One of the great annual events in Levanto (actually, twice a year) is the Mangialonga, which translates into “The Long Eat.” Decisively different from the Long March, this is a celebration of local foods and local Medieval hilltop villages. Starting out from downtown Levanto, this day-long event takes you on […]
Nature
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[portfolio_slideshow autoplay=true navpos=disabled] Nothing about agriculture in the Cinque Terre is easy. This land is not made for easy. After a day in the fields, the thing that most hurts is the soles of your feet from trying desperately to keep yourself steady on the hill all the time. Last […]
My wife is researching the barefoot movement for an article, and all this talk of bare feet brought to mind a comment that I friend of mine here in Levanto made. Talking with one of the older, wiser women from the area, she told him how when she was a […]
Here’s how it went down: I was out walking my father-in-law’s dog, Rocco, who’s spending a month with us taking the airs of the Mediterranean. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking one of my daughters with me when I do this walk, sometime after dinner, but last night we […]
Daniele Moggia, an activist from Vernazza who was there during the floods of October 2012 and who has been a driving force in rebuilding the town and educating people about the fragility of the local environment, has just written a post about the most recent cry, after the small rock […]
It has been a long hot summer here in Levanto and the Cinque Terre, which I suppose most people would find encouraging after the epic destructive floods and landslides of last October. But be careful what you wish for, as your grandmother told you. Long hot summers mean dry grasses […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]