In our recent post, we related our disastrous visit to the US at the beginning of December. Theft, Covid, and various travel snafus made for a harrowing time.

Nevertheless when we got back home to Italy, we went about our lives - writing, itinerary work, and organizing music engagements.

We also got into the holiday spirit, as Natale (Christmas) unfolded in Italy and then New Years Eve approached.

This article was originally published as a Featured Reader commentary in Long Island’s “Newsday” newspaper - which Matt used to deliver on his bike as a kid! In it he describes Thanksgiving day dinners at his house on Long Island, and how things are … a bit different, now that we live in Italy.

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.

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.