As of today, we have been living in Tuscany for three years now. Before we decided to move our lives here permanently, we did a lot of long rides through Italy. Slow travel, as a travel journal would say. Not counting the 2-3 weeks-long regular holidays to Italy that most Europeans do anyway, the first long trip was after, or more like, during the pandemic in the summer of 2021.

We’ve spent nearly 3 months in Italy. A couple of weeks in Lerici, a couple of weeks in Florence, and more than a month in Rome, and some in-between days here and there. The goal of that trip was this: experience Italy without the masses of tourists (most foreign travel was banned that time, we’ve got our vaccines, so we were the few ones who could travel), and live in the two main tourist destinations for a longer time (Florence & Rome).

Also, we knew that we would get married at the end of August, a couple of days after we returned from this trip. So we kept the trip romantic, picked our wedding rings from an artisan in Florence, and had a pre-honeymoon weekend in a small villa for just the two of us. The latter will be important later in this article.

Long story short, we arrived from the North and made our way down to Rome. In Rome, I picked a place called Fonte Dell’Vsignolo, a perfectly designed farm estate turned villa, next to a town called Ronciglione. The villa was run by a wonderful German lady, by the way, and designed by her Italian husband. Not sure if it's still operational, though. It was 4 years ago, last time we were there. Anyhow, we ended up in Ronciglione for a romantic weekend.

Now, this story is not about what happened in the villa, because that’s private. But when we first left the villa for a dinner in the town. Ronciglione. Like you, we had probably never heard about this town before, and I am not even sure if we were able to pronounce it correctly at first. But that is where somehow something clicked. I don’t know, the universe was just in the right constellation, or we simply got drunk after dinner, or it was the summer evening, or the landlady in the villa spiked our drinks, but something was totally and completely in balance, and we, or at least I, got the idea.

Before this experience, when we traveled, we did what most people did. We went to the main city and spent some time there. We tried some “hidden things to see in X,” but mostly we just stayed in The City or In The Destination, and our hack was to stay longer than usual so something unusual could happen. Our hack was time, because we had time. We worked online, and there were no offices or schools we needed to get back to. I remember, one of the first “hmmm that is different” experiences I had was in Valencia. Finally, a Spanish city that is not Madrid, Barcelona, or Sevilla. Finally, a place which functions as a city, a place where you can live and pass time, without encountering masses of tourists. Or when I spent an unusually long time in Tel Aviv and only dedicated a few days to Jerusalem. Or when I was locked on Malta for a week, alone, doing pretty much nothing, just wandering around Mdina and Valletta. These were fundamentally different travel experiences compared to the usual “go to Cyprus, spend a week in a hotel in Ayia Napa, do a day trip to Nicosia” or “let’s just go to Athens for a week.”

Italy was even worse in this, because the country has so much to offer that everyone is ticking off the basics first. And even the basics take a lot of time. I have lived in Florence for two weeks, and since then I have been living sort of next to it for years now, and I am still unable to say that I’ve seen it all. So obviously, when we went to Italy, we did the basics. Even on this first longer trip, we did the basics: Florence, Rome. Ok, in Lerici, we got a taste of a bit of difference, but still, we went there to see the Cinque Terre without the armies of Jennifers. And, by the way, this longer trip was probably the, I don’t know, tenth trip total to Italy, twentieth if we combine both of our trips. Sophie did an entire road trip from Venice to Sicily before.

But in Ronciglione, something has changed. The best way to describe this is this:

I’ve realized that I want to visit these generic towns. I started to favor day trips to odd places, or towns which I knew nothing about. Our travel planner was Google Maps, randomly clicking around, rather than Tripadvisor or Wikipedia. The idea of Anywhere Italy wasn’t born there. But the mindset shift for Anywhere Italy happened there.

On our next trip, we didn’t even stop at any of the famous places. We went straight down to Calabria and Sicily. Then we ended up in Rome for a year, but that’s another story…

So, Ronciglione was our baptism into hidden Italian towns. The first time, we spent only a few days there. On our next trip, we ended up in Rome for a year. From there, we’ve visited the town and the area many times. It was our first patch on the Italian map, which we discovered only for ourselves. With time, we’ve learned that this patch is called Tuscia.

After a month in Rome, we wanted to spend two more weeks elsewhere on our way back home to Budapest. I can’t even remember which city it was. Probably Venice or Bologna, because they are halfway between Rome and Budapest, but I know that we canceled our plans. We booked two more weeks in the center of Ronciglione. Yes, we’ve got red-pilled so much that we changed our entire plan and booked more days in an almost meaningless, small town in the middle of nothing in Lazio.

Since it was a small town and there was nothing to do there, we quickly discovered everything around us. We quickly became friends with Paola, who was an Italian aristocrat who lived in New York as a socialite, poet, writer, filmmaker, everything, and returned a couple of years ago to her estate here in Ronciglione. We’ve spent a couple of days by her pool. She invited us to a pool party with local artists, which sadly we couldn’t attend as it was two days after our departure. Her place, Relais Villa Lina is bookable.

We also spent time in the local lake, Lago di Vico, which is the heart of the Tuscia region. We’ve learned that the area is a supplier for Ferrero, as most farmers are growing hazelnuts here. Sophie once forgot her purse at home and realized after ordering gelato at the local bar. Got waived and even got free coffee, just because she was “bellissima.” These experiences are small and indifferent, but they were our first in Italy, and they were as close as you can get to local life. Banality, I know, but why the hell am I still remembering this after years? It didn’t even happen with me.

This was the first place where we just sat at the local bar and watched the locals. The young ones are the best, the teenagers. I know it might sound creepy, but it was here where we named all of them Marcos and Francescas. They are like doves on the main piazza, always going around in groups, always separated, girls and boys, two groups. They dress up, they are loud, they are like parrots, always talking. Almost no one is checking their phones, and you see no one doing selfies. It’s like the pre-internet era, totally weird and amazing at the same time to see. Or the old people, the group of grandpas who sit at the coffee table from 9 AM till 12:30, doing absolutely nothing, drinking a coffee, a glass of wine, maybe smoking a cigarette, or a cigar, reading the local paper, maybe having a talk with a friend. Then at 12:30, promptly, they religiously stand up, and like a rocket ship they speed up home, because it’s lunchtime.

Again, banality of everyday things. But it was Ronciglione where we have not just started noticing these, but started enjoying them. We were the creepy foreigners who were sitting on the same piazza at the same coffee table for an hour or more, and watching other people doing their things. Sometimes we were even more creepy and took a photo of the evening street.

I remember the third time that we returned here. Almost a year had passed after our first visit. It was my birthday, so we spent a couple of days again in the villa. We went for the same walks. We went to the same bars. No one recognized us, of course. But it felt like we were returning home. Which is an extremely odd feeling to have, because even then, our home was not even in this country. Still, feelings.

Because of the banality of the experience, I can only write about it with meaningless words. I could say this is slow travel. Or I could say this is watching life happen. Or, maybe, I can quote the Nobel-prize-winning Hungarian writer, Laszlo Krasznahorkai:

_* “Csak nézni, hogy telik a kurva élet” - in Hungarian, from his work Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango). I have no clue how it is officially translated into English, but above is my own rough one.

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Because aside from wine, there is nothing more Italian than the amaro or bitter spirits.

Some nations have their own versions: Jagermeister in Germany, Becherovka in Czechia, Gammel Dansk in Denmark, Pelinkovac in the Balkans, Zoladkova in Poland, etc. Even gin is similar in the making, but its bitterness is “outsourced” to the tonic water.

But no other country does more versions of this than Italy. I haven’t counted it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of amari in Italy equals or exceeds the number of wine categories in Italy.

And, of course, everyone knows Aperol, and its cocktail version, the Aperol Spritz, which is… no, sonny, no, it’s not a bitter or an amaro. It’s a bitter cocktail, and it is at best a cousin of amaro, but in reality, it is closer to gin&tonic. So, if you want to know what amaro is and what it is for, read on.

The unavoidable history lesson for amaro

Regionality and geography made countless versions of amaro. But all of them have the same journey: alchemists → monks → pharmacies → distilleries.

We need to touch on the super quick history lesson of distilling anything, aka, humanity’s quest to make alcohol. For that, let’s make friends with Jimmy.

So. Bye Jimmy, we have arrived at the point where clever European Christians are able to distill alcohol. At first, believe it or not, this whole spiel had two routes.

One is making wine stronger, which later led to the long history of brandy-style drinks, which are part of another story. It was the route that later went into sprouts like the super minimalistic, we-just-distill-anything passes of vodka and whisky.

Two is putting any kind of weird but cheap herbs into the distillation. That’s the amaro, or bitter or medicinal alcohol, passage. It wasn’t a new method at all. Even pre-medieval Jimmy put herbs into the wine and fortified it. Wormwood was common for medicinal wine drinking, which was later named vermouth. Long story short: put some herbs in it, distill it, you get something bitter, nice.

And what tastes bitter but is good for you? Medicine. People connected wine with joy, so most monasteries made wine for the festivals and sacred events. When distillation arrived in Europe, monks started making bitter drinks for medicinal purposes. Herbs were the medicine, alcohol was the carrier.

Once Baby Jesus said OK to science (around the 17th- 18th century, it took him a couple of hundred years from semi-OK to fully-OK this thing…), pharmacies were the first to emerge. They started selling potions and remedies for the sick. And from where they got their first batches of distilled bitter alcohol? Of course, from monks.

From there, the route was as simple as the economic journey to capitalism. Somewhere, somehow, a pharmacist realized that this bitter stuff is not just for the sick. We can build a brand! And this is how any bitter drink got its baptism in and around the late 19th century. By the way, Americanos reading this, Coca-Cola was born the same way.

So what is amaro and what isn’t?

You know the story now, so you know what amaro is. It’s a bitter, hard-distilled alcoholic drink infused with herbs, with some medicinal uses, often connected to digestive issues. That is why it's most commonly called a digestive, or a drink you drink after the meal.

So amaro = distilled hard liquor + herbs + medicinal value + consumed after a meal.

It’s not part of the definition, but goes without saying that because of the herbs and medicinal values, you can’t drink too much of it. It’s one of the worst ideas you can have: getting drunk solely on amaro.

But what is not amaro? This might be a bit longer, but it's equally simple. Every word matters: a bitter drink infused with herbs. Gin is infused with herbs (juniper or modern versions are infused with anything really). But it’s not bitter. Bitterness is outsourced to the tonic water. Vermouth then? No, the carrier is not hard distilled alcohol. It’s wine. Grappa, vodka, whiskey—no, no herbs and botany at all. Those are pure distilled alcohols. Anything made for cocktails: Angostura or other bitters that are there only to infuse cocktail drinks with bitter flavor. Or everyone’s favorite Aperol, where the alcohol level is too low (Aperol is 11% or something?) so they are not meant to be consumed alone. Even Campari is borderline. These are more like cocktail bases than standalone drinks.

And there is the grey line. People think they are amaro, but... Limoncello, sambuca, amaretto, nocino, and all the others where the method of making amaro is there, but there is one slight thing that makes it less of an amaro. Sugar. In some cases, an absolute bonkers amount of sugar. Some of them are a bit bitter, yes, but sugar always overpowers the bitterness. As far as I know, there is also a law that says if you have x amount of sugar, you are technically a liquore, not an amaro. These are considered more like sweet digestives.

The digestive value and the hyperlocality

I think the digestive value is the one thing that defines the amaro in terms of how it is consumed. Because once we get this right, the only thing left is locality, which is purely driven by geography and makes this entire category interesting because you can discover new amari all the time during your travel.

Digestive value means it aids digestion. So it is supposed to be consumed after the meal or for weird digestive issues. In some cases, especially in Northern regions, amaro is consumed to treat seasickness. Amari made in the mountains are heavier because the meals were more meaty, fatty, heavy. Southern amaro, especially by the sea, is lighter, often made from citruses, not because citrus and the sea are there, but because the meals are lighter anyway.

Once you get that, the last thing you need to know is the ever-true thing about Italy: everything is hyperlocal.

Amaro is made from local herbs. Whatever it is favored, available, or part of the local patron saint festivities, or artisans, or whatever it is that is fully local there. There are amari known only in a few towns and made for a few towns. There are ones which are made into big-brand batches and are available on almost all bars’ shelves. And there are restaurants and local trattorias that pride themselves on having that bottle of amaro only, and they give you a look if you order the big-name Montenegro one.

Just an example: I have no idea what the name was, but I’ve had a chestnut-flavored one in Garfagnana. The most authentic amaro experience I have ever had was a bottle, not even labeled, sold by an old grandpa from his wine cellar in Equi Terme. He mentioned the herbs, but my Italian is not that deep. He made sure that even though we didn’t buy the whole bottle, at least we tasted his creation. It was a matter of pride, not a matter of transaction. It was great, a bit edgy, probably because it was 100% homegrown and homebrewed.

But I’m from Hungary, and we have a thing called palinka, which is pretty much brandy distilled from whatever fruit fell down from the trees. It is strong, definitely nothing mellow about it, and mostly homemade. Almost no one buys it from the shops, because everyone has someone who makes their version of this drink. Amaro is kinda the same in the making.

How amaro should be consumed

This will also be very straightforward. Amaro is a digestive, so you should drink it after the meal. You can drink it neat, with water separately, or with ice. This is kinda similar to whiskey drinking. Unrelated to your choices, it is almost always served room temperature. Some of them are served cold, even freezer cold (like the del Capo). Same amount as any shot, like a whiskey, again. Unlike whiskey, which is often served in a narrow-on-the-top glass to concentrate the fragrance of the drink, amaro is almost always served in a simple wide round glass. Smell is important, but taste is what you need to savor more. Some people buy a cantucci with it and dunk the cookie in the amaro as a form of dessert. I’ve seen some people dunk simply bread in it. It’s up to you.

The goal of the amaro is to prolong the evening conversation. It is by definition a slow drink. You are sipping it. Since it is often very bitter and the herbs also need some patience from you, you can’t just simply shoot it down. Professional amaro experts, like myself, drink an amaro for half an hour or more.

Some amari come in cocktails, or more like, some amari can be served as the base ingredient of a cocktail. But that’s an aperitif, not a digestive. It opens the evening, not closes it. All those versions of spritzes where some form of bitter is topped up by prosecco or simply soda. And also, some amari make into coffee. It’s called caffé corretto, corrected coffee. It’s an espresso shot mixed with a shot of alcohol. The three most popular options are amaro/bitters, sambuca, and grappa.

But when you say amaro, it’s most likely something that you get neat, after the meal, and you drink it slowly.

Some amazing amaro examples

I did some research, well, my AI did. I tried some of these personally (will mark it).

Braulio. Coming from Bormio in the Lombardian Valtellina valley. A 150-year-old recipe, aged in barrels in cellars dug under the town’s streets. The locals literally walked on their amaro cellars.

