This is about our visit to La Marina Grande, the older and more rustic of Sorrento’s two marinas. I had spent months researching just about every aspect of our trip, naturally including the extensive reading of restaurant menus and reviews. I had read that Ristorante Bagni Delfino was a favorite “forget the budget” restaurant for many visitors up to and including Rick Steves. It seemed a worthwhile destination. Continue reading →

Disclosure: I am breaking the Sorrento portion of our Italy trip into parts simply because I so dread coming to the end. I’ve been home a month now and still can’t get used to the fact that I’m not in Italy. Hence, foot-dragging. Continue reading →

May was a very good time to be in Sorrento, garden-wise. The weather was splendid and all kinds of flowers were in bloom. The narrow streets between our hotel and il centro smelled like perfume: cascades of white confederate jasmine flowers spilled down almost every stone wall.

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From Perugia we took the train to Rome and then to Naples. The only glitch was being a few minutes late out of Perugia, which put our Rome connection in some jeopardy; I was a little nervous about finding our train in the huge Rome station. But all went off without a hitch. It is very easy to get around by train in Italy. Continue reading →

Buonconvento is a small medieval town in the province of Siena in southern Tuscany. That statement contains about four more things about Buonconvento than I knew when we embarked on this great Italian adventure. Wikipedia tells me the first description on record evidently dates back to 1100, and its walls started to go up by around 1371. Bonus conventus means “happy place,” and it was certainly that for us. Continue reading →

I’m pretty awful at museums. When we were young, my sister Katherine and I would be taken by our adventure-loving mother to various museums, often along with my friend Sharon and her mother (grown-ups needed other grown-ups to talk and smoke with). We went to the Wadsworth in Hartford, the Peabody down in New Haven, and even to some of the museums in New York City, where I liked the dinosaur bones almost as much as those irresistible paintings where somebody’s head was cut off and bleeding on a platter. Continue reading →

…is not enough. That’s what happens when you set up a trip in ignorance, which seems pretty much a given when you are in fact ignorant about your destination: things that look great on paper suddenly don’t make much sense. Oh, well. I’d been planning  my second trip to Italy before I departed for this one, so no big deal: Siena is alive and well and in my future. Continue reading →

My feelings about Rome turn out to be complicated. Continue reading →

A long time ago I wrote a poem that I liked perfectly well because I was young and full of poetry, and I liked how it started: “Who am I to talk?” Turned out I was the only fan of my poem; everyone else who read it thought that if I weren’t the one to talk, I should just shut up. Continue reading →