Pisa at night / Flickr photo by Fabiogis50

June is definitely the best month to be in town. Pisa celebrates its “Giugno Pisano” with a number of events, including the major ones: La Luminara on June 16th, Palio di San Ranieri on June 17th and Gioco del Ponte on the last weekend of the month. All around these three major dates, the city organizes a number of minor events which are just as interesting.

The official program is only available in Italian, and it can be downloaded in pdf format here. Of all the things organized, I recommend you…

• …go for an aperitivo to the two little bars opened for the occasion right on the riverbanks along the Arno: Argini and Margini and Arno Vivo. The former organizes live jazz concerts every Friday and Saturday night. Last year they served fish and chips too! The latter is more “disco-oriented”!

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Etruscan Hilltop Village / Flickr photo by 8blackcrows

This people never ceases to fascinate because of its mysterious history, language and customs. The origins of the Etruscans are lost in prehistory: some believe that they are indigenous, others believe that they came from the Greek area, given the cultural similarities. Their fortune derived from metal mining and trading, especially copper and iron that they exported all over the Mediterranean sea. Knowledge of the Etruscan language is still far from complete; it is however believed to be have been a non-Indoeuropean language.

If you grow up in Tuscany, you hear about this mysterious people all the time. And there are many tangible signs of their presence in this area that they left behind. There are several famous archaeological sites around Civitella Marittima, the village where I grew up and where our Casina di Rosa vacation rental is located.

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Got Milk? / Flickr photo by cwalker71

Up to the late ’80s, the village had a milk shop. A lady would sell you fresh milk delivered to the shop that very morning by local producers. You had to bring your own bottle. Over time, the milk shops closed, fresh milk was sold in milk cartons, and long-life milk became more and more popular. I always use it, but it’s nothing like the milk I used to drink when I was a kid.

The good news is that the “latteria“ is coming back…

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I suppose it’s a marketing strategy. At least that gives me an idea of the type of crowd they want to attract (the Russian version of the website gives also a clue about the audience they’re after!). I went to look at the hotel site and I saw that the cheapest room is almost 400 euros per night, which obviously makes it a luxury place for (maybe) many but (definitely) not for all…

I realized there is something that I really don’t like about this kind of tourism ventures.

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Photo by foéÖþoooey

This is a linguistic trace of the central role played by bread in the Italian culinary tradition, especially when ‘companatico’ was scarce and more expensive than most people could afford. Bread is so important in our dietary tradition that we have national laws explicitly meant to define the different types and the products which can go in its preparation.

Italians apparently eat 66kg of bread per person every year. My grandparents ate bread with anything: pasta, vegetables and even fruit. I remember being served bread and figs and bread and wine with sugar during festive family meals. And every time I go to my parents’ place in the countryside, I cannot but remember my grandfather sitting on a half-broken wooden bench, slicing a stale loaf of bread with his pocket knife and eating it with ripe grapes or peaches.

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Today, my source of inspiration was a chat I had with Giulia of the beautiful Locanda della Valle Nuova (Le Marche) about an interesting article on ecotourism that she posted on Twitter titled ‘Has the Whole Ecotourism Industry Shot Itself in the Foot?‘.

The author, Len Cordiner, CEO of whl.travel, discusses the problem of the certification of accommodations and tours as ‘eco-friendly’, a matter that I will leave aside here.

But the interesting point he makes is that he believes something did not quite work as planned, since many people tend to equate green vacations with doing it tough – hard beds and tasteless food. Green or sustainable holidays were perceived as something only tree huggers would do, not at all fun or enjoyable.

For this reason, he says, we need a new thinking and his proposal is to engage travellers.

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Photo: Dubrovnik old town, Stephen Chapman

Using local transport in Antigua, Guatemala / Photo by Stephen Chapman

Over the past few days I have enjoyed reading a number of articles about travel issues in general. One I have particularly enjoyed, and I am sorry that I did not get a chance to read before, is ‘Another new local travel knowledge site‘ by Stephen Chapman, founder of Make Travel Fair.

Stephen discusses a very interesting issue:

“how quickly a phrase or an idea can catch on and seem to spawn a whole new generation of websites almost overnight”

more specifically he deals with how

‘Local travel’ feels like it’s hit the big time at the moment, everyone wants a piece of the action, everyone wants to get involved in a web start-up and wrestle to become the next big thing in travel.

The article got me thinking about a number of issues. We have a vacation rental in Tuscany. We made the decision to make it as locally-rooted as possible from the very moment we started it. It seemed the obvious way to go, despite being a clear counter-tendency in a place like Tuscany, where ‘off-the-beaten-path’ (if such thing still exists here) is generally equated with ‘completely deprived of any tourist interest at all’. In such a well-know region, if nobody has already made an area ‘popular’, then it must be because there is nothing to see or do there.

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Fiori e Dintorni website

This morning I accompanied a soon-to-be bride to the village florist’s shop Fiori e Dintorni. The florist is a dear friend, a true artist. She doesn’t speak English but many foreign brides go to her for wedding flowers because her work is really outstanding.  So much better than most florists’ in the region.

A comment by the bride’s mother got me thinking. She was amazed that a flower store, and such a lovely one at that, could survive in such a small village.

Not the first time I’ve heard the question “how do people survive out here?”.

This got me thinking about how relative a concept “out here” is and how much people from cities often have no idea of how much stuff you can do living “slower”, in a small, quiet village in the Tuscan countryside.

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