Cynar. It’s popular, and it is made from artichoke. It’s from Veneto and it got popular from the ad from the 50s post-war boom. A then-famous actor was sipping the amaro in the middle of the busy Milan traffic at a table, reading a paper, giving zero f. The slogan was “against the hustle of modern life.” I tried this, and it has this weird aftertaste of artichoke, which to me is a bit too much.

Amaro Lucano. Made by a pastry shop owner in Basilicata. It says on the bottle: work and honesty. Their slogan: what else do you want from life? Accurate. I tried it, and it is easy to fall in love with it for those who are rookies in amaro. It’s on the sweeter side (guess this is the pastry heritage).

Centerba. I have never tried it, but it has a legendary reputation. The name means hundreds of herbs, because, you’ve guessed it, it is made from around a hundred herbs in Mount Majella, Abruzzo, where it is a regional treasure. It comes in an easily recognizable green bottle. And it is 70% alcohol. It is advertised for its antiseptic properties. With 70%, you bet it’s antiseptic.

Montenegro. Named after Princess Elena di Montenegro, the wife of King Victor Emmanuel III. It’s one of the most popular amari in Italy, available in almost all places. Very forgiving, mild, mellow. No judgment here, but it is often ordered by old nonnas. I tried it. To me, it is almost like non-bitter. You put in more than one ice cube, and it’s almost a dessert drink.

The del Capo. Or fully written: Vecchio Amaro del Capo. One of my favorites. Best stuff to drink during summer. You have to ask for it or look it up on the menu because it is never out on the shelves. Why? It is the national consensus that it has to be served from the freezer, ice cold, like a vodka.

The China Elixir. The Elixir di China Clementi. Or simply just China on the bottle. Nothing to do with China. It means quinine, which is the base ingredient of this one. Comes from my turf, Fivizzano, in Lunigiana. Started as a malaria medicine because in the Versilia swamps, malaria was common. Made by the same family since 1884. I tried. It’s one of the most bitter ones. By the way, did you know that quinine is almost undrinkable in its purest form, so tonic water has to have so freakin’ much sugar that it has more sugar than a bottle of generic sweet soda? All because of quinine.

Ramazzotti. If Montenegro is a popular one, Ramazzotti is the rockstar of amari. It is the first industrial-made, mass-produced amaro, coming from Milan, of course. Mr. Ramazzotti opened his bar in the 1840s next to La Scala and tried to outsmart local bars on coffee, so he started the ammazzacaffé thing. He went to war with coffee and suggested that people should drink amaro (his amaro to be precise) instead of coffee. Nowadays, the ammazzacaffé stuck, and it is an amaro consumed after the coffee. Sort of like the caffé corretto, but instead of mixing the amaro in the coffee, it is served separately, as water would. I tried it, obviously, it is almost impossible to avoid it.

One last thing. Compared to other drinks like vodka, whiskey, or cognac, or rum, or whatever, it is not recommended to get drunk from amaro. Simply put, you shouldn’t have more than 2 glasses a day, or your stomach rebels. Because of this, amaro bottles tend to stay open for longer periods than other drinks. They live on the shelves, opened. I don’t know if it is because of the prolonged shelf life, or because in Italy anything that is artisanal tends to be beautifully designed, but amaro bottles are almost always amazing to look at. Seriously, they are a design marvel. Beautiful. They often carry their hundreds-of-years-old graphic style.

But, and I’ve said it before, the best experiences are coming from unmarked bottles. From a wine cellar. In a medieval small town. From an almost hundred-year-old grandpa. Who is proudly showing off his creation. His recipe. His amaro.

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This piece is not like those articles. For two reasons. One, I am talking about apartment buying only. Houses don’t have condo fees, and you don’t need to obey that many rules in renovation work either. Two, this piece is entirely based on my experiences, since I went through the buying process myself recently (a 2-bedroom apartment with a full attic and garage in Turin).

So. First of all, no one needs to panic. There is no endless Italian paperwork, no idiot rules of red tape, and no special cases. There are, however, some interesting, probably only-here kind of rules, which I will share. And, of course, the real estate business is full of scams and crap sold as gold with a markup, but that is everywhere, so obviously, don’t be stupid, never believe a single word from a real estate agent, and keep your eyes open. But that’s, I guess, the normal behavior.

My background

It counts a bit here because it forms my point of view in this article. It can also serve you as a reference point when I say anything below.

So, I am Hungarian by birth, which means I am a foreign immigrant in Italy. I have an official residency. I’m an EU citizen, which means I don’t need a visa to stay here, but I do need a residency to deal with daily life here. Residency is not needed to buy an apartment, by the way, but it makes it much easier. I have also lived in, well, duh, Hungary (Budapest), and in London for many years. I was a tenant in London but got inches close to becoming an owner, so I know everything about buying real estate in Britain. And I was a homeowner in Budapest. So I have two countries and their laws and processes to compare with the Italian one.

And since buying a property is not just a financial transaction, but a cultural process (as anything), I also think that I now have three very different cultures to compare with each other.

The Anglo-Saxon process is extremely straightforward and transparent, which is probably the same in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Eastern European process seems complicated until you realize that you are in Eastern Europe, and if you have money, you can do anything, and I mean anything. You can convert your attic into another penthouse without any legislative work or any single fucks given to others in the condo. You just need to know the right people at the local council and bribe the condo representative, and that’s it. You can even sell the on-paper attic as a penthouse with a huge markup, legally. It’s a libertarian’s wet dream.

The Italian Job

The Italian process is similar to anything in Southern Europe. Red tape is in extreme detail, and it is treated very seriously (on the surface), and everyone acts as if the government rules are similar to the Bible, which is, of course, written by God, no questions about that.

Also, everyone is extremely serious about this business. Selling real estate is an opera with a minimum of 5 acts. Everyone looks and behaves as if this is the most important decision of their entire life, which it is sometimes, so I get it. And since it is also the place where the most money is moved around, everyone is like a vulture who takes a cut.

So before I go into some details, I have two underlying tips or more like rules for everyone. It should define how you approach this entire thing.

Rule one: it is totally fine and actually recommended to question the words of God. Almost anything can be fluid, and almost everything can be ignored. Most things are up to a personal relationship or interpretation. So when someone says the rules, nod, acknowledge. Of course, it is very serious, it’s a rule, but try to find an alternative solution. In almost all cases, one exists. Also, it’s Italy. Look around. Does the place seem like it has any rules? Sorry, don’t want to offend anyone, I love Italy with all my heart, but the rules are here at best fluffy, to be honest. Or more like, the state treats itself super seriously, and locals on the surface play along, but personally, they are like nah, duh, meh. This kinda applies to a process like buying property.

Rule two: the real estate agent is actually your friend. Now, this is a mindset shift, because we, or at least I, was trained in one very persistent manner on how to handle real estate agents, or like salespeople in general. So, I’m a marketer by trade, by the way, so I had the opportunity (or curse?) to work with people in sales. Trust me: don't believe anything a salesperson tells you. The higher the price tag, the less you should trust that person. And no, there's no “oh, but he is such a nice fella” in this. Now, with all that said, the real estate agent in Italy is your friend who accompanies you on the journey and helps you with the transition. I will explain why later. But just have that mindset first.

The cost of the buying process

So, this is the very fundamental difference of the Italian buying experience compared to everything else I have experienced. Here, everyone takes a cut from you, the buyer. Maybe someone will comment on this post that this is the same process in their country, but to me, this was completely new.

In Italy, you, as the buyer, pay the notary who handles the legal paperwork and state fees. It makes sense. We do the same in Hungary. It’s through a lawyer, and we pay the state fees on our own, but it’s the same. You also pay the seller for the asking price. That is, of course, makes sense. But in Italy, as a buyer, you also pay the real estate agent a fee.

Fucking why?! WHY?! He is selling me. The seller should pay the fee, of course, since the agency is doing them a favor. Listing the property, handling the appointments, keeping the contacts, etc. That’s a service worth paying for. But as a buyer? It’s the same if I walk into a store and tip the cashier for handing me the bag. The agency in Italy makes a fee on both the buyer and the seller. And as a buyer, you get nothing, by the way. Except your property. You walk into the agent’s office once, sign the papers of interest, make an official offer on the asking price, and bye. Everything else either happens at the notary later (if it’s a yes), or happens nothing at all (if it’s a no).

To me, this is mindblowing, and I have considered starting a real estate business for foreigners, because all I can see now is that selling properties in Italy is basically free money on the streets for agencies. I also understood why Italy has a real estate agency on literally every corner in every town. For real, it’s either a gelateria, a trattoria, or an immobiliare. Or insurance, that’s another scam that is everywhere. Funny, our new home’s condo has two offices on the streets, they pay rent to our condo, which is great for condo costs. Guess? Yes, a pizzeria and an insurance agency.

The process

I should have started with this, but the process matters only on paper. Remember rule one: question everything.

It looks straightforward, and I will write about all its steps:

1. You try to find a property. You either walk into an agency or look online.

2. You visit properties. 99% of the time with an agent.

3. You have the one. You make one offer to the agent.

4. The seller accepts your offer. You are legally bound to buy at that price.

5. Both of you and the agent go to the notary, sign papers, and it’s done.

Finding the property

Now, this part of the process is the one step that is totally up to you and your preferences. All I can give you are some tips.

The most important tip: remember that Italy is a country based on relationships and hyperlocality. And also, never forget the most important rule: everyone hates Rome, except Romans.

So, with that in mind, allow me to translate this to real estate.

Relationships. The best deals are done within families and friends. Since you are a foreigner, it’s an important thing to know and it is also a relief. You don’t need to chase the best deal, because you won’t be part of it. Doesn’t matter what those real estate agencies tell you about buying your dreamy house in Tuscany for pennies. It’s probably a scam anyway, but it is definitely not The Deal Of Your Lifetime. So don’t chase it. Accept it. It’s a relief if you ask me.

Hyperlocality. The local real estate agency office has more opportunities than the entire internet. The only place where internet search can serve you is the big-city option. The market is faster there, so the agencies make some (not full, some!) effort to put up some of their ads online.

The smaller the town you are buying in, the more likely you need to go into the local real estate agency office. If you are in a town with multiple areas, go to the area where you want to buy and find the agency there. Even if they belong to a big franchise like Tempocasa or Tecnocasa, the local office always knows better. Submit your search preferences there, and they will find you something. Even in cities, I personally walked into some of the local neighborhood agencies. Another personal experience: I was a tenant for years in Tuscany. I knew the area where I wanted to live, walked into like five agencies, submitted my details, and one of them presented me the solution. The apartment wasn’t on the internet, nor at any other agencies, except the one we ended up with. So yeah, keep that in mind when hunting, almost nothing is online and transparent.

Rome. Mention any city or town to an Italian, and they will find something to like about it. Mention Rome. Watch what happens. This translates into paying taxes, fees, and licenses to the government. This is the Bible. It’s a set of rules you have to follow. And it’s a set of rules you have to question. By the rules, you can’t negotiate much. IRL: you can. The part of this house is a storage space, not a living space. But don’t worry, no one does a checkup. If they do, what do they find? A couple of beds? No one can say you can’t store beds in your storage, right? Yes, on the floor map, there was a closed kitchen here. I know there is none here now, but do you bother? Of course not! It’s an open-plan dining room now. Look how spacious it is! I can go on, but I think you get the gist here. The rules say red. You say dark orange. If you look hard enough, it can still fly as red, no worries.

One important line here, before my own advice burns you. The flexibility is about how you use the space after the notary goes home. It is not about what's on the records the day you sign. At the rogito, the seller declares that the apartment matches the cadastral plans, and the notary takes that seriously, because this is the one place where the Bible is actually the Bible. Small mismatches, a moved kitchen, an opened wall, get fixed on paper by a geometra before signing for a few hundred euros. Make the seller pay for it. Big mismatches, rooms that don't exist on the plans, a storage space sold as a bedroom, are not quirks. They are the traps I mention later, the ones a good fixer smells from miles away. Buy the beds after. Not before.

So, don’t bother about chasing the best deal, it’s not for you. Go full local to find the best opportunities. And keep your eyes open because rules can be blurry, even if everyone pretends they are super serious. But some rules are still not meant to be broken.

The searching for the one

So this is generic advice and has nothing to do with Italy because property searching has the same rules everywhere. At this point, you know your options; all you need to do is see the properties and get a first-hand experience. So here is what I always do. Again, this is mostly for apartment buying, but kinda applies to houses as well.

1. Drive around the area. Twice: one by day, one after 8 PM. What kind of people do you see on the streets? What kind of shops? What kind of restaurants? What’s the feeling you have? Can you imagine yourself walking home there? Especially if it’s a big city, it’s important to know which areas are off limits for you. In my experience (Turin), I had to drive less than five minutes around the North side of the city, especially Barriere di Milano, to know that I want the South-West of the city.

2. Wait 10+ minutes for the agent in front of the house. If you are lucky, you are just on time, and the agent is late, which is pretty much all the time in Italy anyway. Look who’s coming in and out. Weird rules I have: Italians are big on dogs. What kind of dogs do you see coming in and out from the house? Pitbulls or Labradors? It’s Italy, people are usually dressed up better when they go out. Do you see this on people coming in and out? Do you imagine yourself talking to these people as your neighbors?

3. Ask in the local bar. I don't do it all the time, but most of the time. I go into the local bar. There is always one within 100 meters. I get something to drink and ask the bartender one question. No, not "how is it to live here, what kind of people live here?" That's offensive. Most bars and their owners are locals. The answer will always be positive. You are a foreigner who wants to open a restaurant there. Do they recommend it? The "who is living here" immediately becomes "how hard life is here," and the complain-tsunami starts. Filter it to your liking.

And here is the thing about asking questions in Italy. Ask directly. Is it safe here at night? Would you park your car on this street? Has this area gone up or down in the last ten years? Where does the trouble start, which corner, which piazza? In some countries these questions make people squirm. Here, nobody squirms. You get an answer, then three stories you didn’t ask for, then a spoken map of exactly which streets are fine after dark and which are not, with house numbers. Italians live hyperlocally, and they talk without a filter. Sometimes without any filter at all.

You don’t have to join in. But you also don’t have to dance around the only question that matters, which is whether you’d walk home on that street at 8 PM. Ask it straight. You’ll get the truth. With interest.

TLDR: no dance. Straight shooting. Ask the direct questions that would earn you side-eye in Canada or Germany. The answers are the cheapest due diligence you will ever get.

Making the offer

Remember when I told you that despite all the things you know about salespeople, go against that mindset and let the real estate agent be your friend? This is the time.

