This weekend we had a group of 23 high school students from Parma here in Levanto for an outdoor field trip in the Cinque Terre. We spend a lot of time promoting our field trips specifically because they get the kids outside and moving, which is good for everyone. This […]
Levanto
79 posts
Five months of flat, glassy, waveless, imperturbable sea. The World Longboard Surfing Championships in Levanto came and went without a ripple on the water, leaving competitors listless and bored. The Mediterranean looked like a pond. Now, as it always has been and always will be, it is reborn. And it’s […]
Italians like to complain about the workings of their government and the quality of public services, and in many cases, there’s a lot to complain about … but not the health care. I have been in love with Italian health care from day 1 in Italy, and I’ve always been […]
When we moved into our current house, our landlady told us that among the wild critters running around, there were badgers in these here hills. I wasn’t buying it. Italy is not known for its wildlife, perhaps in large part for the fact that in the North, the quintessential wild animal, the […]
This week, we’re highlighting the “Upper Route” of the Cinque Terre, a spectacular trail that runs 17 miles from Portovenere to Levanto high above the villages of the Cinque Terre and the coastline below. And we got some help in promoting it with Seattle Backpacker’s Magazine. Rather than repeat myself […]
Somewhere in the pages of Kerouac’s great On the Road, (or maybe in one of the other works, sometimes all Kerouac runs together for me) as they are headed down the Western side of the Continental Divide somewhere in the Rockies, Jack and Neal decide to cut the engine on […]
I’ve lived in Italy for 11 years now, and I have come to the conclusion that I will never know everything about Italian cuisine. It’s simply too vast. It’s also simply too tied to geography to ever possibly hope to try everything. So much of the greatness of Italian food […]
I may have mentioned once or twice that the weather here in Liguria is, well, stupendous. (We’ll discount the anomalous 2 weeks of nippiness that froze our buns in our poorly-insulated house.) For someone who finds the weather an essential part of the quality of his daily life (just like […]
Times are tough, funding for schools has fallen through the floor, and all of our family budgets are feeling a bit more strained than before. Here in Italy, we’re lucky that things haven’t gotten any worse. Voyager believes in the importance of school field trips as a chance to break […]
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 […]