Peppa – now in her late seventies and still working full days on her land – is beginning to feel the effects of years of hard labor. More and more often, a “local” will be with her to assist in seasonal tasks. Like the pruning of her ninety olive trees. When I arrived there one…
Even Sandri’s pastry shop on Perugia’s main thoroughfare, Corso Vannucci, celebrated the early April Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo – with a white sugar sign (complete with festival hashtag) taking center stage in their display window (while the Easter cakes and almond paste serpenti were set off to the side): Over six-hundred journalists, photographers, professors, intellectuals, more than one hundred…
A “cooking lesson” is a banal understatement to describe our day at the farm estate near Spoleto of Gianluca Polidori. Here’s a tidbit of his invitation to an event centered on “food & territory promotion criteria based on the maintenance of a strong territorial identity”: “The laboratory kitchen is the beating heart of a stately…
This year, the annual Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo animates medieval Perugia from Apri 3 to 7. I’ll look forward to being there and to immersion once again into such inspirational youth enthusiasm and familiarity with world issues during conferences on a myriad of subjects for four days. I hope you can feel how the youth…
In the more than twenty years as an authorized guida regionale del’Umbria, Spello (che bello!) – not far from Assisi – has always been a favorite tour destination. Both for myself and for my tour guests. And now more than ever, for the recently-opened museum of Roman mosaics (first discovered in July, 2005 during work on a planned…
It’s all backwards here in March this year: the month came IN like a lamb and is moving out like a lion. March is gusting into April with cold and windy weather. But spring is waiting in the lobby: our peach trees are in bloom And at Novella’s market stall in Assisi, she might be…
The “heart of the problem” is the hazelnut itself; ironically, the idiomatic expression “the heart of the problem,” is translated as “il nocciolo del problema” in Italian, i.e., “the hazelnut of the problem.” A growing movement in Umbria and in nearby Latium is set on blocking the conversion of farm lands to the lucrative (for the land…
When I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an exciting school field trip might have been to Great America in Illinois to ride the roller coasters. If you’re in school here in Umbria, your class field trip these days might be to learn about the Romans’ intricate art of making mosaics after viewing the astounding mosaic…
Heavily damaged in the October 2016 earthquake, Norcia’s “resurrection” just might have started: the early March street fair, Nero Norcia (“Black Norcia”), starring black truffles – and not only! – animated the town, drew in the people. This mostra mercato (almost quite literally, a “show-and-sell”) drew people from all over Italy…… ….so important for Norcia, struggling to…
Never postpone. I have thought about Graziella Viterbi now and then over the past few months, wondering how she was and hoping to look her up in Rome. Alas, I can’t now: this survivor of the Holocaust who found refuge in Assisi with her family in 1943 died in mid-March at the age of ninety-two.…