Once you find a property, you make an offer. The offer is official, and it is as official as it gets. You walk into the agency office and sign papers. You pay nothing here, but you sign that if the offer is accepted, you pay a deposit, sort of a booking fee. It’s usually around 10% of the asking price, so it’s multiple tens of thousands of euros. By paying this, you made sure that the apartment can’t be sold to anyone else but you. The deposit, the caparra, cuts both ways, and this is the part to memorize. If you back out, the seller keeps your deposit. All of it. If the seller backs out, they owe it back to you, doubled. Symmetric punishment, written into the civil code, and the reason both sides become very serious the moment an offer is accepted.

And here comes the problem.

What if you like more than one property? You can’t make multiple offers, because, if accepted, you are legally bound to pay the booking fee. Let’s say you want to make an offer to three apartments. All of them accept. You can’t cherry-pick one that you like the most and ignore the rest. If you have deep pockets, of course, you can. But that means that you pay 2x the 10% booking fee on two places you won’t buy. Because if you back out from an offer, you lose the fee. Sometimes they even double it, so you pay 2x more if you back out. Usually it’s for the seller, not the buyer, but I’ve seen this option for buyers at some places too.

Since you can’t just make multiple offers, you have to put all your eggs into one basket and make a very good offer on one. Obviously, have a plan B and C, if the offer won’t get accepted, so you can make offers to others. Oh, yes, you can’t make two offers on one place. One offer, one place. No negotiation via offers. I don’t even want to describe how this works in my home country in Hungary, but let’s just say it mostly involves a nylon bag of cash, some shots of alcohol, loud screaming, and counting rolls of cash by hand, standing around a table. So compared to that, it’s a kinda rigid process, I have to say.

How do you know that you made a very good offer?

Your friend, your amico, your BFF, the agent will tell you. Since in this process everyone is making money (except you, the buyer, you pay everyone), everyone is happy with a certain cut. No need to get super hungry here. The agent will tell you what a good offer is. When they sign the seller, they know what the minimum asking price is. They add the fees, and anything above that sum is an award. Depending on your agent or agency, the offer price is set either via direct negotiation with the agent or by simply telling you the price.

In Eastern Europe, negotiation is about the total annihilation of the other. I might be oversimplifying it, but it is a battle. If there is an asking price, it is more like a guiding price. Negotiation starts at the minimum of 50% of the asking price. From there, every penny that is negotiated in is an inch won on the battlefield. At the end of the negotiations, people are usually pointing at dusty curtains and looking under sinks for mold so they can negotiate a bit more down on the price. It’s a long process. If there is an agency involved, they are more like the referee in the ring who sometimes gets an accidental punch.

In Italy, it’s more like two friends talking over coffee about something inconvenient. You know I can’t pay this price in full. Yeah, I know. But we have to make an offer. Yeah, I know. How about 20% less than the asking price? I don’t know… this is a very nice neighborhood, and the apartment is very big. Yeah, I know… Ok, how about 10%? Let’s make an offer at this price! Absolutely, this is a very good idea. Which means you are still probably 20-30% above the minimum asking price, but you kept everyone happy. Seller got their money, agent got their cut, you made some savings, it’s all kumbaya.

But you can do this only if you respect your friend and their needs. This is not a war. It’s a friendly conversation.

The buying process

If the seller doesn’t accept the offer, you go to your plan B or C. If you made the agent your friend, the asking price was good, and the acceptance is almost guaranteed. Well, people sometimes have no freakin’ idea where they are, how they live, and what they do, so they can back down from anything, even selling a house. But if the offer itself is accepted and you paid the booking fee, you can expect that you either got a property (95% of the time), or you will get back your booking fee with some damage money added to it, which is nice (5% of the time). I personally know someone who made offer, the deal went through, but weeks before signing, the seller backed off because of some internal family issue. My friends who made the offer got the offer money back twice, from it, they bought an even bigger house later. It was free cash added to their account, just because the seller wasn’t sure about their life.

But let’s say all goes well. The buying process is simple, and it is rigid. So whatever I have said about keeping the game flexible, you can’t do it at the notary. It’s merely a paperwork opera. There are papers to sign, and there are fees to pay. You will get a fully detailed paper on the fees. All that matters is this: count around 10% on top of the asking price of the property. That covers all the fees: state, notary, agency, everything. This is why 10% negotiation is accepted. You literally negotiate down the sum of the fees you have to pay to buy.

Important note, since most of you are foreigners reading this. One fork in the fees that decides your final number: prima casa or seconda casa. If this will be your main home and you register residency in that comune within 18 months, the registration tax is as low as 2%. If it’s a holiday flat and your life stays in Toronto, it’s 9%. Both are calculated on the cadastral value, a bureaucratic fiction usually well below the real price, so the bite is smaller than it sounds, but the gap between 2 and 9 is real money. Buying new from a developer swaps this for VAT, 4% versus 10%, charged on the actual price, which hurts more. And the 18 months is not a suggestion. Miss the deadline and the taxman recalculates you at 9% and adds a fine on top. I buy as a resident, and this is my first home (in Italy), where I live full-time. Buying a second home from abroad, budget a few points more and have the fixer run your exact number before you fall in love with anything. Of all the silly fees and markups, this is the one where I agree with Italy. Favor the ones who actually live here.

Tips from my personal experience

These are tips entirely based on my personal experience. I am a foreigner, and though I speak baby Italian, I am definitely not a pro. I also have neither the time nor the will to deal with fixing appointments, speaking with agents more than I should, or spending more time on the buying process than I need to.

First tip, which was the most useful one: hire an assistant. We had one. They are a real estate company, an accountant, a translator, and all of those together. Let’s just say: fixer. Look around in expat groups, peers, wherever, I’m sure you can find the fixer that has solutions specifically to your nationality and needs. Ours asked for a % cut. Every penny was worth it because they fixed all the appointments, dealt with the agencies, reviewed all the documents, and checked all the papers. You know Italians, they love to talk. Salespeople? Multiply that amount of talk by 10X. I don’t know about you, but one of the last things I want to do in my free time is talk to salespeople more than 10 minutes a day. And that 10 minutes is only because I am in the buying process, so it is 10 minutes more than the healthy amount.

Checking all the documents by the fixer should not be underestimated either. I didn’t even go into the details here… Some deals are rotten. The property is not even the seller’s. It’s just bare ownership, not full ownership. It’s in a building that is waiting to be demolished. It’s 2 rooms on the floor plan, but on the official records it’s one room only, so it’s either not legally renovated or something is off. All in all, there can be traps. Only a small percentage of the deals are like this and for the right nose, they smell miles away. The fixer can check these documents for you and highlight anything off.

Second tip: be familiar with the Italian real estate situation. This needs a bit of an explanation. This can be a separate article, but let me just give you the TLDR version:

Italy had 4 big building phases that are affecting the current real estate market. Well, 5, but the medieval palaces are not in our focus for today, sorry.

• Anything before or around the turn of the century (1890-1910). Either it is a stone house in Tuscany, or it is a converted palazzo in the city, these properties are almost all the same. Thick stone walls. Questionable electricity and plumbing work. Most of them are under protective heritage rules, which means, you can’t just convert or renovate them however you want. Even installing A/C (which alone is almost a sacrilege in Italy, but that’s another story) is equal to a successful D-Day. These properties are either renovation projects or, if they are already renovated, are almost equal to option 5, which are for palaces. They are on the heavy side of the pricing table. Even as renovation projects, by the way, you will spend either your time or your money to make them borderline habitable. I know some people who do well with this, and even I sometimes play with the thought that I will renovate my own stone house somewhere. But this is more like a commitment, rather than a buying decision.

• Post-war building phase. It’s actually two phases: one pre-war, some of the Mussolini-era building projects, and some of the post-war era 50s and 60s projects. These are huge, monolithic, sometimes brutalist buildings. Almost like little villages under one roof. If you have lived in Eastern Europe, the closest resemblance is the Soviet-era housing projects around factories and the outskirts of cities. Today, these are cheap properties. Either because the quality is as you would expect or because the area has neighbors that you don’t want to be friends with. Some of them are still lived in by old pensioners. These are mostly your nonna flats, in various sizes and levels of quality. I would consider these options only for two reasons: you are very young and just need a place to start, or you are buying for investment. Both of those options have caveats: you don’t want to start your life in an area that has safety problems, and you don’t want to invest in a declining area. So, it’s a case-by-case option, but in almost all cases, this is not an option for a foreigner to buy.

• The Italian Miracle Era. In the 80s, Italy had a bull run. This run is still visible on the housing market. Most of the apartment blocks in most of the cities were built during this era. I don’t have any tips here aside from the fact that if you are into buying an apartment in Italy, you will probably end up buying one built in this era. The best ones are built in the mid-to-late 90s, when the bull run peaked. But even the 80s ones can be nice if well-maintained. Condos in this era have solid electricity and plumbing, and double-glazed, proper windows. No one will crucify you for A/C because some of them even have it built-in. For real, most of these places are worth their money. My suggestion: buy something with 4 to 6 floors, a garage block, and some shops on the street level. It means only 10-20 apartments but endless cash flow for the condo for renovations. My apartment is exactly in a condo like that.

• The newly built. No tips here. These are projects that are built now or planned today. Two things to know. One, since Italy is an open-air museum, building new projects is not possible in the central areas, literally anywhere, in any town. So most of these newly built projects are on the outskirts or in the sleeping towns. Two, it’s a newly built project. So if it looks amazing on paper or in plans, it will be 10X worse in real life. Also, most of these projects are for young professional families with small kids. There is always a school, a playground, or something nearby. If you have kids, that’s a good thing. I don’t have kids, well, maybe don’t move next to a loud playground. My only tip: if you are buying a newly built one, buy something that was built 5-10 years ago. The perfect young professional family has already divorced, moved to a country house, or decided that they want to live inside a real city. You can buy their pad, and all the problems that weren’t visible from the floor plan alone when it was built are all there in front of you now, priced in.

So TLDR: the best bet is something built between 1980-2000, with an energy rating around or better than D, kinda renovated, middle-class family moves to their old parents' closer to the countryside. Or an older couple moves out of the city to the countryside. Perfect situations.

Third tip: do the basics of Italian groundwork. I know this is read by complete foreigners who have never set foot in Italy yet. Hire an agency or a service provider and do the very basics nevertheless: getting a tax number (codice fiscale) and opening an Italian bank account.

• The tax number is pretty straightforward to get, and almost any accountant or lawyer can get it for you. Or you can get it for yourself, it’s not even that complicated. It will be used everywhere on every document.

• The bank account is needed to deal with payments. Big sums of money are not transferred but handled within banks on their own, and you, as the customer, just get a paper from the bank that it is handled. You show that official paper to the notary, and everyone is happy that the payment is done. It’s basically a cheque system.

Yes, you can do this without a tax number or without a local bank. But it's much easier to do it this way.

For the bank, I personally recommend opening a bank account in Italy, keeping it open to handle basic Italian things, like this one, but never use it for anything else. We have one account, which is the maximum number of accounts I want to keep open in Italy, and we use it basically to pay taxes, fees, and some super-Italian services that accept only Italian banks with a physical location. Everything else: either keep your local bank or use Revolut (not affiliated, just a happy user). It gives you an Italian IBAN, which tends to be important for some services, and you can pay cheques, bills, fines, everything that is special to Italy, solely through their mobile app, which works like a banking app should work in the 2020s.

Last note on banking: you are a foreigner, so it is borderline impossible to get a mortgage or a loan for buying a property. Maybe it can be done technically for a business. I haven’t tried, and I would be surprised if they would give you one. But for a person? Don’t even bother. It’s hard even for Italians to get one. But even if it can be done and could be available for you, you still have to deal with an Italian bank. And, to be honest, I am 100X more looking forward to going to a dentist for a filling without any anesthesia than to an Italian bank.

Fourth tip: know what you want precisely. The worst thing that can happen in a buying situation is a hesitant buyer. If you are in a new country as a foreigner, this multiplies since you already have things that make you unbalanced.

I knew I wanted at least 2 bedrooms and the highest floor possible, ideally a penthouse. I also knew I needed a garage and I wanted to be 15 minutes from the city center. From my price range, I knew that good flooring, probably good windows, a balcony, and an elevator would be included, so I didn’t even look for those. I was ready to be flexible on some smaller things, but the big ones were fixed.

However, I didn’t know the city. Normally, I would suggest renting where you want to buy for a year. In my case, I went straight into it. I knew the city enough to get around, but it’s different to know a city as a visitor than as a local. So 80% of my time was spent on research. I drove around areas. I asked locals, friends, AI, and the internet about where to live. I spent days walking in areas which I ended up preferring. Because in an apartment, at the end of the day, yes, you buy the place itself, but more importantly, you buy the location. And no matter how fancy your apartment is, if it’s in an area where you don’t fancy walking calmly after 8 pm. And in a city with more than a million people in it, there are plenty of areas like that. So, do your research.

Once you know what you want and have done the research, the visiting, the looking, the searching, the actual buying process is simple and fast.

Last tip: respect and know the local needs for housing. You’ve probably heard about the Italian divide of North vs South. As a foreigner, the cultural divide is more like an interesting story, so for property buying reasons, it’s almost totally irrelevant. But geography and economic power aren’t irrelevant. Without going into details, you just have to know that in the South, insulation and heating are not the top priorities. Even if an apartment has heating units, double-check if they work at all. I am not joking… I’ve seen miracles in Palermo. Also check how the windows are closing. Again, in Sicily and in Calabria, I’ve stayed in places where you could close the window and still get your fingers out. And these were all fully renovated, spot-on Airbnbs. Long story short: double-check build quality in the South. Not because those areas are “poor” but because they only have a few weeks of cold weather. Insulating and heating their places is simply not important there. Meanwhile, in the North, where winters are real, especially in Friuli, Veneto, Lombardy, and Piedmont, almost all condos come with proper double-glazing windows and working heating units. For me, it was no question that I would live in the North. But maybe some of you want a place in Sicily.

With all that said, I did my process within 2 weeks. But for that, you need the basic rules, and let me repeat them again as a closure to this piece:

1. Know what you want, where you want it, and for how much you want it. Knowing these three pieces will save you thousands of euros and weeks of looking. Buying is 80% planning, 20% action.

2. The smaller your destination town, the more local you should go. For small towns, forget the internet, go to the actual agency’s office.

3. Don’t chase the perfect deal. It doesn’t exist. At least not for you. Find just a good deal.

4. Some rules are guides, some are Bible. Know which one is which, and you can make the process smoother.

5. The real estate agent is your friend when you make an offer on the price. Still negotiate as much as you can.

6. Have a fixer, and even with a fixer, get familiar with the Italian reality in terms of the real estate market and banking.

7. Know that location is more important than apartment quality. In a small city, it’s immediately visible if you want to live there. In a city, you need to ask around. Be as direct as you want.

