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The city of Carmel has a new special partnership with a town all the way in the Tuscany region of Italy. Cortona, located in the country's Arezzo province, is Carmel's newest Sister City. That means the communities will promote "international goodwill, understanding, student educational exchanges and expanded business relationships between the two...

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Florence's iconic Uffizi art gallery has got over one million likes on video-sharing social media platform TikTok, the Florentine gallery said Wednesday. A video of a three-day visit by British singer-songwriter Dua Lipa pushed the Uffizi over the threshold, it said. Furthermore, with over 116,700 TikTok followers, the Uffizi is by far the most fol...

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As a young man, our guide, Mario Acciai, was born and raised just outside of Florence. His farming family chastised Mario, youngest of seven, for being a daydreamer, singing, and disappearing to play on the banks of the Arno River or to explore the surrounding hills. His wanderlust led him to love and to his life’s calling. My husband and I travele...

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The town of Collodi, Italy, about 45 miles west of Florence, is set on a slope behind a fabulous 17th-century villa. The garden, built as a kind of fantasy pleasure park for the Garzoni family and their noble guests, offers terraces, flower beds, grand staircases, splashing fountains and antique marble statues surrounding the Baroque villa. Walk th...

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“Dante’s Train,” a rail route tracing the journey of the Supreme Poet from Florence to Ravenna during his exile years, is returning for the summer season. Launched last year to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the vintage steam train takes travelers from Florence, the Tuscan capital, where Dante was born, to Ravenna in Emilia-Romag...

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When one thinks of the great civilisations of Italy's past, the Romans immediately come to mind; yet not everyone knows that this glorious people, who dominated the world for centuries, drew much from another civilisation that excelled on Italian soil: the Etruscans. They occupied a vast territory stretching from the river Arno to the Tiber, encomp...

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New technologies have enabled us to travel even by just moving a finger on our smartphones. Here tourism has become somewhat virtual. And we have noticed it in these two years of lockdown and pandemic. Enabling it was the innovation introduced in 2007, just 15 years ago, by Google, which after changing our lives with the Maps application, launched...

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Before the pandemic, I never really understood “foodie” culture. As a travel writer, I enjoyed cooking classes when they were on the itinerary, but the lessons were lost on me once the final dish was plated. I was more fascinated by the personalities of chefs than the actual ingredients. But when travel locked down, something stirred in me: Watchin...

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In one way or another, at any latitude, we all have at least one place in our heart, a place that acquires subjective importance by virtue of a personal memory or because of the significance it is given individually on an emotional level. And yet there are intersections of coordinates which, because of characteristics that make them universally uni...

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The Italian economy has received the shellacking of a generation over the last two years. 1.2 million jobs were lost, a third of Italians experienced a loss of income, and nearly 700,000 small and midsize businesses are still at risk of bankruptcy. There are few bright spots on the Italian economic horizon right now, with Milan’s FTSE MIB stock mar...

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