Category: Travel

   To round out our Italy adventure we decided our last stop should be Lecce, all the way down into the heel of the boot, a city of about 100 thousand. There are much less tourists down this far and English isn’t as ubiquitous as it is in the tourist havens of Naples and the…

   If your only experience of Matera is from photos or travel shows it’s easy to think that the ancient part of the city, the Sassi, is all that there is to Matera, and sure that is spectacular. But the historical parts of the city located on the flats above the Sassi areas are worth…

   Here lies the foundations of human civilizations. A warren of hand carved underground dwellings and structures. These were the literal cave men. The mythical troglodytes of our beginnings. The first stone age human settlements on the entire Italian peninsula. Homes passed on continuously for over 12,000 years. Where space age humans still live, proud…

   The Amalfi Coast has long been one of my travel goals and I was elated to finally get to this region of Italy. Its colorful old houses that perch impossibly on the sides of steep cliffs over the ocean are just astounding to look at. A picture perfect storybook of a landscape. I had…

   Directly across the Bay of Naples from Naples is the quaint cliffside town of Sorrento, about 30 miles by the coast, passing the looming Mount Vesuvius as you go, the still steaming vents a reminder that this giant is just taking a nap, not dormant. Though the food is similar, the character of the…

   Naples. A jungle of antiquity and life. An endless reticulated tangling. Layer upon layer. Thin lanes dotted with shrines and gestures for one god until the next. The winding and meshing traffic flowing like blood through veins, eschewing rules for chaos, allowing the flow to sort it all out. A mystery of patience and…

   As we’ve travelled throughout Europe over the past few years, there are few places that were not touched and shaped by the ancient Roman Empire. From the UK to Turkey and far beyond. Even the width of the railroad tracks that ran through my hometown are the standard width of the Roman Chariot. And…

   Rome, according to legend, was founded by Romulus, the child of a vestal virgin raped by Mars, then condemned to death along with his twin brother Remus by drowning in the Tiber River. Fortunately their executioner was not detail oriented and he left them on the riverbank to die from exposure. Then a wolf-mother…