8. Know the costs of buying. Rounded up, it’s usually 10% of the asking price that covers all the fees. That is also the % you need to negotiate down from the property.

9. Housing built between 1910 and 1980 is usually a waste of money. Century-old housing is a renovation project. Only for those who are willing to commit. Newly built ones are honeytraps or overpriced. Keep all your eyes open.

10. The best bet for apartments: anything built between 1980 and 2000. I haven’t checked, but my gut tells me the same is true for houses as well.

There you have it. My fully honest monster-essay on buying an apartment in Italy, mostly based on my own experience. Before you ask, or if it wasn’t clear enough until now, I’m here to tell you that I am not a real estate agent. I don’t offer real estate or any type of consulting services. I am not a fixer, investment advisor, or a real estate expert of any kind, and I can’t recommend anyone for you. I’m not even a journalist (it’s a profession, OK?!!) who writes about these topics daily.

I like to think I can make good deals, and I am street smart. I am also fully honest and very direct, almost to an extreme, uncomfortable extent, which kinda helps with buying situations like these (not the best approach in office situations). I also grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, lived in London for many years, and I picked Italy as my home because I love it, so I’m pretty sure you can’t name anything that would surprise me, and I don’t need to get lessons on bravery, irony, or flexible life choices either. But at the end of the day: I’m just a bloke on the internet who has some experience in buying an apartment in Italy.

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This is a bit of a clickbait topic, I admit, so let me clarify what I mean exactly. There are certain factors that a city has to offer that make it perfect for both locals and slow travelers. I will use Turin as an example, because Turin has it all, clearly.

One quick clarification, again, before. I put locals and slow travelers in the same group, pretty confidently.

First, ego, sorry, they are my two main target groups: I write either for those who want to dive deep into Italy, slowly, avoiding fast, mass tourism targets, and for those who want to stay like a local by either moving here entirely, or having some sort of an established base here.

Second, I believe these two groups are the same because it was the same for me, personally. Certain people enjoy road trips, and I am not one of them. The perpetual travel makes me tired, and I am lazy and convenient, sorry. So picking a hub where I sprawl into directions slowly is much more preferred than being constantly on the road. To me, this is slow travel. It is also the same as living somewhere as a local. So, again, these two groups are the same, I think. For both of them, the perfect city looks somewhat similar.

Lastly, a tourist looks for an entirely different experience. They want things that can be captured instantly and shared with everyone who immediately gets the experience, without spending a minute there. A tourist wants instant, pre-packaged fun, compressed into short periods of time. 10 things to see in <insert city name> under 2 days.

So, let’s talk about the perfection. Five categories.

1

Absence of landmarks. I wrote about this when I wrote about Lucca, a city you can’t photograph. The perfect Italian city has nothing to offer for the camera. Therefore, almost no one comes only for pictures (a surface-level experience). If you shoot a picture in this perfect city, people might recognize that it's Italian, but they have a hard time pinpointing which one without some context.

Turin has almost no landmarks. Maybe the Mole Antonelliana. Maybe some of the Savoy palaces. But honestly, none of them are recognizable without context for most people.

2

Surrounded by alternatives. I’ve found this true when I was writing the piece about Lerici. And it is also the most important reason why Anywhere Italy exists. When you have a peak destination, the alternatives in the immediate vicinity are totally overlooked and overshadowed by the Big Thing next to them. Venice vs Chioggia. Verona vs Vicenza. Pisa vs Lucca. Lerici vs Cinque Terre. Rapallo vs Chiavari. The list is endless. Just take Lucca. You have almost the same experience as you have in Pisa, same vibe, same food, same streets, much fewer people. But no tower.

Turin is similar. It is surrounded by the Ligurian coast on the South and Milan from the East. Most people want the sea, so Liguria. The few who do trips to cities pick Milan, because of Milan and the lakes, Como, and others. Turin sits between them, as the 3rd and 4th alternative.

3

Off-branded. Yeah, sorry, I can’t help my inner marketer. If we don’t know a place, we simply prefer a callout about it. This <insert city> is the city of <insert value or perception>, and it is famous for <insert ‘stuff’>. Philadelphia is a cheaper and smaller alternative to the New York lifestyle, and it is famous for its sandwich. Florence is the city of the Renaissance, and it has amazing art and culture. Obviously, the reality is not that simple. But the perfect city doesn’t have this simplicity, so it doesn’t draw that much attention. It is either confusing in branding, or the branding itself is not very appealing.

Turin has both. It’s not very appealing, because for most people, it is still the industrial capital of Italy. Rome: capital of religion and government. Florence: capital of art and culture. Milano: capital of economy and fashion. Turin: capital of industrial factories.

Even if you look deeper, it gets confusing. Turin is the birthplace of Italian unification, the center for both fascist and antifascist politics, and the home of the most prominent intellectual movements in Italy. Basically: it’s the political and intellectual capital of Italy, or it was. Turin is also the home of the Savoy monarchs, who gave Italy its unification and were the country's first and last kings. It’s a royal city, built for and entirely around the royal family and its castles and palaces. Therefore, the city is a decadent, Art Nouveau, Baroque masterpiece, with insane avenues, huge piazzas and more palaces than you can find in France. And on some of these avenues, it also houses huge factories, and it is home to Italian industrial innovation and engineering.

In short, it’s hard to decode the city. So it's perfect to spend more time there. Time helps to unfold the secrets.

4

It’s connected. The fact that it has alternatives means not just that it is overlooked or overshadowed, but also that it is connected to other prominent hubs. From Chioggia, it’s much more convenient to reach Venice’s main islands than doing it with all the masses from the grand station. It’s also better to retreat to Chioggia’s old town after a day trip in Venice than staying in the center of Venice for the night. It’s so much better to live in Lucca and do the day trips to Florence, rather than living in Florence and doing the other way around. The best hubs are connected to prime destinations with silence, convenience, and ease of reach.

Turin’s best thing is that it takes a couple of hours by car or train to reach Milan, the famous lakes, the Ligurian coast, the Alps, and one of Italy’s best wine regions. Make it more than 3 hours and you are either already in Tuscany or on the French Riviera. Turin also has an international airport, so reach is truly limitless.

5

It’s interesting on its own. So, this is tricky and highly personal for everyone. First, I think almost every city with at least a million people can be interesting. If there is population and economic power to spend, services will follow so the city stays interesting. Second, the city has to have some history. By history, I mean it has to be hundreds of years old or older. With time, the city itself becomes interesting. With time, stories become layers upon layers of history.

Turin was the home of the Savoy monarchs for hundreds of years, which still marks a big chunk of the city's history today. The center of Turin really looks like a royal city with palaces, castles, and royal residences. Then, industrialism came. It’s the HQ of FIAT and home to a very long list of other big brands across a wide variety of industries. It left a mark on the city in the form of economic housing and expanded the city limits to its current size. It also gave the city a very reliable and modern public transport system that is rare in Italy. Now, the city is transforming from an industrial hub into an innovation and creative capital. It is also a home for intellectualism and food, rebranding itself as Italy’s smart city. We’ll see about that, but for sure, it makes it more and more interesting with time.

The perfect Italian city has almost nothing you can photograph or anything that you can’t get elsewhere. It probably either has a bad rep, is confusing, or is simply unknown. Yet, it is the perfect place to live or spend a sizeable chunk of time because it is standalone interesting, giving you everything that any Italian city can give you but without the overpriced services due to mass tourism. It is also the best hub option because it is connected to famous destinations, which you can visit day-by-day, saving money, time, and energy by returning to your less-interesting hub every time.

If you come to Turin, you will have a hard time finding fridge magnets. Some shops sell them, and there are some souvenir places in the center. A few maybe. But compared to Florence, Rome, Venice, or Pisa, you literally have to be on alert to find anything touristy to buy.

The fridge magnet-per-shop ratio is pretty low here. If you ask me, that’s the best ever sign for a perfect city in Italy…

Peter

Torino, 25 July 2026

What’s new on the page

Guide on the Riviera di Levante

As promised, I made the posts about the Riviera di Levante region into a guide. That’s the part of Liguria that is East of Genova, basically anything between Genova and the Western border of Tuscany, which is Versilia, and it has its own guide since (for now), we are living there.

The Cinque Terre, the Tigullio, the Magra Delta, and Genova, all-in-one. The plan is to extend this guide with the Western part of Liguria, but we will do those trips once we move fully to Torino. San Remo is just closer from there.

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I started learning Italian after moving here. Restaurants run on English, but anything past ordering lunch doesn't. Before I hired a teacher, Babbel did most of the work, with more real learning than Duolingo's gamified fake learning. I'm a Babbel affiliate, but I only point you to things I've used and liked.

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We live forty minutes from the eastern end of it, in Versilia, we have slept in its towns and driven its full length in every season for five years, and the honest finding is this: the five famous villages are the least interesting thing about the coast, and the coast is better everywhere the name runs out.

In a nutshell aka TLDR

Anything is a better alternative than the five. Let’s keep it simple: don’t feed the SEO monster and call the Cinque Terre simply the five. Anything in this guide, and on the coast, is a better alternative than the five. Why? 100X less people for 95% the same experience. That is the goal. That is what this guide is.

Everything is a day-trip, so why won’t you just stay more? All of the destinations in this area can be done from a base as a day trip. But the Ligurian lifestyle, the slow embracement of dramatic hill-falling-to-the-sea towns, should be done with unlimited time. Or at least more than a couple of day trips. So book an apartment here and soak it in.

This gets physical. Money can buy convenience. Well, not in Liguria, it can’t. You still need to walk. A lot. Like, a lot. Uphill. In the summer (come off-season, please, much better option), scorching sun. So, plan this in when you come to this part of Italy. Probably not the best place to trolley up little kids, or walk with bad knees, or with any health issues. In terms of a base, pick from the rare flat towns.

Stones, stones, stones. This part of Italy has fewer sandy beaches and more rocky lagoons. Experiencing the sea is closer to a crab’s experience, which is soaking up sun on the rocks between waves, rather than sitting in the sand under an umbrella. But, in return, you’ll get the most turquoise blue waters, rivaling the Amalfi.

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Where to base yourself

The easy win: Lerici. We lived in this town for a couple of weeks and have returned many times ever since. It is convenient: flat, it has a promenade, a castle, a free beach, and ferries from the dock to the five. It also has some great history involving drunk English poets from the 19th century.

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The places not to miss

Genova. Everyone says don’t, not worth it. We say it is mandatory and it is one of the best, if not the best, port cities in Italy. Spend some time in the old quarter with narrow streets. Eat the local fried foods. It is also a perfect base alternative to Lerici on the other end of the Riviera. Genoa is a proper city, full of buzz, and we hear it also has an amazing nightlife.

The Tigullio. Rapallo, Portofino, Camogli, Santa Margherita, Sestri Levante, Chiavari. It’s a sort-of-consistent part of the Riviera that is connected culturally and geographically as well. Like Lerici, most of these towns are easy to walk around and rewarding to stay in.

Portovenere. We have a special connection to this port town. We’ve spent a few weeks here and have returned ever since. It is one of the slowest towns where you can just soak in the Ligurian spirit. No rush, no hurry, just drinking an espresso for half an hour.

The Cinque Terre. Yes, no guide is complete without the five, but we gave a different treat to this part. TLDR: come anytime but summer and focus on the lesser-known towns like Camogli. Visiting these towns during peak season is torture not just to the locals but also for yourself.

The Magra Delta loop. Montemarcallo, Tellaro, and Sarzana. The Magra river delta and the mountain-reserve behind Lerici. One of the best-kept secrets of this area, as it is always empty, almost no one goes there, yet it is a few minutes' drive from the five. If there is off-the-beaten-path, this is it.

The valley behind. Everyone is focusing on the sea, but there is an entire valley behind the Ligurian coast that is still Liguria, and it is still amazing. Our piece on the Magra road trip covers some of it, and we will write a fully separate Guide on it. For now, we only covered Brugnato.

Ligurian food

Pesto. As you would expect, part 1. We tell you the story behind it and what the proper Genovese version is.

Focaccia. As you would expect, part 2. However, we tasted three different types with three different stories. Unveiled all in our piece.

Torta salata. Not 100% Ligurian as variations of this exist everywhere in Italy, but we experienced this first here.

Ceci. If a Tuscan reads this, they are probably already shouting that this is a Tuscan dish. It’s not, or not entirely. Chickpea flour with oil, burned to perfection.

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The final note

This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on the Riviera di Levante goes up.

Everything in here is a place I have been to personally. I don’t write about restaurants I haven’t eaten at or towns I haven’t walked through. If a place is in this guide, it’s because I went, ate, learned something, and decided it was worth your time.

Guide last updated: 22 July 2026

This is Anywhere Italy’s Reading Table. Here are the latest articles from writers who made my days better.

on Gianni Versace

Everyone files Versace under Milan. This piece files him under Reggio Calabria, where he was born in 1946 and where Greek temples and Roman baths are not museum exhibits but the ground you walk on. His mother ran an atelier that brought Paris to southern society, sewing her name in gold thread on black into every dress.

What stayed with me is the habit he carried out of all that: buying run-down buildings and written-off people and spending absurd sums to prove the world wrong about them. A man trained from childhood to see value where everyone else had stopped looking. I run a publication on that exact premise, so I read this one with both eyes open.

Read the article on Italy Untold →

on Enrico Bertoz

I’m kinda hooked on Robert’s articles and his very personal stories. This one is about Enrico Bertoz, who left Friuli in 1998 because the Italy of the nineties felt hollow to him, and Kerouac did not. He washed dishes at Valentino in Los Angeles. The restaurant’s wine cellar rerouted his whole life, and he ended up a Sonoma winemaker with his own label, Arbe Garbe, championing Malvasia Bianca of all grapes.

Robert wrote this after visiting him in 2024. Enrico died of cancer not long after. I read plenty about foreigners moving to Italy to find themselves. The reverse migration, an Italian going west for the same reason, gets written far less, and almost never this well. It’s a tribute, and it earns the word.

Read this article on Robert’s Substack →

on how to know you are in Umbria

Michelle walks into a bar in Spello wearing a Roma jersey, a stranger starts talking, and the stranger turns out to be the father of a friend she and her husband made by returning to the same wine bar enough times. That’s the whole plot, and it’s enough, because the piece is really about how small towns work: you become known by showing up again, and then again, and at some point the town starts introducing you to itself.

I wrote a Sunday Espresso arguing that the second visit beats the first. She makes the same case in one conversation that crosses language and two generations.

Read the article on Michelle’s blog →

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on the wild side of Rome

Not that wild… Wild boars on the sidewalks in daylight, acid-green parrots descended from escaped pets, and a writer who meets all of it from a bike instead of a car window.

I lived in Rome for a year, and the boars were already treating the northern edge of the city as their own. What I like is the vantage: this is the fauna of someone actually moving through the city, not a news item about an invasion. Rome’s fringes blur into open country faster than any capital I know, and the animals worked that out before the urban planners did.

