Kategoria BISAC: Travel >> Europe - Italy

The Tuscan Year recounts the daily life and food preparation of a family living on a farm in Tuscany. Elizabeth Romer chronicles each season's activities month by month: curing prosciutto and making salame in January, planting and cheesemaking in March, harvesting and threshing corn in July, hunting for wild muchrooms in September, and grape crushing in Ocober. Scattered throughout this lovely calendar are recipes--fresh bread and olive oil, grilled mushrooms, broad beans with ham, trout with fresh tomatoes and basil, chicken grilled with fresh sage and garlic, and apples baked with...

"At villa Donnafugata, long ago is never very far away," writes bestselling author Marlena de Blasi of the magnificent if somewhat ruined castle in the mountains of Sicily that she finds, accidentally, one summer while traveling with her husband, Fernando. There de Blasi is befriended by Tosca, the patroness of the villa, an elegant and beautiful woman-of-a-certain-age who recounts her lifelong love story with the last prince of Sicily descended from the French nobles of Anjou.

Sicily is a land of contrasts: grandeur and poverty, beauty and...

Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a train, isn't it?" But soon he turns his novelist's eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians--conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants--Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture...

Though steeped in a rich and ancient past, Calabria had been lost from view when Norman Douglas visited in the early 1900s. Within Douglas's vibrant account of his adventures is woven the rich history--from Greek settlers and Roman conquerors to the powerful Ndrangheta organized crime family--that has shaped the land, language, culture, and people of a place that Douglas grew to adore. Witty, erudite, and elegant, Old Calabria is a literary classic, acclaimed as much for its sparkling prose as for its exquisite portrait of Italy's most unpredictable and colorful province.