I want to tell you about something that will ruin you, in the best possible way. There is a version of olive oil — a specific, particular version that exists only in a narrow window of time in a specific part of the world — that makes every other olive oil you have tasted taste…
I want to ask you something directly. You have been thinking about Tuscany for a while. Maybe since you read the book — Frances Mayes writing about buying a house on a hillside above Cortona and discovering that life could be organized around beauty and olive oil and the specific quality of an afternoon in…
Most package tours of Tuscany operate on the same model: cover the maximum number of notable places in the minimum amount of time, deliver the highlights efficiently, return the client to their departure point having seen everything on the list. This model is not wrong. It is optimized for breadth. If the goal is to…
On clear days — most common in late autumn and early spring, when the atmosphere above the Val di Chiana is at its most transparent — a silver shape appears on the southern horizon from the Etruscan walls of Cortona. Lake Trasimeno. The largest lake in central Italy. The fourth largest in the country. Sitting…
Every town in Italy has two sets of restaurants. The first set is visible from the main street — the ones with menus in multiple languages displayed outside, with photographs of the dishes, with hosts who speak English and seats oriented toward the passing tourist traffic. These restaurants exist because tourists exist and they need…
6:47am. Church bells. Not an alarm. Bells — from the campanile of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which has been ringing at this hour from this tower for centuries. You do not resent them. They have been doing this since long before you arrived and will continue long after you leave, and there is something in…
This comparison is not a competition. Both Siena and Cortona are extraordinary places — genuinely, specifically extraordinary in ways that justify every positive thing written about them. The question is not which one is better but which one is right for you, on this trip, given what you are actually looking for. I live in…
There are two ways to spend a day in Cortona. The first way is efficient. You arrive mid-morning, walk Via Nazionale, visit the MAEC museum, take photographs from the main viewpoints, eat lunch at a restaurant near the piazza, browse a few shops, and leave in the late afternoon. You have seen Cortona. You have…
Something has gone wrong with the way most people experience Tuscany. It is not the beauty — the beauty is real, and the region delivers on every expectation in that regard. It is not the food or the wine or the accommodation or the quality of the light in the late afternoon. All of these…
Florence is not the problem. Florence is extraordinary — one of the densest concentrations of human artistic achievement in the world, a city that justifies every superlative applied to it and earns every visit it receives. The problem is what Florence does to a Tuscany trip when it becomes the entire Tuscany trip. Most visitors…