When we moved into our new home in the village of Le Ghiare outside Levanto, we inherited a water pump. All our new neighbors were complimentary about our luck to have said device for the following reason: with that pump you can water your entire garden without paying for municipal […]
Farming
12 posts
We here at Voyager have a passion for traditional agricultural practices and organic foods. (Don’t believe me? Check out our study abroad and alumni tour packages!) And so it is nice that we live in a place that, perhaps more out of necessity than sheer desire, still supports and practices […]
The wonderful lemon festival that takes place every year in Monterosso in the Cinque Terre has been pushed back a week due to bad weather, which is no surprise, because the weather has been lousy all spring. Scheduled for yesterday, the new date is Sunday May 26th. It has been […]
Olives waiting to be carted off to the press From the outset, I must admit that the title of this blog post is perhaps specious … no one really “makes” olive oil by themselves, not unless you are the owner of a very large piece of machinery, or you […]
[portfolio_slideshow autoplay=true navpos=disabled] In case anyone was wondering what the olive harvest looks like in Levanto and the Cinque Terre, here it is: lots of rain, lots of wind, lots of shaking of branches, and a whole lot of olives!
My grandmother Penny, born 1900, was an instructor at a women’s college in Michigan in the 1920s. Her subject? Home economics. Back then, this really meant something more than the classes that I and so many others had to sit through for a quarter credit in Junior High. It meant […]
Over the past few months, I’ve had the luck to meet two of the more interesting and traditional winemakers in the Cinque Terre: Walter de Batté and Luciano Capellini. In many ways, they each exemplify what it is that we at Voyager are trying to bring to our clients: a […]
Perhaps my favorite annual ritual in Italy is that of going around buying wine in demijohns directly from the producer and bottling it myself. It is a process that feels intimately rural, exquisitely traditional. Before wine became the billion-dollar snooty affair that it is, wine was simply something that everyone […]
The entire coastline of Liguria is dotted with its characteristic olive groves, vineyards, and citrus groves. Of these last, the lemon is king, and for micro-climactic reasons, the lemons in Monterosso are better than anywhere else, which is why the city celebrates them in its Lemon Festival, which takes place […]
A few weeks ago, after spending an afternoon getting scratched up by brambles and cursing heavily at baling wire getting wrapped around my brush-cutter, my wife and I stood back and looked with no little satisfaction at the small plot of land that we had rescued from under the encroachment […]