I know that this looks totally staged, but my daughters really did pull out two chairs to watch our neighbor use his rototiller on his garden. Perhaps the fact that we don’t own a television has something to do with their fascination in things like this. Let’s just say, though, that […]
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The area covered by the Cinque Terre National Park includes a number of even smaller towns up above the coastline that give a totally different sense of coastal Mediterranean life. Places like Campiglia, San Bernardino, and Volastra. Far from the madding crowds, these tiny hamlets offer spectacular views of the […]
With the arrival of the first nice weather and the first important holidays (Easter on April 20th, Liberation Day, the 25th of April; May Day on May 1st) the people have started to pour into Levanto. The first wave of tourists is always a great pleasure here, a promise of […]
I take a lot of inspiration from my neighbor Antonio, not only because he gardens what for me would be an impossibly large plot with graceful, effortless ease, but because I have also seen the results of his efforts. No matter what my tomatoes or yellow peppers look like, they […]
This morning, the first when both my girls went to school, and therefore the first morning in five years that my wife and I did not have children at our heels, I stopped at the Barolino Café in downtown Levanto for a cappuccino while my wife handled other affairs. The […]
Last night (Saturday), we were out for dinner with a bunch of other families from our older daughter’s nursery school class celebrated the impending beginning of the school year tomorrow. Downtown Levanto was hopping with people even in late September. Restaurants were full, bars were doing brisk business, the weather […]
The Festival of San Matteo (otherwise known as Saint Matthew) is on today in the minuscule but ever-charming vilage of Le Ghiare just outside of Levanto. This being our first year in Le Ghiare, I don’t know what to expect, but they’ve been cleaning out the church since yesterday. At […]
Oh, but I was forgetting … for those of you who aren’t quite ready to give up completely on the summer, there’s one final beach party scheduled for Saturday night (September 21) on the Levanto beach.
Perhaps it was for the onslaught of house guests, perhaps for the onslaught of tourists, perhaps for nothing more than the hot sun calling me to the beach, but it has been ages since I wrote anything on this blog. And now it is late summer in Levanto (in truth, […]
I remember when I was in Moscow for a few days in 1993 I stumbled across the Moscow International Film Festival. While in those days Moscow was not exactly the hip international destination (I recall very few limos and stars), the Soviet film industry had been exceedingly important to world […]