Read the piece on Sara’s blog →

on Salento

Negroamaro is the grape that made Salento’s name long before anyone bottled it seriously, and this piece points to where that history is being reworked: Moros, a 1950s cooperative winery turned contemporary cultural space, hosting exhibitions and concerts alongside the harvest.

It’s a pointer more than a story, but the pointer is a good one. The Salento in it is the working interior, not the beach postcard, and a cooperative cellar reborn as a cultural venue is the kind of place worth planning a detour around.

Read the article on Flavia’s Substack →

on the air conditioning situation in Italy

Anyone who has lived in Italy has fought the war of the correnti, the drafts Italians are raised from infancy to fear. Frances traces how a country practically phobic about air conditioning came to install it in half its homes by 2024, while Rome’s electric buses retreat to the depot when their batteries run low and tourists in short-term rentals run the AC all day toward a blackout.

The ending is the best thing I read this week: a woman on a cooled bus, delighted by the air conditioning, pulls a scarf from her handbag anyway… I will write my own piece on this topic soon, because there is also a new angle- the foreigner’s angle on this.

Read the article on Frances’ Substack →

That was this week’s Reading Table. If you read something I missed, send it my way: ciao (at) anywhereitaly (dot) com.

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Like most people, I arrived in Italy with an idea of focaccia already installed. In Hungary, bakeries sell something called focaccia, which I have eaten, and I can now report that it has approximately the same relationship to the Italian article that a poster of the sea has to swimming.

The first real one I ate was in Lerici, in Liguria, which, as birthplaces of first impressions go, is close to the source. That version worked more or less like a pizza dough with ambitions: toppings on it, many variations, served mostly hot, drunk against a beer or something cold with bubbles. It was very oily, very salty, very heavy, and I want to be clear that this is not a complaint, I liked it enormously. I filed focaccia away as loaded, hot, and slightly dangerous, and considered the matter learned.

Then we moved to Versilia, and the matter unlearned itself. Almost every shop here sells focaccia, and the Tuscans make a different thing of it: less salty, less oily, drier, lighter, a bread that has been to confession. Its job is different, too. Here it gets cut in half and filled with Tuscan salumi, or cubed and scattered on those platters of cured meat that this region considers a food group, focaccia as the delivery mechanism for finocchiona, for prosciutto, for porchetta if you’re lucky. The Tuscans half admit it’s another bread altogether: much of what fills their counters answers just as readily to schiacciata, the crushed one, a name that quietly declines to compete with Liguria at all. Same idea, different animal, and a completely different afternoon.

Then we started driving to Genova, and Genova retired my remaining theories. In Genova, focaccia is not lunch, and it is not a vehicle for anything. It is a staple of the cafés, and it is breakfast. The fugassa there is eaten plain, no topping, no filling, no cheese, and the Genovesi dunk it in their morning coffee the way the rest of the world dunks biscuits: into a long coffee, into a cappuccino, into, if that is what’s on the counter, an espresso. The first time I ordered focaccia with an espresso and watched the espresso arrive in a wide cappuccino glass, I thought the bar had made a mistake. It had not. The glass was the accommodation: the coffee came in the wrong cup on purpose, so the bread would fit. Nobody announced this. It was simply anticipated, the way a hardware store anticipates that you will need screws with the hinges. A salty, oiled bread, dipped in coffee, at eight in the morning, and an entire port city in silent agreement that this is the correct order of things.

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It helps to know who invented the agreement. And here comes the research part. The old forni of Genova cluster near the port because the fugassa was the breakfast of the camalli, the dockers, men who started before dawn and needed something cheap, fast, salted, and already in hand. The bakers worked the dough at night so it would be hot when the shift began, and they still do; the name itself goes back to the hearth, a focus, a bread as old as the fire it sat on. What I met at that café counter was not a quirk. It was the last living gesture of a working port’s morning, performed daily by pensioners and office workers in a city that has otherwise moved its cranes ten kilometers west.

So here is everything I can actually tell you about focaccia, the entire yield of my research, and my three regional educations. First, it is one of the cheapest, fastest breads in Italy. Flour, water, oil, salt, and not much patience. The peninsula’s answer to the tortilla, the naan, the pita. Which is exactly why it was the food of dockers and not of dukes. And second, because it is cheap, fast, and neutral, it takes the shape of whatever town is holding it. Liguria’s coast loads it and serves it hot with beer. Tuscany dries it out and puts a butcher’s counter inside it. Genova strips it back to nothing and dips it in coffee at dawn. There is no The Focaccia, and every region will tell you, with total confidence, that theirs is it.

I have stopped adjudicating. But I will say that of the three educations, the one that stays with me is the Genova counter: the wide glass, the wrong cup on purpose, the salt and the oil meeting the coffee, an old dockers’ breakfast outliving the dockers one dunk at a time.

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As of today, the database so far has one practical use case: a slow travel planner. Later, more use cases will come, but the primary role of that product is to drive signups to the publication (for now). Most of you are reading this either because you saw my notes on Substack or other social media platforms, or you’ve discovered the content on the product’s site and arrived at the newsletter as a second thought.

Building this product has its learnings. One of which I want to share today. It's about international food and culture in Italy. Or the lack of it.

It all starts with Gambero Rosso, the Italian equivalent of the Michelin Guide for restaurants, bars, and other places. I bought the latest edition so I can enrich my town database with its findings, but it's also reminded me of Italy’s overall approach to international cuisine.

See, I’ve lived in London for many years. Probably the most international city on Earth. In London, it’s easy to find at least 10 options for <insert random country> cuisine. Some of you would say, OK, but this is because London has a high immigrant culture, or this is because of colonization, or this is because British food is weird, so people prefer other options, or whatever. None of this is true, I think. Or some of it is true.

I’m also coming from Budapest. Much smaller scale of a city. Hungarian cuisine is great, not well-known, but very tasty and spicy. We have almost zero immigration. And we have never colonized anyone (we were the colony most of the time). Yet, you can find more international cuisine options in Budapest than you can find in all of Italy combined.

If you open Gambero Rosso, the restaurant guide I was talking about, they have a very specific rating system. Forks for restaurants, tables for trattorias, bottles for bars, and world maps (!) for international cuisine. A system similar to Michelin, where they have stars: 1 is good, 3 is amazing.

Now, where is the problem? There are many. For one, the fact that international cuisine is treated separately at all. That pretty much sums everything up. Let me explain.

First of all, personal comment: you can fight against a multicultural society, be my guest, but it is kinda pointless. It’s also not so smart to expect the benefits of a global economy, then bitch about international culture. That’s not an immigration question, which is a serious problem in Europe. It’s a view on how we treat any other culture that is different than ours.

Second, and this is also personal, as it is based entirely on my own experiences. International cuisine in Italy mainly refers to Japanese cuisine. Yes, there are some Greek, Indian, Mexican, and Chinese restaurants in bigger cities. But you can find a sushi place (mostly run by Chinese, by the way) in almost every small town. If you open Gambero Rosso’s recommendations on international places, which are either selected or have gained world map recognition, they are almost exclusively either Japanese or some form of fusion of Japanese-Italian. It’s also the only international kitchen sometimes run by Italians, which suggests they have an interest in it.

Lastly, Italian cuisine itself has absorbed most of the European cuisines anyway. The Italian South is full of Greek and Arabic cultural influences, reflected in the kitchen itself. The Italian North is pretty much a Germanic-French kitchen. As I am typing this, I am in Turin, on the border of Italy, France, and Switzerland. The amount of butter in Piemontesi cuisine would make Gordon Ramsay or any French chef ashamed. Also, there are even smaller pockets: Slavic and Hungarian cuisines are full members of Friuli-Venezia’s kitchen, especially in Trieste.

So what’s left? Anything that is hard to integrate into the local culture: Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Arabic, Middle Eastern, Russian, British, American, Caribbean, etc. Pretty much half of London’s restaurant scene.

Add in that Italy didn’t have a long colonialist history. That little they had is still visible in the immigration (East Africa and Albania), but, except for a few places, it didn’t really translate into the cuisine. Yes, there are some Ethiopian restaurants in Rome, but even Indian places are more abundant, and that says a lot. Also, most of the immigrants who open restaurants are putting a modern spin on a classic Italian place.

If you think about it, this is totally different in countries with a colonial history. Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands are just as good as, or better than, those in Indonesia. And I won’t even mention the Indian restaurants in England, which are almost always amazing. Or any North African restaurant in Paris. I can go on and on. Colonialism is a questionable thing, sure, but it definitely contributed a lot in international cuisine, which is undoubtadly a good thing.

But why should you care about this at all?

As someone who’s spending a couple of weeks in Italy, you shouldn’t. I don’t think anyone who comes to Italy is eager to look for the nearest Chinese restaurant serving proper Cantonese food. And no one should look for the best ramen place when they are between the Uffizi and the Duomo.

But give it a month, and I guarantee to you that you will do anything for a great chicken tikka masala. Laugh at me all you want, but we literally drive more than an hour to Genova because I know an amazing Japanese place (Tamashi Ramen), and they also serve proper kebabs, not one of those sketchy street-food versions. Yes, we also try the classic Ligurian dishes. But since ANY restaurant within a 100-meter circle around my home cooks almost ANY kind of Italian food, I get pretty freakin’ tired of them.

How can this be changed? I’m not sure if this can be changed. Italy still dubs all media that comes into its country, including movies, videos, and content. Almost no one speaks any languages, if they do, it’s usually some broken version of German, French, or maybe English. Also, most Italians travel domestically, only a small portion of Italians travel to other countries. And, as explained above, immigration is not a big thing here.

Countries like the US, UK, Canada, or even France have the same setup: monolingual, rarely travel outside, yet they have immigrants who start their own businesses. In Italy, the ease of starting a business and the immigration parts are missing. But, and no judgment here, I think there is also another missing part: interest.

And I can say this as a Hungarian.

Hungary is also a monolingual country, we dub all content into Hungarian, though younger generations speak English well. We are absolutely monocultural. I won’t be surprised if Hungary has the lowest immigration outside of Europe. It’s absolutely horrible to start a business there. And while Italians can pay in restaurants, Hungarians don’t even have that buying power.

Despite all of this, Budapest is full of international restaurants. Some of them are run by Hungarians, others are run by the local immigrants. I’m not saying you can find the best Mexican restaurant in Budapest (definitely not), but you have more options than in all the Italian cities combined. So I would argue that if there is demand, there will be supply.

In Italy, that demand is absolutely missing.

Oh, one last thing: most of my readers are non-Italians who either live here or want to travel to or move here. Friends, please. Start your own stuff. Send me the details. I will be your first guest. I would do anything for a proper shepherd’s pie.

Absolutely last thing: this is not universal in Italy. In Milan, you have it all. And I am typing this email in Turin. I just had the best ramen outside of Japan. There is hope.

Peter

Torino, 19 July 2026

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Wrapping up Levanto

Anything east of Genova is considered the Levanto Riviera (Riviera di Levante in Italian, not sure about the English name). It is close to our home in Versilia, and we make regular trips there. It is also popular for tourists, especially because of the Cinque Terre. So, I thought I would sum up that area based on our experiences. There are new articles about Portovenere, the Cinque Terre, the pesto, and the little-known village of Brugnato. Last month I also wrote about Tigullio, the Magra Delta, and Lerici. A full guide to the entire region is coming next week. Stay tuned!

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I will tell you the rest of that day, because it was a good day. But I should be honest about what this piece is, because it is not a piece telling you to go to the Cinque Terre. You do not need me for that. The entire apparatus of global tourism exists to tell you to go to the Cinque Terre. This is a piece about when the five villages are worth it, which is almost never, and about what to do instead, which is the part nobody selling you the postcard has any interest in explaining.

Start with the arithmetic that nobody on the ferry thinks about. The five villages have, between them, roughly four thousand residents. Not forty thousand. Four. The largest, Monterosso, holds about fifteen hundred people. Vernazza is under a thousand. Corniglia is a couple of hundred. Into these five small containers arrive between two and three million visitors a year, which on a summer Saturday means tens of thousands of bodies moving through lanes built for the foot traffic of a fishing economy. People call it an infrastructure problem, as if the villages had fallen short of a reasonable expectation. It is the opposite. Four fishing villages at the waterline and one farming village on a cliff, none of them ever meant to process a crowd, because for most of their thousand years, there was no way for a crowd to arrive. The railway only reached them in 1874. The road, to this day, stays up on the ridge and declines to come down.

I know what the five are like without the crowd, because I caught them in the one window in living memory when the crowd was gone. I hate mass tourism. Hate is the correct word. I said no to Venice ten times and Florence five before I ever went, and it took a global pandemic to change the terms. During our first long stay in Italy, based for a few weeks in Lerici, we took the ferry up the coast on a quiet morning and did the full spiel.

The souvenir shops selling the same lemon-printed linen you can buy in Sorrento were shut. The food stalls aimed at people who would never come back were shut. There were, I checked with real curiosity, no pesto-making classes running, thanks, God. What remained, with the apparatus switched off, was embarrassingly simple: five beautiful villages where people live slowly, dramatic water, fresh seafood, sun. We finished in Corniglia, the one the day-trippers skip because it has no harbor and sits a hundred meters up, the farming village among the fishing villages, named for the Roman family whose wine jars turned up at Pompeii, technically not even a town but a frazione of Vernazza, a village that belongs to another village. The train doors open at Corniglia, the passengers look up at the stairs, and the doors close. We drank our bottle above all of it and nearly paid with a night on the platform.

That version of the Cinque Terre exists for a few months a year, and I will come back then. But first, part of your itinerary is missing.

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A few years after that day, we moved to Versilia, and the five villages are now forty minutes from my house, with a ferry from the next town over. We could go every weekend. We go almost never, and between May and September we do not go at all, a rule we adopted after breaking it exactly once: one sunny June day I wanted my favorite spot in Riomaggiore badly enough, and no, I will not tell you where it is, that being the entire point of a favorite spot, to try the ferry from Lerici. We drove down to the port, saw the crowd from the car, and drove straight back up into the hills without stopping. A zombie film with better lighting, hordes moving with the glassy stare of people having the experience they were promised, rather than the one that is available. No thanks.

And here is the thing I have learned from living on this coast rather than visiting it: the promise the crowd came for is not even locked inside those five villages. I have written before, driving the Tigullio, that the seaside towns of eastern Liguria are, structurally, one town. A steep hill falls into the sea, the bright houses stack up the slope, a small port, a small piazza, focaccia, pesto, fried fish, the same cold Vermentino. The Cinque Terre are five towns with a national park around them and a marketing name that adds up to five. The copies without the name are a few miles away in either direction, and the experience they sell is the same experience, with the crowd divided by a hundred.

