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 […]
cinque terre
Our most complete tour of this spectacular area, the Cinque Terre by Land and Sea, has just been revamped to allow people the opportunity to explore the Ligurian capital city of Genoa. For those of you who don’t know much about it, Genoa was ruler of the Mediterranean world in […]
The annual appointment of tourism professionals in Italy, the BIT in Milan, is revving up this week, and Voyager will be making its modest first appearance at it. Armed with flyers, brochures, business cards, proposals, and good cheer, we’re going to be spreading the word about a new way to […]
There are innumerable things about living in a small town that can inspire or infuriate. Because I happen to love my small town (nb: Levanto, Italy), I usually tend to find myself on the inspirational side. Today, after schlepping up four flights of stairs to the offices where I hold […]
On October 11th, I promised that I’d be writing an update on my reading habits as soon as I finished the mammoth Bleak House by Charles Dickens. On that day, I hypothesized that I probably wouldn’t be finishing it anytime before the summer, given my slow-poke reading pace and the […]
2011 has ended much differently than it began for me. A year ago, I had not planned to resign from my comfortable job in a European School because of the inability of its administration to handle a call for jobs with transparency and dignity. A year ago, I had not […]
It’s pruning season here in Levanto, and that means time to get out your shears and get chopping. From where I stood today on my hilltop, I could hear the unmistakeable sounds of one chainsaw, one band saw, and one electric hedge-trimmer all going at the same time. It all […]
If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see the remains of an old construction in the foreground, probably a small stone hut used for storing tools and for getting out of the sun while eating your lunch on hot days. There’s not much left of it now, and […]
No, this is not about hominids, but about the great and glorious Ape (pronounced AH-pay), a vehicle so diffused in Levanto that they should be building monuments to it. Made by Piaggio since just after the war, it is a three-wheeled pickup truck that originally was nothing more than a […]
My father, a born Doubting Thomas, has always been suspicious of the existence of wild boar (cinghiale in Italian) in Italy. After spending three weeks in Tuscany a few years ago, he calculated that based on the number of restaurants serving wild boar in various forms (stew, steak, sausage, jerky, […]