Search Results for: Puglia

January 23, 2018

Where to go in Italy in 2018? Here’s my annual off-the-beaten path list

Eating breakfast in the garden courtyard of Procida's Albergo La Vigna was one of the highlights of our year. Photo by Marina Pascucci

I have a better idea. In fact, I have 10 of them. If you daydream about Italy, go where few others go. Here is a list of 10 highly recommended off-the-beaten-path places I’ve been, mostly last year, during my combined 5 ½ years living in Italy.
Print this list (including links to expanded blogs of destinations), written in alphabetical order, and post it on your laptop instead of that gondola photo.
(To read more, click here.)

December 14, 2017

Matera: World’s third oldest city rocks Basilicata in more ways than one

The Sassi (The Stones) was once abandoned less than 40 years ago but now is Matera's nerve center. Photo by Marina Pascucci

Matera is the world’s third oldest city, according to Traveller magazine. Only Aleppo, Syria, and Jericho, Palestine, are older. So unless you like your pizza in a war zone, Matera is the place to explore. Matera was first inhabited in the Paleolithic Era which ended about 10,000 B.C. Back then, Matera’s inhabitants were discovering stone tools and how to hunt and gather. It has been continuously inhabited for the last 9,000 years. However, the neighborhood where I’m standing and where my Marina and I are staying, wasn’t around less than 40 years ago. It was abandoned, an empty shell of a novelty.
(To read more, click here.)

September 24, 2017

Wine tastings in Rome a delicious way to travel around Italy without ever leaving the room

If you’re pressed for time and don’t want to hassle with a car, a necessity for wineries, you can stay in Rome and get an even bigger variety. In Italy, the wineries come to Rome. In my 3 ½ years here, I’ve been to countless wine tastings. I’ve tried superb wines from Sicily to Alto Adige.
(To read more, click here.)

January 26, 2017

Traveling to Italy in 2017? Here’s my top 10 list

The Archipelago di La Maddalena just off the north coast of Sardinia is just one of many less-trodden destinations in Italy.

Here I present you with 10 places that you probably have never heard of, let alone never made your bucket list. So here’s my collection, in alphabetical order, of lovely, interesting, off-the-beaten-path places to visit in Italy in 2017. Print it, put it under a refrigerator magnet and know you’ll never eat a better pizza than outside on a warm Italian night.
(To read more, click here.)

January 14, 2017

On the road in Serie D: 4th Division Trastevere flying high in Italy’s soccer lowlands

Snow and freezing temperatures greeted ASD Trastevere on its five-hour road trip to Puglia.

His 35-year-old face is weathered, in kind of a rugged Italian sort of way. He has a perpetual scruffy beard. Lines are forming around eyes that have seen too many patchy soccer fields, tiny towns and lonely roads.
Stefano Tajarol has the look of Serie D.
This is the bottom branch of Italy’s soccer tree, hanging just above the rubble of amateurism. Serie D has 162 teams spread from rural Sicily to the foothills of the Italian Alps. Francavilla. Ghivizzano. Darfo Boario. They are towns you’ll never see in a guide book. They’re all trying to climb atop one of nine divisions for promotion to Lega Pro, Italy’s third division where there are higher salaries, historic stadiums and — gasp! — television.
(To read more, click here.)

October 24, 2016

Playing an extra in “The Young Pope” teaches me the cardinal rules of film business

Director Paolo Sorrentino needed tall Americans. I'm tall. I'm American.

I play an American cardinal, one of the many nameless bodies that form a fluid red or black background as Jude Law maneuvers through scenes. We’re shooting a breakfast scene and I’m sitting two chairs down from a cardinal who’s about to die. My job is to eat slowly, look over calmly and appear expressionless as the cardinal falls to the floor. But did I eat too many grapes? Could Sorrentino tell I was choking? I KNEW I should’ve eaten the breakfast roll!
(To read more, click here.)

April 29, 2016

Fritto Misto is Le Marche’s “healthy” celebration of Italian fried food

The Sicily booth, featuring the island's signature cannoli, is one of 17 booths at Fritto Misto. Photo by Marina Pascucci.

So what am I doing in a gorgeous Italian town near the Adriatic surrounded by fried food, the antithesis of what made Italian cuisine famous and Italian bodies prized?
I’m covering the 12th annual Fritto Misto, a celebration of all things fried in Italian cuisine. For 10 days every April, the charming town of Ascoli Piceno becomes the capital of Italian fried food. From ascolane to arancino, from cannoli to, yes, fried pizza, Fritto Misto (Mixed Fry) covers the landscape of all things fried in Italy.
(To read more, click here.)

March 16, 2016

Ex-drug dealer talks of life in the violent streets of Tor Bella Monaca, maybe Rome’s scariest neighborhood

De Santis in front of his building where his brother threw himself off of and where Carlo still lives today.

I met De Santis while hanging out in Bar Pasticceria where owner Rocco Sansotta educated me about the life and times of Tor Bella Monaca [LINK] in Part II. My good Australian-Italian friend, Robert Della Vedova, lived here for six months and remembered De Santis as one of the regulars. He remembered he had a good story to tell.

Did he ever. It’s one of poverty and drugs, false hope and fleeting wealth, of painful crashes and shaky rebounds. It’s of violence, of betrayal, of prison.
It’s of Tor Bella Monaca.
(To read more, click here.)

July 27, 2015

Rome’s beer boom part of fastest growing beer nation in the world: Italy

Beer in Rome? Yes, there is some. There’s a lot, actually. Thanks to Agostino Arioli and Teo Musso, two Northern Italians tired of Italy’s backwater beer scene, beer bars in Rome have exploded. Eight years ago, Italy had only 70 craft breweries. Today it has 650. Rome has more than three dozen craft beer bars, known as birrerias, and just as many “bottle shops” selling nothing but bottled beer. “Nowadays, after the U.S., I think the most interesting, exciting craft beer scene is Italy,” said Arioli, who founded Birrificio Italiano, one of the top craft beer breweries in the country, in 1996.
(To read more, click here.)

July 3, 2014

Retired in Rome Journal: Europe’s Ugliest Bike Ride is nearly as ugly as the Tiber River itself

The "path" leading to the bike path along the Tiber River.

My euphoria lasted all of about one kilometer. That’s all it took before the bike path diverted toward the street above as both banks of the Tiber were suddenly dominated by brush and rocks. Not even on Rome’s periphery, I had hit a dead end. The Tiber is not only gross. It’s unaccommodating. It’s like the city planners are telling joggers and bikers, “Look, if you think this river is a petri dish so far, you should see what lies ahead. Go back.”
(To read more, clerk here.)

January 14, 2014

Retired in Rome Journal: A welcome home to the city of my dreams

Peter Bloom, moi and Gretchen Bloom at La Taverna dei Fori Imperiali upon my return to Rome.

I’m not into omens much. Man determines his own fate. That’s why I’m sitting here in Rome, my life’s remains enveloped in the five bags that surround me as I await passage into my new apartment. An early retirement that has baffled friends and foes alike has taken me to Rome, site of the wildest 17 months of my life and hopefully home of many more to come.

September 9, 2013

Costa Rica Journal: Language school gives Samara a special bond with expats

Central America is a huge center for language schools and Samara seems to be one of the epicenters. Every non Tico I meet seems to be learning Spanish here. It’s a nice idea. You go to school for four hours a day and then use what you’ve learned on the beaches, bars and dusty streets of the village.

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