You Should Watch Cinema Paradiso

I love volcanoes – I’ve always loved them, for as long as I can remember. There’s just something about the power, the destruction, the unpredictability, and the intimate association with our history. They have always had some sort of meaning. Seriously – when I was a kid and my dad had to go to Sicily […]

Forgotten Histories

When I came to Calabria I knew I was coming someplace smaller, to a place most of the world doesn’t know about, and if they did they have already forgotten. I knew transport in this region is limited and many places are impossible to reach by train. I don’t have a car, so I’m more […]

Leaving Guidebooks Behind

Lurching left and right in an unpredictable manner, the train hurried forward, going ever downward. We were in a hurry to reach our destination, so didn’t bother stopping at Napoli Centrale, which would have lengthened this already long 5-hour ride. We stopped at Salerno, the site of my infamous loss of consciousness, and I glanced […]

Diciannove

The last whispers of daylight were quickly disappearing into a rainy evening when the wheels of the big A330 skidded on the tarmac and I finally landed at Fiumicino airport after too many hours of travel. The night had, then, fully settled in as I stepped off of the Leonardo Express train and onto the […]

Something New and Something Old

The taxi driver who picked me up at the Venezia Mestre train station was stuff of legend. I told him where we were going, and he sped off into the drizzly night, driving at whiplash speeds down dark unlit streets and ignoring the GPS, carving a zigzag line into the landscape that crossed the direct […]

An Easy Day in Bologna

What do you do when you take one of your favorite people to one of your favorite places in the world? What do you do when you’re taking them to a place that maybe isn’t overwhelming for its sites, but moreso for it’s foods. Maybe the biggest draw for me is the atmosphere of this […]