The Cinque Terre and the surrounding lands, in particular my beloved Levanto, are obviously major summer tourist attractions, something that causes the number of residents in Levanto, for example, to swell from 6,000 in the winter to more than 20,000 in the summer, and that’s not counting the day-trippers. What […]
Levanto
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As I was getting into the car today, my youngest daughter looked up at me and said in her still undeveloped manner, “Why rain?” I looked up at the sky and saw blue. There were no drops on the ground. But she was right, it sounded like rain. And so […]
Considering the fact that I’ve lived outside of the US continually since 1998, I missed moment of great cultural importance when Americans started calling the guy who pours your coffee a “barista” and the sweet creamy stuff that you eat out of a cone “gelato.” Where I come from (the […]
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 […]
This year’s Festa del Mare in Levanto is upon us. Though there have been a few related happenings in the preceding days, the real action gets started tomorrow, Tuesday July 24, and has it’s big finish on Wednesday July 25. Those of you who have seen video of Italian Sea […]
I don’t remember the last time I was out on a pedalò, but I suspect I was just a kid, and the location was some kind of artificial lake in Connecticut or Texas or in Central Park for all I know. But I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly bursting with […]
There are two wines of importance that come from the Cinque Terre, but there is only one king: Sciachetrà, a straw wine of such goodness and scarcity that you can spent 100 bucks on a half-bottle of the stuff. The other, the crisp white Cinque Terre DOC, can be […]
When I was just a wide-eyed undergraduate doing a summer program in St. Petersburg in 1993, I spent the longest of the city’s famous White Nights in a countryside dacha, drinking heavily and speculating about Chekhov and the world. When we ran out of inane conversation topics I went out […]
The US has everything one could imagine in terms of natural beauty: mountains, rivers, deserts, forests, beaches, oceans, bays, cliffs, plains, lakes, islands, geysers, swamps, and moonscapes that rival the best to be found worldwide. That’s one of the reasons that so many Americans don’t travel outside the US. […]
For those of you passionate about cycling or who are just interested in another aspect of Italian cultural/sporting phenomena, the Giro d’Italia is one of those can’t miss experiences. While less famous than the Tour de France, the Giro is nonetheless one of the top-tier events on the international cycling […]