For some reason this afternoon I got thinking about the Gulistan, the revered Persian poem by Sa’di. As fate would have it, I had the chance to visit the mausoleum of Sa’di in Shiraz Iran in 2000, a wonderful garden / memorial for this great poet of gardens. Gulistan means […]
Cinque Terre
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The Cinque Terre is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and if you didn’t know that, then you’ve never been here before, because the fact is bandied about like so many ears of corn at a State Fair. A bit of history: when the League of Nations folded up shop […]
I’ve been indoors most of the afternoon translating the list of treatments and procedures offered by a noted Hotel and Thermal Spa near Verona, which at times has been mind-numbing (how many ways can you find to say, “This treatment offers …”) and at times mouth-watering (after hours of translating, […]
I’ve said it before. The lousy weather in Levanto and the Cinque Terre always makes people unhappy, with the major exception of one specialized crowd: the surfers. That’s because surfing in Levanto is one of the best sports around when the winds and waves are high. This week has been […]
Here in our new village of Le Ghiare outside of Levanto (and you can’t get more village-like than this, having a population of less than 100) there is still something that belongs to a very old tradition: the village olive press. It’s on the ground floor of the home that […]
Cinque Terre hiking has been so long synonymous with the Via Dell’Amore, the famous walk from Riomaggiore to Manarola along a paved trail that hugs the cliffs and coastline, that when it was closed at the end of last season because of an incident involving falling rocks and some very […]
With the victory today of Vincenzo Nibali in the Giro d’Italia (the Tour de France of Italy), it seems fitting to offer a few notes about biking Levanto and the areas around Levanto. In many ways, Levanto is not your ideal biking locale, at least not unless you consider […]
As anyone in Italy over the past months knows, the weather has been really awful, like the Dr. Seuss book says: The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day. And so two of the biggest […]
Liguria is, more than anything else, a long thin coastal stretch with mountains at its shoulders, and its entire complex of history, culture, and society is tied up to the sea and these geographical factors. And so the winds of Liguria are of great importance. There’s an easterly wind howling […]
Erica and I recently bought our first house, which was a surprise to us more than anyone, for when we made the decision to move permanently to the Cinque Terre area and put down roots in Levanto, we always figured that buying a house would be the last thing to […]