So, concretely. If what you wanted was the vertical village on the water, go to Tellaro, at the wild end of the Lerici coast, hanging over its rocks with an octopus legend on the church door and no train station, which is the single greatest gift geography ever gave a Ligurian village. If what you wanted was the fortress-on-the-sea drama, go to Portovenere, where a striped church stands on the rock where a temple of Venus stood, and where you can live a whole slow week on three streets, as we did. If what you wanted was the postcard bay, go to Sestri Levante and stand above the Baia del Silenzio at the hour when the light comes sideways, the one view on this coast where the photograph reliably fails and you have to be there. If what you wanted was the fishing village with the painted facades, Camogli does Portofino’s job without the theatre, on a promenade five times as long. And if what you wanted was simply to be based somewhere flat, walkable and real, with the whole coast on a cheap train line, take a room in Chiavari under the porticoes and do the five villages as one winter day trip from there, which brings me to the only advice about the Cinque Terre themselves I am prepared to give.

Go in winter. From November to March, the weather is jacket weather, and a rainless week feels better than in July. Half the places are closed, and the closures are a map: everything that shuts caters only to visitors, everything that stays open is open for the people who live there, which tells you in one stroll exactly where to eat. Prices come back to local, menus come back from tourist-menu English to whatever the kitchen was cooking anyway, the ferries sleep, and the lanes belong to old men and delivery vans. That is the only season the five villages are themselves, and the only season I go, quietly, in January, to a spot in Riomaggiore I am still not going to name, where the sea does the same thing it does in August for an audience of nobody.

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A word on the shopping village first, because the concept deserves a paragraph of anthropology. The mall, as an idea, barely exists in Italy, and honestly, not much in Europe. People shop locally, in small shops. The grander version is the gallery, the covered arcade threaded through a city center. The grandest is simply a shopping street where you walk with everyone else. A sealed building full of stores is a rarity, usually exiled to the outskirts of big cities, and the American-style open shopping village is rarer still. Brugnato has one of the few in Liguria, seventy-odd shops trading under the name of a national park that is two valleys away, and we figured we wanted variety without knowing what we wanted, which is the exact state of mind these places are built to monetize. The shopping was horrible. Not the shops’ fault. It is simply not a thing we know how to do in a place like that, and we lasted less time than the drive-in had taken. Then we went up to the old town to find the house, and the house was also horrible, rundown in ways the photographs had been careful about, and we did not buy it, something that cheap being cheap for a reason. So the errand failed twice before lunch. And then we took a walk, and the walk is the reason I am writing this.

Here is the thing about old Italian town centers: they are one design. I say this with affection, after years of walking them. There is a main piazza, and on or near it stands the cathedral or the principal church. Around the piazza, the cafés and restaurants, the general apparatus of public life, because the piazza is where the town performs itself. Streets radiate off it, one or two carrying the traffic of importance. And somewhere out at the edge, a wall, the remnant of a wall, a ring road where the moat was, some mark in the ground that says: here the town ended, and the fields began. The scale changes, the region changes, the stone changes color. The principles never change. From Friuli to Sicily, you can be dropped blindfolded into a centro storico and navigate it on instinct, because you have walked it a hundred times under a hundred names.

Brugnato ignores all of it. The old town is a spiral. Two streets, coiling inward, buildings cramped shoulder to shoulder and painted in the full Ligurian palette, and the coil tightens until you arrive at the center and find, where every instinct says a piazza should open up, a church. No square. No ring of cafés. No stage for the evening walk. Public life has no headquarters here because the plan never allocated one to it. The streets simply deliver you to the church door and stop, like a shell delivering you to its own middle. Half the buildings on the way stand empty or half-ruined, and the whole place carries a moldering, closed-in quiet that the logistics cannot explain, because the autostrada runs practically past the gate, the outlet glitters down the hill, and the town is neither remote nor, evidently, poor. It feels less like a town in decline than like a building that people happen to live inside.

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Which, it turns out, is exactly what it is. Brugnato was never designed as a town. It was designed as a monastery, founded in the seventh century by monks of the San Colombano line, and favored by the Lombard kings for a purpose unrelated to the people living there: to check the power of the bishops of Luni. The abbey answered to the Holy See directly, never to Luni, and emperors kept renewing its immunity in writing. The bishops of Luni spent four centuries trying to swallow it and failed, and in 1133, the pope ended the feud in the pettiest way available: he promoted the abbey into a diocese of its own, a cathedral city of a few hundred souls, its bishops carrying the feudal title of count, a title they kept, incredibly, until after the Second Vatican Council. What grew around the abbey grew the way flesh grows around a splinter: an elliptical ring of houses wrapped tight against the churchmen’s citadel, a moat around that, everything oriented inward toward the cloister rather than outward toward a market. From the air, they say, you can still read the closed ellipse in the roofline. A typical Italian town is built around the place where its citizens meet. Brugnato is built around the place where monks met God, and citizens were an afterthought. Of course, there is no piazza. There was never supposed to be a public.

That is why the stroll feels so strange, and why I recommend it. You walk in expecting a town, and the town never arrives. You get the coil, the colors, the empty windows, the church waiting in the middle like a spider that stopped being hungry centuries ago. Somewhere under the cathedral floor, the diocese says, lie the remains of a Roman post and two older churches, layer under layer under layer, the whole history of the place stacked vertically because the plan never allowed it to spread. The bishops themselves eventually couldn’t stand it: for two full centuries, 1302 to 1502, they governed their miniature diocese from Pontremoli, over the mountains, as absentee landlords of a town the size of a parish.

We drove home without the sports clothes and without the house. The listing sold eventually, I assume, to someone braver about damp. But in a country where every old town is a variation on one beloved design, Brugnato is the only one I have walked that follows a different score entirely, and it is worth twenty minutes of anyone’s autostrada exit: park below, walk the coil inward, touch the church door, walk the coil back out. That is the whole visit. There is nowhere to sit and no square to sit in, and after enough years of piazzas, that absence is the most interesting thing on the street.

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Both of those prices are telling the truth about something. Just not about pesto.

Here is the thing about Italian sauces that nobody explains to you, because to an Italian, it does not need explaining. They are machines for eating carbohydrates, and they are small machines. Almost all of them are built from the same four positions. One ingredient gives the color and the body, and this is the star, the thing you need in quantity. One gives the depth, and you need only a handful of it. One gives the spice or the sharpness, a clove, a rind, a pinch. And one binds it, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the binder is olive oil. Salt, if you count it, mostly arrives already dissolved in the pasta water. That is the whole architecture. A traditional tomato sauce: tomato, garlic, oregano, oil. Four. A pesto: basil, pine nuts, garlic, hard salty cheese, oil. Five, and the fifth is there because the sauce is never cooked, so something has to carry the salt. When you watch a chef build an Italian sauce with more than five ingredients, you are allowed to conclude, safely and out loud, that what he is making is complicated for its own sake, and that whatever it is, it is not Italian.

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The four positions are a form. What fills them is a map. Italian food is regional in a way that goes past preference into geology: the star ingredient, the one you need in bulk, must be the thing your land produces in bulk, because for most of history, nobody was shipping bulk anywhere. Campania has hills of volcanic soil that grow tomatoes the way other places grow weeds, and so the south’s sauces run red, and a ragù can afford to simmer kilos of them down to nothing. Now look at Liguria on the same map. A wall of mountains falling into the sea. No plain, no field, no room. You cannot grow bulk anything on a fifty-degree slope.

Except that the slopes are covered in pines, and pines drop pine nuts. And a terraced alley two meters wide, too small for any crop that feeds a family, is exactly the right size for garlic. And basil, the one thing the sauce needs in quantity, is the botanical equivalent of a squatter: it grows in a pot, on a sill, on a roof, in the corner of a courtyard, anywhere a Ligurian could not fit anything more serious. The most famous basil in the world today grows in small greenhouses at Prà, on a hillside in western Genova, directly above one of the largest container terminals in Italy, the DOP herb and the port cranes sharing a postcode, which is the whole region in one image.

And the cheese, the position basil cannot fill because an uncooked sauce needs its salt from somewhere, is the confession at the heart of the recipe. There is no room in Liguria for cows, and not much for sheep. So the cheese came the only way anything bulky ever came to Liguria, which is by water: Fiore Sardo, sheep’s cheese from Sardinia, an island Genova’s merchants treated as a warehouse for centuries, split with Parmigiano hauled over from Emilia. The first written recipe for pesto, Giovanni Battista Ratto’s, in the Cuciniera Genovese of 1863, calls for Dutch cheese with total serenity, because that is what a port city’s pantry held in 1863. The sauce that now has a consortium, a DOP, and a world championship with marble mortars in the Palazzo Ducale is younger than the unification of Italy and was codified with cheese from Holland. The mountains grew the herb, the pines dropped the nuts, and the sea brought the rest.

So pesto is not Ligurian because Ligurians are geniuses of flavor. Pesto is Ligurian because nothing else could be. It is what a vertical, landless, frugal coast could produce without buying anything, and the frugality is not my joke. It is the region’s own reputation, lovingly maintained by the rest of Italy: the Genovese do not part with money. Pine nuts are expensive everywhere else on Earth. In Liguria, they fall out of the sky. Walnuts, the cheap nut of the flatlands, are what the sauce’s own ancestor used, the medieval agliata, garlic and walnuts pounded to a paste, and inland grandmothers went on using them whenever pinoli were short. The versions with pistachio or hazelnut mean that somebody paid Sicily or Piemonte, and a proper Genovese would quietly ask you why you would do such a thing. Even the famous red cousin obeys the arithmetic: pesto rosso swaps the star for sun-dried tomatoes because drying is how a region with no tomato fields makes a few tomatoes act like many. You need a hillside of fresh ones for a ragù. You need a windowsill’s worth, dried on a roof in August, for a jar.

Which brings me back to the two prices. The jar in Chiavari, from a producer at a market stall, pennies, is the honest price of pesto, because pesto is honestly cheap: it is the sauce of having nothing, made from what fell, what fit in an alley, and what grew in a pot. The jar in the Portovenere window, and the hundred-euro class where a stranger crushes basil for an hour and is photographed doing it, is the price of the story about pesto, and the story is what the coast sells now, the way it once sold cheese landed on the quay. I do not even resent it. A region that spent a thousand years making do will not apologize for finally charging the visitors for the making.

But you should know which one you are buying. If you are anywhere in Liguria, walk past the window with the lit shelves, find the weekly market, find the table with jars bearing handwritten lids, and pay what the town pays. It should cost about as much as your focaccia and your coffee.

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This is Anywhere Italy’s Reading Table. Here are the latest articles from writers who made my days better.

on why Macerata is her favorite town

Favorite underrated Italian town: Macerata, in the heart of Le Marche. Why Macerata? It sits inland, away from the motorways and the usual tourist trails, which is exactly why most people never find it.

The town has a remarkable depth for its size: one of Europe’s oldest universities still in operation, a food culture anchored by Vincisgrassi (the region’s layered pasta dish, richer and older than any lasagne you’ve tried), and the Sferisterio, a stunning 19th-century open-air arena that hosts a serious opera festival every summer. It’s the kind of place that rewards the curious traveler who’s willing to experiment.

Ilaria focuses on artisans, wines, and foods behind small Italian towns, especially in the Marche region. She wrote a really cool article on the Uncool beauty, which is Macerata.

Read the article on Ilaria’s Substack →

on why Urbino is close to his chest

Urbino should be as famous as Siena. It isn’t for two reasons: we Marchigiani are terrible at marketing our own region, and Urbino isn't on the way to anything.

No train, no autostrada. You reach it on purpose, or you never see it. What you get in exchange is a small city whose entire historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Palazzo Ducale was built to prove that a small court could out-civilize Florence. Raphael was born just up the street, and you can visit the house where he grew up. The university, founded in 1506, keeps the city young. If you go, dine at Portanova for an unforgettable meal.

Antonio included Urbino in his 7 must-see cities in the Marche.

Read his article on Urbino on his Substack →

— An Attempt at Exhausting a Bar in Rome

An older article from Eric, but it got served to me via Substack, so… I believe the story is the unit. This piece sets out to prove me wrong. Eric borrows the method from Georges Perec’s 1975 experiment in Paris and applies it to a bar in Rome: sit still, session after session, and write down only what crosses your field of vision. No arc, no characters, no lesson.

Customers, orders, the same espresso ritual performed by a dozen different hands, the light moving across the room. I spent a year in Rome, and this is the Rome I recognize, the one with a job to do and no interest in you. The trick is that the accumulation becomes the story anyway. Refuse to tell one long enough, and the reader builds it for you.

Read the article on Eric’s blog →

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— One Street in Venice, Corte Nova

Also, an older article from April came up after reading through Gillian’s blog. Since I’ve been to Venice many times (but not lived there), it caught my eye, also because everything I preach about staying in one place instead of ten, Gillian does on a single street.

Corte Nova is one narrow run of Venice, and she reads it the way most writers read the whole city: the architecture, the light at different hours, who lives there, what the name once meant. Her claim is that one street, looked at closely enough, holds as much as San Marco.

She is right, and the reason she is right is the only lesson that matters in this kind of writing. Attention is the multiplier. Pick something small and refuse to look away.

Walk through the street on Gillian’s blog →

— How Italians Keep Fresh in the Summer

The Marche will not leave me alone this week. Barbara Rocci writes the Marche summer as a set of habits rather than a list of sights, and it is the closest thing to my own religion I have read in a while.

The afternoon heat shuts the shutters and empties the streets until the town agrees to move again at sunset. When it gets to be too much, people drive to a lake or a river, put their feet in cold water, and eat a sandwich under a tree.

Up in the Sibillini, there is cold fountain water and a glass of Vernaccia di Serrapetrona waiting. Summer here is a rhythm, not an itinerary, which is the argument I have been making for two years, made better by someone who lives it.

Read the article on Barbara’s Substack →

— By Whom the Bell Tolls

One of the best, if not the best article I’ve read this week. I have walked past a hundred bell towers in Italy and never once thought of the bells as something a person keeps. Robert Camuto climbs 312 steps up (congrats!) Verona’s cathedral tower to spend an afternoon with Matteo Padovani, who has looked after its ten bells for thirty years.

The piece turns on a technique called Alla Veronese, where teams move between the city’s bell towers and fill the air with hymns and scraps of opera, a 250-year-old school most people in Verona hear without ever hearing as craft.

The biggest bell weighs more than five tons. The man has given three decades to keeping it in tune with the others. Sound as architecture, and one surveyor holding the whole thing together by hand.

Read the article on Robert’s Substack →

— Bellano, Lake Como Like a Local

Everyone who goes to Lake Como goes to Bellagio, which is exactly why I paid attention to the town next door that nobody names. Annie spent several days in Bellano, on the eastern shore, in the stretch of the lake where the tour boats thin out and the place stops performing.

