You’d think they were giving them away to witness the annual stampede to specialty restaurants and gourmet shops up and down the Italian peninsula where customers become positively unruly elbowing each other out of the way to get served first. On the contrary, the divinely pungent white truffles of Piedmont Read more…
Soft, oozing mozzarella, rich golden, extra virgin olive oil, fresh basil, aromatic tomatoes, pungent garlic, Tuscan bread fresh from the oven, makes your mouth water just thinking of them. These are the colors, textures and flavors of “The Mediterranean Diet – Tuscan Style”. Now close your eyes and imagine relaxing Read more…
Puccini wrote Manon Lescaut between 1889 and 1892. Neither of his previous operas ( Le Villi which has some charming music but includes spoken narration and rather a lot of hectic dancing, and Edgar with its huge canvas, huge chorus and undeveloped principal characters ) had had any real success. Read more…
In Lucca it’s a common joke that the mountains between Lucca and pisa keep the people from having to see each other. A tunnel now leads to the Pisa side but the ideological separation is still felt by football fans, graffiti artists and ordinary citizens. In Lucca e read Dante’s Read more…
Olives, those beautiful silvery trees, have today become a visual metaphor for Italy. Nevertheless, seldom does anyone come to Italy solely for the purpose of growing olives and making olive oil. Most foreign-born cultivators naively back into it somehow. Olives usually enter their lives on a ” bit of land Read more…