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 […]
levanto
79 posts
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 […]
[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!
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 […]
For those who fly across oceans to visit Italy and make the Cinque Terre one of their many stops on a grueling two-week European vacation, hitting the beach is not usually on top of their list of priorities. For those who have more time to spend in Italy, coming to […]
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 […]