I wasn’t visiting anyone in particular as I walked through Assisi’s cemetery on November 1st, but everyone I met there was: visitors had armfuls of lilies or bright yellow chrysanthemums for the…
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When you are next in Umbria, why not stay in “Il Nido Tranquillo” (“The Tranquil Nest”)? The name perfectly fits this snug little apartment for two in the quiet medieval backstreets of…
In the Middle Ages, the disparaging term “Il norcino” (literally meaning, “from Norcia”) grouped together a variety of improvisational impersonators of i chirurghi (‘surgeons”): il cerusico (“barber/surgeon), il cava-denti (tooth-extractor), and il…
A friend joined me for the adventure: we took a curvy wooded road into the Valnerina and then up into the Sibiliine mountains in southern Umbria, until we came to tiny Preci…
Hard to imagine we are coming up to the fourteenth edition of the wondrous food festival celebrating Italian first courses, I Primi d’Italia. I wrote this when there ten years ago and…
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…
He could only hobble across the stage, head of fuzzy white hair bobbing, sax clutched in a strong gnarled fist. The knees and hips of Sonny Rollins – soon to be eighty-two…
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…
In the early thirteenth century, San Francesco di Assisi left behind the woes of the world for forty days of isolation and contemplation on a tranquil island in the middle of Lake…