Exploring Italy's Alpine Lakes

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Exploring Italy's Alpine Lakes

We spent the first 10 days of October on the road - a research trip up to Italy’s northern Lakes region. It’s been five years since we published our guidebook to this region. We’re proud of that volume - it’s our best-organized and best-written of our guidebooks.

We wanted to patch a few holes, as it were, in our breadth of knowledge in those regions - a new lodging here, a new restaurant there, a few more places to visit and roads to explore between here and there. We won’t do a new edition of the book for a while yet, but meanwhile our recent explorations and discoveries help us design even better itineraries for our clients who travel up there.

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The Humble Moka Pot (...that's "Moka" not Mocha")

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The Humble Moka Pot (...that's "Moka" not Mocha")

If you visit Italy, you’ll doubtlessly get an espresso at a bar any number of times - it’s one of those iconic, Insta-glam moments.

But if you spend a little more time here, you may find yourself in a vacation rental or apartment, in which you’ll likely find the ubiquitous Moka pot - the aluminum stovetop coffee cooker invented in Italy in 1933. Every household has one - or two, or three, of varying sizes.

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Convertibles, Canepina, and Corriere

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Convertibles, Canepina, and Corriere

A few days ago we enjoyed a really fun day, with some American friends visiting Soriano - in fact, they're the people who told us about Soriano in the first place years ago. So the four of us crammed ourselves in to our little Fiat 500 convertible and put the top down, to head over to the nearby town of Canepina on this beautifully overcast day. The weather was cool and breezy, no direct sun, with a droplet of rain falling on you every 5 minutes… Perfect convertible weather, as far as these two “pazzi americani” (crazy Americans) are concerned.

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Taking a Break with a Cool Pool

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Taking a Break with a Cool Pool

Whew! It has been another week of SCORCHING temps here in Italia. We have a very full roster of itinerary clients, and a couple of research trips of our own coming up; so we have been just sitting in the house chained to a computer all day.

Having all this work is not that bad (at this time of year), because it’s too damn hot to do anything outside anyway. But we both get stir crazy after 8 hours or so of screen time, and after a couple of days I lose track of what day it is!!

It looked like we were wrapping things up by this weekend, so we did a last minute search and booked ourselves another day at an agriturismo/restaurant that has a pool, about an hour from our house.

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