The framing runs warmer and more lifestyle than I usually pass on, frescoed ceilings and garden patios, but she earns it with the small true things: the pastry bar in the morning, the butcher who shows up in a red truck on Wednesday, an afternoon climb to a gorge hung with hydrangeas. A famous lake has a plain working town on it, and the town is the better story.

Read the article on Annie’s Substack →

That was this week’s Reading Table. If you read something I missed, send it my way: ciao (at) anywhereitaly (dot) com.

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So that is where we had dinner. Inside, the ground floor held a kitchen and the idea of a living room. Above it, two more floors, a bedroom each, a bathroom, the whole house barely a hundred square meters stretched vertically over three flights of stairs, which is not an eccentric house in Portovenere but the standard model. Within a few days, we stopped pretending. We ate at the table on the street, in front of everyone walking past, because it was easier than eating in a room the size of the table. We drank our morning coffee out there in bathrobes. We were not the only ones. The whole street lived like this, half indoors and half out, and after a few days, the people passing began saying buongiorno to us, not because we had earned anything but because we were furniture now, and you greet the furniture.

Portovenere allows this because Portovenere is small in a way that even other small Ligurian towns are not. Lerici, across the water, where we had lived a few weeks earlier, is a harbor town with room to breathe, a long flat promenade, frazioni scattered around the bay, actual places to live outside the old center. Living there is close to comfortable. There is nothing comfortable about Portovenere. It is a handful of parallel streets stacked on a rock formation at the far edge of the Gulf of Poets, the Gulf of La Spezia if you are reading a chart instead of a poem, with Palmaria island moored in front of it like a door left ajar. The streets function as levels, connected by stairs and small landings and more stairs, and the town has one modest piazza but conducts its real business at its two ends: up top, where the church is, and down at the port, where the restaurants are. From Versilia, where we live now, you can see the whole arrangement from the beach on a clear day: the rocky edge of the gulf, with the island closing it off, and a town shaped like a decision.

The decision was Genova’s, and the date is carved over the town gate: Colonia Januensis 1113. Walk in under that inscription, as we did every day carrying shopping, and you are walking into a weapon. Genova bought the rock from the local lords and planted a colony of its own citizens on it, and the point of the colony was Pisa, or rather the ruin of Pisa: a fortified forward base for the corsair war against Pisan shipping and for pushing Genovese interests down into the Lunigiana. The tower houses, the walls, the single deep street now lined with focaccia and cones of fried fish, all of it is military planning wearing pastel. The houses were not even these colors for most of their lives. Until the 1930s, the facades wore pink cocciopesto plaster against the salt, and the postcard palette came later, the way most things a visitor loves about the Italian coast came later, and for the visitor.

Climb to the other end of the town, up the stairs that keep going after you are sure they must stop, and you reach the church of San Pietro on the last spit of rock, striped black and white, standing where a temple of Venus stood for centuries before it. The Romans called the place Portus Veneris. The story says the goddess was born from sea foam, and the sea under that point produces foam with an enthusiasm you can watch for an hour, so the location logic holds. One god moved out, another moved in. The building burned and was shelled, spent a stretch of the nineteenth century as a gun battery and a while longer as a navy searchlight station, and it is now the most photographed wedding venue on this coast. The rock does not seem to mind who it works for. It has been a lighthouse for one thing or another for two thousand years.

But I did not spend three weeks looking at the church. I spent three weeks looking at the house across the street.

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An elderly couple lived there, in a house as narrow as ours, and they had what almost no house in Portovenere has, which is a balcony, a tiny one, off the kitchen, with room for two small chairs and no table. Their kitchen window faced ours. We never learned their names, and it did not matter, because within a week we knew everything else.

The mama woke first, at seven or eight, and made coffee in the tiny kitchen. Around eight or nine, the papa appeared, moving at the speed of a man who has decided the day can wait, and they took their chairs on the balcony and set their glasses on the railing, because there was no table, and drank their espresso. I have never seen anyone drink a short shot of espresso for half an hour. It is a two-sip drink. They made it a sitting. The papa smoked one cigarette with it, obviously, why the hell not, above 80, tapping the ash over the railing into the street with the casualness of a man who has been tapping ash into that street since before the street was famous, and then carefully, every time, folding the leftover butt into a small container. True champion. There was a whole ethics in that distinction.

Around ten, the coffee now in him, the papa went down with a small dog as old and slow as he was, and the two of them disappeared into the town at a tortoise pace and came back half an hour later with a paper packet from the bakery, focaccia and a few brioche. Then the second coffee, the long one this time, an hour on the balcony with the brioche, the two of them side by side over the street. Around eleven, they parted, the papa to his own errands, the mama to the kitchen, where through the window I watched her start on lunch, or dinner, or both.

And this happened every day. Every single day, the same liturgy at the same hours, the glasses on the railing, the ash and the kept butt, the slow dog, the paper packet. They owned, as far as I could see, almost nothing. The papa’s skin was the color of a man who had spent his entire life outdoors on the water, and given where we were, he almost certainly had, because before the ferries started running day-trippers to the Cinque Terre, every man in this town was a fisherman, the way every house was pink.

Our own days arranged themselves around theirs. We learned about the neighbor’s cat, Franco, who conducted a personal war against our dog every day, lost every day, and returned every day, which, after a week, I began to respect. We stopped filling the water jug from the kitchen tap and started carrying it to the fountain down the street, not for the taste, or not only, but because that is what the street did, and the walk to the fountain was where the buongiornos happened.

It was the pandemic, and the crowds, such as they were, were Italian, and the town in season was full anyway: full of people coming for the ferry to the Cinque Terre, a few minutes across the water, and for the beaches, which are Ligurian beaches, meaning rocks that you negotiate with rather than lie on. The town they came to photograph is really there: the narrow streets, the tower houses, the colors. It photographs well. It always has. Byron got a whole grotto named after him here, though the naming was done in 1877 by an admiring English countess, decades after the poet, and the swim to Lerici on the plaque is more poetry than biography. This gulf was renamed by the poets after the poets had left. It knows what it is selling.

What it is selling and what it is are two different inventories. Most people spend a few hours in Portovenere between the ferry and the aperitivo. We gave it three weeks, and the town we got was the one the couple on the balcony lived in: vertical, repetitive, almost monastic, a town where the day is a staircase you climb the same way at the same hours, where the luxuries are a balcony the size of a doormat and an espresso stretched to thirty minutes because there is no reason on earth to drink it faster. It is not a comfortable life. It is not a comfortable town. It is grounded and puritan, and it sits on its rock the way the church sits on its point, working for whoever needs a lighthouse this century.

We went back a few years later, from Versilia, an easy drive now. The town was fuller, and the windows were emptier. The houses that held families hold key boxes now, and the people who would have been on the balconies have mostly gone wherever the owners of short-let apartments go, which is anywhere but here. You could still find the locals if you looked, a few young ones who moved in, a few old ones who never left. But the couple’s balcony, the last time I looked up at it, had no glasses on the railing.

I have not lived in Liguria properly yet, a few weeks at a time is visiting slowly, not living, and I will not pretend to know what a winter on that rock does to a person. But I know what I watched from my street table for three weeks, in bathrobes, with the whole town walking past. Two people with nothing, on a balcony with no table, drinking the slowest coffee in Italy, every morning, above a street that Genova built for a war nine hundred years ago and that strangers now cross the world to photograph. The glasses on the railing. The ash is falling onto the street. The butt, folded away and kept.

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In a recent article about Lunigiana, I mentioned as a sidenote that we had lived in Marciaso for a month before we moved to Versilia, where we live today.

Before Marciaso, we’d spent a lot of time in Italy. Lived in Florence, Rome, and even did a tour in the South. But we always kept our home in Budapest, where we are from originally. We either rented it out or left it empty while we were in Italy. Then, after a month in Marciaso and a month in Versilia, we decided to move to Italy forever. From doing slow travel in a country to selling all your stuff and relocating there is a different story. It is always a personal story.

See, no sane person would move to Marciaso, to be honest. It’s a town with barely 100 people, and most of them are close to 100 years old. It has one bar/restaurant/place, whatever it is, that is open only on Friday and Saturday. It is a medieval walled town on a mountain ridge, in one of the most isolated areas of Tuscany, the Lunigiana. Add that it was October, raining most of the time, and you were essentially cut off from civilization because the winding roads were too risky to drive down to Carrara.

In far-off islands in the middle of the ocean, there is a saying that you are either born there or you are running from something. Marciaso and towns like this are kinda the same. Sidenote: when you buy your 1 EUR home in a ghost town, remember that. But if you knew my wife and me back then, you would immediately understand why we moved there.

We wanted to just get away. Her brother, dad, and grandfather died within 2 years. I had a heart operation that summer. We needed emotional support from various people, and we got nothing because everyone was super focused on their own drama. Only the two of us were supporting each other. So we said fuck-all and got away. I remember clearly, it was a particular evening. We decided, we booked, we packed, we went. Within the span of two days. We arrived in the first week of October.

Marciaso was perfect for this. We wanted to live on a mountain-top Italian borgo for a while anyway as an experience. The Airbnb was cheap for a month. We rented out our home back in Budapest. Just in case we wanted to go back, we couldn’t. Burn the bridges, y’all. We gave up this mountain living after around a month and moved back down to the coast, but the move was genuine.

In December, our tenant back home extended her stay until January, then nothing. The plan was to go home. I remember the conversation like it happened yesterday.

- I don’t want to go home. I’m happy here. It’s just different. I don’t know why or how, but this is a place where we can stay. (Sophie)

- I was thinking about the same thing. I don’t know how, but we can make this work. Doesn’t matter how much it costs. We will make it work. (me)

It was decided at the end of December. We informed our families. I flew back for a weekend to take care of the apartment. We kept it for a while to finance our new rental here in Italy, but on that day we decided to sell it and make our stay permanent.

It’s hard to translate a deeply personal story into something practical. But I know everyone simply just loves practical rules, so I will try to be as practical as I can. However, keep in mind that every journey is personal.

The goal is this: you go on a journey, following a set of rules. If you follow these rules by the book, the journey itself forces you to confront yourself and face a change.

What will this change be all about? It’s personal and 100% depends on your personal life. In our case, it was a decision to stay. In your case, it might be different. But there will be a transformation.

So, how does this work? Or more like, why does it work? And why travel?

It’s simple. You are part of your own circle. Friends, family, colleagues, work, community, whatever. While this is great, they are there for one reason alone: to support your self-image. They are the keeper of your identity. This is why retreats, slow trips, vacations, and anything that pulls you out of that circle, even for a while, work because they give you the freedom to give zero fucks about your identity and do what you really want, not what is expected of you.

This is why every middle-aged American woman wants to go on an Eat Pray Love tour. This is why Bali exists with its yoga retreats and “find yourself” camps. We all need a break from our identity from time to time, so we can make genuinely honest decisions that protect and serve us by the heart. We make these decisions for ourselves, not for the expectations of our neighbors/families/friends.

But this change works only if you more or less follow the rules. So, I tried to systematize how this works and came up with these.

1

Your travel should be to a different country, where the language is not your native language. So domestic travel is out. If you want domestic travel, fine, but that means camping in the woods, without people.

You need people around you who know nothing about you, and you know nothing about them. You can understand them only if you focus on their language, but I would argue it is even better if you don’t speak their language at all.

This gives you the maximum level of I don’t give a fuck what they think about me as a starting point, which is the point of all this.

Italy is perfect for this. People will smile at you and leave you alone. It’s Europe, so you are safe and sound everywhere, even if you travel alone.

2

Stay for 90 days. Eat, Pray, Love? She stayed in one place for 3-4 months. A financial quarter? It’s a quarter for a reason. A season? 3 months. Almost every transformational timing is set at around the 90-day mark. Even most visas last for 90 days.

I know it is hard to organize a 90-day trip away from all your commitments. I honestly don’t have any tips here.

Both Sophie and I have online jobs, so we work from anywhere and don’t need to go into the office. We don’t have kids, so schooling is not a problem we need to solve. We don’t have debt, loans, or any financial restraints that require us to continually work or make payments.

Every life is different. All I can say is this: if you really want to make this work, you will make it work.

3

Stay in one, a maximum of two places. Perpetual travel is the real-life version of endless scrolling of the feed. It kills attention. The entire goal is to be without expectation and be with yourself.

You want to stay put. Travel is a vehicle for change. Don’t travel to your enemy by switching towns every week or doing a long 3-month road trip. In some cases, road-trip-style travel can work. But for most people, it is simply easier to stay in one place for a longer period.

Also, don’t forget the logistics and money. Booking a place for 3 months is much, much easier and cheaper than constantly switching places. In our personal example, we switched places once.

4

No day trips for the first 4 weeks. This is highly connected to Rule 3. You want to stay put. I think this is the 2nd time I've written this down. It’s kinda important.

Obviously, grocery runs, logistical runs, health runs—these don’t count. But perpetual travel can also happen via day trips. A simple rule for the day trip option is the timing (4 weeks), or you can take a day trip once the town where you are staying has truly run out of options to see or do.

5

Stay in a small town, but not in a village. This rule is a bit fluffy, but I will try to strike a balance here. We’ve learned this in Marciaso. A town that is too small functions as a sanatorium. You are truly off the grid. If you had drama like us, it could be a good option. Silence heals wounds. But for most of us, we need at least some inspiration.

I would say go with population, aim for something between 5,000 and 30,000 people. It gives you either a big village or a small town. This publication itself is written about these towns. I personally collected 1,000 of them here.

In Italy, a small town has a piazza, a couple of restaurants and bars, a small church and/or museum, and some activities. It is definitely not a ghost town, and it is a good, calm, but also very local place to be in. Pick one in a nice area so you can take day trips to amazing places from your home base (don’t forget rule 4!).

6

Ignore expats and digital nomads. Yeah, counterintuitive, I know. But you need expat connections only if you stay longer or you settle down there. Digital nomads are also a different breed. Also, not that many of them in Italy anyway. It's too expensive to just fly around in Italy. Also, a Bali beach looks better with a laptop with a “welcome to my office” copy on the pic.

Remember that the entire goal of this trip is to stay put (3rd time!) and look at your life from a vantage point, without shackles, without expectations, without anyone to whom you can tell your story.

The moment you meet with expats, within 10 minutes, you end up at “How’s Texas?” “I don’t know! How’s Seattle?” and give it 20 minutes, and you are arguing about the Giant Orange Idiot Baby. Remember that it is exactly why you are taking this trip: to avoid these conversations.

7

Define no goal. That is probably the hardest one, especially for Americans who treat and live their lives as a never-ending to-do list. There is no goal. Life has no goal, but that is another story. This trip surely has no goal other than this: it is happening.

