We’ve been in Italy for 3-1/2 weeks now, so we’re starting to get a handle on (at least northern) Italian culture. You might think of pasta and pizza or art and churches, and you wouldn’t exactly be wrong, but that would be like boiling down American culture to grilled hamburgers and 4th of July fireworks.…
Here are 12 things which have surprised us about Italy so far: Even in bigger cities (like Bergamo or Milan), people often run into others they know on the street, and stop to kiss and chat for however long. B read online that people are generally on-time in Italy, but with this practice, I have no…
The Langhe is not a city. It’s a bit like a county in the ‘state’ of Piedmont – but a very large county, made up of countryside: vineyards, hazelnut trees, and small family farms. We visited several villages here, over three days: Neive: Most locals asked us if we had come here, suggesting that it’s…
Acqui Terme, Italy, was one of our stranger stays on this trip. It’s one of the few places so far that we have been excited to leave. In which we get our room We booked a place with a grad student in our usual way and were told that we would “meet” his mom. We…
I booked a tour of a hazelnut farm, based on a blog tip I read. After all, the region is known for its hazelnuts. Supposedly, Fererro Rocher only uses hazelnuts from the area for their famous chocolates. (Nutella, on the other hand, comes from their lesser hazelnut cousins.) Unfortunately, the tour was not quite what…
While B was being shorn, I needed to buy groceries for two dishes which I had promised to make for dinner with our hosts. They would prepare a few traditional Langhe dishes, and I would make a Russian and an American dish, to show them what we might eat at home. Back at the salon,…
The most persistent stereotype we’ve heard about Italians – especially from Americans, is that they’re lazy. They start work late, they take a long lunch, they leave early, they take a long dinner, and they chat or party into the night, right? Or do they work at all? Based on the Italians we’ve met, it…
We were in Cinque Terre (which is actually a grouping of 5 towns) for three days. Riomaggiore This is the town we stayed in, on the recommendation of a blog post by a woman who met her husband here. It turns out that a number of local boys had married women from outside Italy –…
Km 0: I would definitely recommend this place, which was a small local cafe. The name is an Italian reference to locally-sourced ingredients. I ordered the rice salad, which was a delicious cold rice and pickled vegetable salad. B had the anchovy sandwich (because the region is known for anchovies), which tasted like a lot of salt and a little butter…
Yesterday, we took a little tourist ferry from one town in the Cinque Terre to another. People said that the small villages looked different from the water than from land, so we opted to test the hype. (Mostly true.) We bought our tickets and headed to the boat dock, which was just a slab of…