Ragazza/ragazzina (“girl/little girl) – chiesa/chiesina (“church/little church) – stella/stellina (“star/little star”) are logical pairings but zucca/zucchina (“squash/little squash”) doesn’t quite work out: La zucchina (“zucchini”) is not related at all to the…
For a “menu a kilometro zero”, head to Scheggino, Umbrian medieval hilltown gem on the Nera River. Follow the twisting stone-vaulted backstreets, leading up to the 11th-century S. Nicola church, and just…
Now over eighty, Raffaello started painting his maiolica masterpieces as a young boy. Massimo started young on the potter’s wheel, too, creating the vases, pitchers, urns Raffaello still decorates. At a young…
When you come down the hill from Norcia and round that curve, you’ll understand what a mozzafiato view is. Only mozzafiato (literally, “cutting off, truncating your breath”, and more visceral than the…
The Peppucci family vineyards blanket the sumptuous curves of the gentle hill landscapes outside Todi. And no vineyard view is more wondrous than a sunset one. One late June evening – while…
This past May, fifty-one Umbrian wine cellars threw open their cantina doors, invited visitors into their vineyards and uncorked bottles of crisp whites and robust reds for the thousands joining in on…
Leaving Gradoli, picturesque Latium hilltown on the western shore of Lake Bolsena, you might miss that old stone ruin on the left, but if you stop – as a friend and I…
La porchetta, noble street food of Umbria and central Italy in general, stars in the May festival of San Terenziano, “Porchettiamo”. Best translated as “Let us roast suckling pig it”, your Italian/English…
Lost in time are the origins of Offida, medieval hilltown of Le Marche, certainly inhabited in the Bronze Age, later by a local Italic tribe, then finally by the Romans. The town’s…
“Buono come il pane” (“as good as bread”) is how the Italians describe a good-hearted, generous person. For the Greeks, bread was “the food of the gods”, for the Anglo-Saxons, “the staff…