Yes, we’re cooking here in Italy as temperatures shoot past records, springs risk drying up and elderly are warned to stay indoors…but some are ignoring those warnings. A smiling gray-haired woman waved trembling hands back and forth to the rock-out music of Funk Off yesterday in Perugia, joining in the street parade following the Florentine…
Whether you stay in our in-town Assisi apartment or our countryside guesthouse (right behind our farmhouse), there are a couple obligations: – you have to join us for a rural Umbrian dinner in our farmhouse – you must accept gifts of fresh eggs from our chickens, vegetables from our garden – and now and then,…
If you’re not sure where to find a bit of Paradise on earth, just settle for Eden on a lake, the Hotel Eden of Lake Bolsena. Just about an hour and a half from Assisi, Lake Bolsena has been drawing us for years when we have a free weekend. We’ve stayed in various spots, but…
There really isn’t any reason to seek out Moiano, tiny village north of Perugia and south of Lake Trasimeno: unless you’re here in Umbria at the end of June – and you’re crazy about snails. We are in Umbria, of course, in late June and Pino IS appassioned of lumache so we detoured to the…
Monet immortalized the lilac spread of lavender fields in 19th-century Provence and these days, the Castellini family’s lavandeto purple shades fan out in the valley below Assisi. At their late June/early July Festa della Lavanda – sixth edition this year – visitors meandered along paths in the family’s 4 acres of purple, white, blue, pink…
What’s the highlight of a visit to our rural neighbors? Sharing in eighty-year-old Peppe’s pride in his prosciutti? Tasting his wine? Meeting Peppa, “Earth Mother,” as I call this warm and joyous spirit? You can see it in her smile as she cuts sprigs of lavender for recent visitors from Australia. And what pride as…
Easy to entice Pino to the Balanzano (near Perugia) sagra: snails were the headliner second course dish at this Sagra dell’Ortolano (“Food festival of the vegetable gardener”). Pino relished those snails (bruschetta miste, first, though!) while I enjoyed the vegetable-theme dishes – grilled vegetables and baked vegetables au gratin – and grilled lamb chops, too.…
On the feast of Corpus Domini (60 days after Easter), kaleidoscopic floral tapestries carpet the piazzas of Spello (this year, seventy masterpieces) and not only: narrow floral masterpieces run along the winding medieval alleyways like elegant table runners, flowered ones (but these flowers are real). On the morning of the Infiorate festival, you’ll want to…
If you’re eager to taste the best in Umbrian local cuisine, head to a sagra, a ten-day village festival where local volunteers team up to cook up buonissimi regional specialties. From late spring to late fall, our “eating out” is practically speaking only at sagras. And I suggest two rules for paramount sagra enjoyment: get…
“Because there’s no better way to eat the goodness of Umbria than at a sagra,” Renato replied with a smile when I asked why he and his wife, Graziella, were eating here at the Sagra della Birra e dello Stinco (“food festival of beer and pork shank”). This Roman couple had headed to Umbria for…