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…
There are roads in Tuscany that exist in travel photography and roads that exist in real life. Most of the famous ones — the cypress-lined avenue at San Quirico d’Orcia, the Gladiator road in Val d’Orcia — are both. They are genuinely beautiful and they are genuinely crowded, particularly in the hours when the light…
Montepulciano is one of the great wine towns of Italy. Not great in the way that Barolo is great — remote, specialized, requiring pilgrimage. Great in the way that a hilltop town can be when everything about it — the architecture, the people, the landscape, the thing it produces — has been organized around a…