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The newsletter will be full of interesting articles on Italian attractions, cities and culture from Martha’s Italy, Wandering Italy, and occasionally one of our other “Wandering” sites like Wandering Sardinia
Welcome to the Valentine’s Day edition of our humble newsletter. Today we celebrate San Valentino, a day recounting the saint of courtly love and patron saint of epilepsy. Love makes you crazy, the act makes you thrash around oddly. It all makes sense, sort of…
In any case, Martha is the star of this newsletter as she points to her favorite places with the Romantic edge where you’ll float on water in a slow moving vessel propelled by ancient genius or look out upon villages seeming to tumble into the wine-dark sea. Check them out:
Carnevale has always had a certain sexiness to it. Those masks aren’t just for show, they’re more about what they obscure. Anonymity, like a bit of wine, gives great encouragement to the lovelorn.
I also nominate food as one of the romantic intensifiers. I’d head on over to Piemonte and the House of Truffles to have a romantic dinner and then, on the morning after, re-fortify myself with:
May Saint Valentine be kind to you this year. Have a great time planning your travel or celebrating vicariously through Martha’s Italy and Wandering Italy.
In our last newsletter we focused on looking back at our best travel experiences of 2019. This time, Martha has some great suggestions for 2020 travel in places planning special events in this coming travel year.
Did you know that Rimini is celebrating 100 years of Fellini? Yes, it’s one of Martha’s top six recommendations for 2020. Check out the rest:
Maybe because I’ve just spent some serious time putting together a guide to the northwest corner of Sardinia that I’m thinking it would be good to go there in 2020. It’s easy to grab a flight to Alghero, rent a car and visit some stunning ancient sites and eat food you can’t get on the mainland. You can also grab a ferry and take you car with you.
Towards the end of the year, Martha and I realized that we’d had some fine adventures in 2019 that seemed quite unique. So, like two-headed Janus, we keep an eye on the past and look forward to planning great trips for for the future with “perfect” 2020 vision.
So I zeroed in on my favorite discoveries, from a fantastic brew pub in the heart of Italy’s finest wine region to the year’s best museum and castle. You can read it here:
Martha’s list is more comprehensive, including such events as the press viewing of Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper in Florence and some snippets from our adventure in Sardinia.
There were many of those little “wow” moments in 2019, as shown in this picture in a family cantina, where a truffle hunter explains that the full vat he’s leaning on provides a single family with olive oil for the year (remember that Italians live several years longer than Americans…)
Olive Oil Vat with enough oil for a family for a year
Did you know that the Roman Guy has morphed into the tour guy and offers a 5% discount on his tours using this link? (Disclosure: we also get a small fee to keep the site and newsletter afloat.)
Tools for Planning Travel in 2020
Moving on to the future, we offer you tools to start planning your vacation adventure. Few people know the size of Italy, so we have a map to show you. Italy is very small for a country with so very much to see—but that makes travel distances manageable.
We’ve also made a planning timeline for what to do when when planning an Italian vacation. The drop-down navigation at the top right leads to other travel planning basics pages.
What Tuscany Looks Like From the Wicker Basket of a Balloon.
I give thanks for all these opportunities, and remind you that with the possible exception of the last experience, you can participate in these activities by clicking the links and finding out how to go about it. It’s what we do here.
Speaking of unique things you can do in Italy, here are some great suggestions from Martha on fun stuff in Venice you can do.
And I would add to Martha’s list by giving you a review of some well-make Venetian carnival masks you can buy online. Christmas is coming up you know!
And speaking of the holiday season, Martha offers suggestions on Italian Themed Gifts
Thanks for being a part of the Wandering Italy/Martha’s Italy clan. We hope to see you in Italy sometime.
Since this newsletter was written, we’ve been updating our Pinterest boards, just in case you plan your vacation from images of the places you want to go. And of course, you can click them to see information about the place. Check out these places we’ve been concentrating on:
As fall descends upon the boot I think of eating, especially when the rains come and there isn’t a whole lot to do at night.
Fall’s last stand isn’t a bleak time for me. I live for the time the kitchen fills with the perfume of long-roasted meats and vegetables al forno on those days.
Two standout autumn meals recently happen to fall on the opposite ends of the luxury scale. First, Martha and I joined our neighbor for a simple pasta e fagioli meal made entirely from scratch using beans from across the street with homemade whole wheat pasta that didn’t see a machine, just Alcide’s formidable matterello, a long Italian rolling pin for those giant sheets of pasta Italians make out of a pile of dough in just a few minutes. Cook that pasta, add the beans and some good, local olive oil and you have a feast we documented because we didn’t think anyone would believe such a simple dish could taste so good (or that people would put that much work into it): Pasta Fagioli with Alcide.
Truffle hunting in Umbria
Then a PR person invited us to hunt and eat some truffles in Umbria. We’d be fools to pass that up, right? Hold on, I’ve been on four of these before and this is the only one I’d recommend. What we found was more than we’d bargained for. No fake truffle hunt for us, this was a real insight into the life of the truffle hunters and a shepherd of a mostly self-sufficient community whose property owners had to be descendants of the original owners in the 1400s, a real “work like a dog, live like a king” community. You can read Martha’s version of our stay, or my version of it by clicking the links below:
Fantastic in Florence: A Last Supper Painted By a Woman
Painting a “last supper” is pretty much something a painter might (be allowed to) do at the pinnacle of his career. No, the use of the word “his” isn’t a lapse into gender bias; women of the time weren’t allowed to formally study anatomy or painting back then. But formal study does not (always) make the artist.
Plautilla Nelli’s 21-foot canvas depicts 13 life-size male figures, the only known Last Supper by a female painter anywhere. It’s been restored and hung where it belongs in the basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. If you care about art and history, you must see it.
You’ve seen castle interiors, right? Generally you’d have to imagine what might have been inside, because it’s long gone. Bracciano Castle is different—and the compelling village overlooking the lake was easy to get to from Rome’s Trastevere Station.
If you’ve just hurried to the leaning tower from the train station and back again, you’ve missed more of a great city than you think. The newly opened museum is a stunner, and you’ll learn quite a bit about Pisa and the merchant boats that plied the Mediterranean from the ancient port.