So, it is not a 90-day bootcamp to build your startup in monk mode, whatever these idiocracies mean. It’s not a 90-day write-your-own-novel creative writing retreat. It’s not a 90-day find-yourself-and-become-one-with-the-world yoga camp. It’s not even an I-fuck-with-all-the-Italian-stallions-I-meet-in-the-bar sex-run (if that’s your thing, no judging!).

This trip has no goal. You don’t need to accomplish anything. You have to follow the rules and let it ride for 90-days. Or 85-days. Or 95-days. Nothing is seriously fixed here, hello. Just let the trip happen with you.

8

Define no strategy. Similar to the previous rule. There is no good or bad trip. There is no one at the end who will congratulate you, except yourself. No one will know you did this, and even if they do, they won’t understand.

There was a guy who traveled across all of Latin America alone. I loved his blog. He did almost all the countries. With a backpack. Nothing serious, no goal, no objective, just had money aside, loved the area, spoke Spanish, why not. It took him almost two years to do it. When someone asked him, how was it? His response was the same: great. He explained later, what else could he say? That he once went down a side river of the Amazon on a half-sinking trash boat, with him the only white non-local person around an area that was the local indian tribes' place, who never ever saw, modern people? How can anyone understand this experience without being there? Where do you start with storytelling? Should you start at all?

I think some things are not meant to be said or shared. It’s yours only. And since something is yours only, why have a strategy for it? Who are you performing for?

9

Try to be a local. Not because anyone will treat you like a local. I can promise you, no one will. You will be the weird foreigner, probably forever. But being a local has one thing: familiarity. Habits. Traditions. A routine. And when you put yourself in a situation like this for a couple of months, trust me, you will love a nice, good routine.

Frequent the same bar. Go to the same restaurant every Friday. Fill up your car's tank at the same station. Walk the same routes. Go to the same butcher. Buy at the same bakery. You won’t be a local, but after around the 10th visit, people will recognize you. It feels nice.

10

Don’t track or document anything. It’s 2026, and I can’t believe I even have to say this, but I know everyone is mega-obsessed with biomarkers, photographing every second corner, making short videos of a seagull walking on a beach, and tracking their steps, sleep, and whatever.

Now, let’s not go into why this entire obsession with tracking and documenting is absolutely wrong and why it is the most obvious sign of loneliness and loss of control over someone’s life. Let’s just say that it is about optimization.

You do this trip because you want to stop optimizing your image, yourself, or your presented self. You want to change direction, whatever that direction is. Or you just want to spend 90 days without having to maintain a smile towards people you hate deep down. Or whatever your reason is. But that reason is definitely not to walk 10,000 steps every day, counted on your watch.

By the way, this last rule should say one simple thing: no screen for 90 days. But this is not an addiction rehab camp either, so let’s negotiate this down to not tracking or documenting anything. You will do it anyway, I know you, but at least having a rule around it, you might do it less.

Now, what happens after 3 months? I have absolutely no idea. But if you maintain these rules, something might happen to you. You might change a bit. You might be calmer, more relaxed. You become stronger, more rooted, more confident. You might get a divorce, quit, or make some big life decision. We decided to sell our home and move here full-time because we realized that location helps us find some solid ground and be happier. But that’s our life. You have a different one.

I can guarantee you one thing, though. With this approach, a trip can change you. You will go home not just with a collection of photos and some tan, like everyone else does after a holiday, but as a different person.

Or you won’t go home at all.

Peter

Pietrasanta, 12 July 2026

What’s new on the page

The final guide on Tuscany

Mainland Tuscany, or shall we say, Postcard Tuscany. As I did with my main guides on Versilia, the Apuan Alps, or the Arno Corridor, I collected the articles and packaged them into a single guide. This time, Mainland Tuscany. This also concludes Tuscany as a region. I’m not sure where I will focus, probably Lazio, since I have many experiences there after living for around a year in Rome.

As you may have noticed, I have a paywall up after 4 weeks a post is published. However, these guides will forever be free without a paywall.

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I started learning Italian after moving here. Restaurants run on English, but anything past ordering lunch doesn't. Before I hired a teacher, Babbel did most of the work, with more real learning than Duolingo's gamified fake learning. I'm a Babbel affiliate, but I only point you to things I've used and liked.

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Not a metaphor. The switchboards for every apartment in the building sat in the common garden with nothing over them, and a water pipe had broken directly above the bank of switches, so the whole thing crackled quietly in the rain the entire time we were there, and nobody in the building appeared to consider this unusual. The washing machine was out on the balcony. The balcony had no roof either, so the machine was standing full of rainwater, plugged in. I was in the shower when the water came through with a bite in it, the kind you feel in your jaw. We packed that morning. It was a 4.8 review score Airbnb for around $200 a night.

In a different year, Rome was the scene of a more ordinary crime. The listing described a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and air conditioning, and used the word "charming," which only ever appears in advertising. What we found was one room photographed from four angles, a pull-out bed, a ground-floor room in a house with mold behind the furniture like a savings account, and a portable air-conditioning unit that did not work.

At the time of writing this article (July 2026), I am in the process of buying an apartment, so I have seen MANY. I also rented out short-term ones, so I saw many rentals. One thing I can safely say, and I hope Italians won’t get offended: Italian real estate might be amazing, but below the $250,000 or $1,500 per month limits, almost any other country outperforms it in quality. And when it comes to Airbnbs, it’s even worse, because if you live in an apartment, you at least renovate it a little, or if you are looking to rent it out for longer terms, you at least take care of it a little. But for Airbnbs?

Also, note that I am not a cheap traveler. My range is 100 to 200 euros a night, which is what most people spend, and for that I want a clean bed, a bathroom with hot water and water pressure that arrive at the same time, fast internet, air conditioning in summer, and heat in winter. A kitchen only if I am staying more than a week. I care nothing about the decor. I will be inspired by the town, not by the apartment. The single request underneath all of it is this: do not make my stay a problem I have to solve.

For about three years now, I have stayed in hotels. Here is the reasoning and the practical part, which is more useful than the reasoning.

Why did the apartments get worse?

Italy does not have to try. The country will be full whether anyone does anything or not, and the people renting apartments here understand this on an instinctual level. A host in Budapest has to compete. A host in Rome has to unlock a door.

The basic policy for Airbnbs in Italy is roughly as follows.

Then there is the arithmetic, which almost nobody explains properly. I had an apartment in Budapest, and I was a host. So I know “the other side” of this. Bottom line: you don’t want to get fully booked. You want the highest per-night price you can get to make money. Let’s do the math quickly on an example.

Your place is $120/night. You are fully booked. This means 30 × 120 = 3,600. Minus agency fee (everyone works with one, they take care of cleaning, management, etc.), platform % fee, you end up with $2,500-3,000 pre-tax.

Or.

Same place, but you ask $300/night. You are 60-70% booked. This means 20 x 300 = 6,000. Pre-tax is around 5,000. Less work, less things to go wrong. Maybe more bad reviews because people don’t get their money’s worth, but who the f cares? The place will be booked anyway. This math only works if your place is in a tourist-popular location. It won’t fly with Brno, Lyon, Bratislava, not even Budapest. With Rome? You can rent out a garage without furniture for 300 a night if it’s close to the Trevi.

Just look at Croatia’s tourism board ad with John Malkovich in it.

It’s one of the best tourism ads I have seen. It’s funny, it has a story, it shows the best of the best of Croatia.

Now look at Italy.

They have run this version for years. A digitized Botticelli Venus goes around in Italy. In some versions, it shows stock video of a Slovenian winery (no joke). It’s super boring. It’s lame. It’s one of the worst tourism ads ever.

But hey, it’s Italy. Since this ad came out, Italy has grown its tourism revenue by 10% year-over-year, every year. Meanwhile, Croatia, I hope again I don’t offend anyone, is a rounding error in the Italian tourism budget. Although they share the same sea, I would argue that they have nicer infrastructure, including hotels. I know it’s a trigger point for Croatians, but even their cultural heritage is somewhat shared through the Venetian Republic. You can literally see the same medieval places, but in Croatia they’re called Pula, Dubrovnik, and Rovinj. Yet, they need to hustle with Malkovich.

Italy doesn’t need to hustle. Eat, Pray, Love hustles for Italy. The Dua Lipa or Jeff Bezos weddings. They are the tourism ads. John Malkovich gets paid to promote Croatia. Jeff Bezos pays a fortune to wed in Venice. Different game.

Bottom line: when you don’t need to compete, you get sloppy.

Book the 3-star hotels

Simplest solution, but first, let’s talk about stars. Personal note: many, many years ago, I worked as a PR consultant, and one of my main clients was AccorHotels. You know, Ibis, Mercure, Novotel, Sofitel, etc. French. As a byproduct of my work, I know almost everything about the hotel industry.

So back to the stars. Italian hotel stars are the most misread symbol in the country. Classification passed to the regions in 1983, then a 2008 decree called Italy Stars & Rating imposed national minimums, and the regions kept adding their own criteria on top, which is why Bolzano and Puglia do not mean quite the same thing by four stars. The rating lasts five years. An inspector from the province or the comune comes once. He counts.

That is the crucial thing. The star does not measure whether the hotel is good. It measures whether the hotel possesses a list of items. A four-star with a broken air conditioner keeps its fourth star until 2031.

Also, stars are not equal. If you are traveling internationally, you would notice this by now. A 4* hotel in Dubai or South East Asia looks like a luxury 5*+ resort in Europe. A 2* European or even American hotel barely qualifies as living space, but can be a good backpacker option in Asia. Now, imagine that, but within regions of Italy. The 4* hotel in Northern Italy looks like paradise. Same stars in, I don’t know, Calabria, it’s at best a 3* equivalent.

Which turns out to be exactly what you want, if you read it correctly. Look at what a three-star is obliged to have: a private bathroom in every single room, daily cleaning, a reception open for at least 16 hours, someone at the reception who speaks one foreign language, a bar, an internet service. Basics. Delivered. Not a promo, but this is why I love the Ibis brand. It gets you nothing, just the basics. But it delivers the basics for you everywhere like McDonald’s.

So the instruction is short. Book the three-star. You are not paying for taste. You are buying a legal floor that someone in a municipal office has physically verified, a floor that no apartment in this country has ever been required to clear.

Two footnotes. The five-star is a different market and mostly a poor one at the price. Almost all luxury resorts are scams. If you want real luxury, book a luxury villa with staff. And an agriturismo is not rated in stars at all: Tuscany grades them in spighe, ears of wheat, Trentino in daisies, Sicily in stars. The symbol changes at the regional border. Complicated. Case-by-case picking.

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Why is the small hotel on your side?

As I said, I know a lot about hotels. Hotels run on margins of a few percent, and only when they are full. A family three-star in an Italian town needs your bed occupied every night of the season and needs you to come back next year.

An apartment owner, as we established, prefers you not to come at all, at a higher price. Almost no one comes back to the same Airbnb twice. Well, I do, because I saved those very rare ones that are worth the money. But let’s agree: I’m unique here.

That is the whole argument. Not romance about hospitality. Alignment of interest. I also said that I hosted once in Budapest before I sold the flat and moved here. We did not do short lets, because in that city three days meant a stag party from Essex, and we were not interested in cleaning up after them. We took two- and three-month guests instead and stayed in contact with them the whole time. That is what a host used to mean. Ask yourself when you last met one. Hell, when was the last time your true host handed you the keys? Not the agency rep. Not some friend. The actual host who owns the home. I have faint memories of this process a decade ago, when Airbnbs had to compete with hotels.

How to book

Book on Booking, or book directly with the hotel by email, which sometimes gets you 10% and always gets you a human. Booking lets the bad reviews stand (mostly). Airbnb’s scores have drifted so far from reality that the number carries no information, and you cannot cross-check the property anywhere else because it has no name. A hotel has a name. Put it on Google, on Reddit, on the Italian review sites. Somebody has already been disappointed there and written it down. Some even made a video about it and posted it online.

Take the hotel in town rather than the one on the ring road with parking. You did not come to Italy to sleep next to a roundabout. Read our piece on driving here and park outside the walls like everyone else.

Expect the internet to be bad. Expect the breakfast, advertised as continental or international, to be a small insult involving vacuum-packed croissants. For real, Italians have zero concept of a real continental breakfast. Expect elementary English at the reception, sometimes even worse than in Japan, where even the best hotels speak not even baby English.

But none of this matters. The bed is clean, and the shower is not electrified. You pay 100-200 per night, and your stay is not a problem you need to deal with.

Rent an apartment when you are staying longer than a week and want to cook. That is the only argument for one that survives contact with the arithmetic above.

The room is not the holiday. Nobody has ever gone home and described the wallpaper. But if the room is bad, everything is bad. You wake up tired and dirty, and you get sick from the uncleaned A/C or from the mold on the wall. You want a place that disappears at 7 in the morning so that you can leave it, walk down through a town that has been getting on with its own business since before your grandmother was born, and find the bar where the coffee costs one euro, and the man behind the machine has been standing in that spot for thirty years.

Sleep somewhere boring. Spend your attention outside.

The inspiration for this post was ’s article on how Airbnbs serve as a window into the collapse of the West. He had dire experiences with Airbnbs and has an amazing quote:

“I will say that the Airbnb indicator is quite interesting to consider as a barometer for the health of Western culture. Perhaps an early sign that trust is returning to Western Society will be when I can book a trip for my family without needing to retain a lawyer beforehand.”

Couldn’t agree more. I invest my trust in my host. If the accommodation is bad, that trust is totally broken. Again, don’t make my stay a challenge or a problem that I have to deal with.

Planning a slow trip? My planner builds it for you. Answer five questions, and you get a personalized route from my handpicked list of the 1,000 towns most travelers skip, with festivals, drive times, and a line on what each place is. Don’t like it? Refine it, swap towns, or browse the whole database by region. Simple. Free. No paywall, not even an email gate. Pure discovery for you.

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Reddit was the inspiration, though not the way you’d expect. Open almost any Italy travel thread where someone asks the room to critique their itinerary. In almost every case the user is American. In almost every case the plan has ten times the items it should. My personal favorite is Rome, Venice, Florence, a Tuscan road trip, two cooking classes, and maybe the Cinque Terre, all under ten days. If you just thought “that’s doable,” you have a problem, and this post is not for you. If you thought “that’s insane,” good. This is how to do it properly, slowly, and savor the thing instead of sprinting through it. Buckle up.

The basics

1. Don't confuse travel for leisure with travel for business. If your trip runs on a schedule, you are not on holiday, you are at a conference. The whole point of travel, and of Italy in particular, is the two hours spent sitting on a square doing nothing. So instead of squeezing those moments in around the edges, build the entire trip so they sit at the center and everything else is a distraction worth taking.

2. Pick a base and refuse to move. The fewer stops, the slower the travel. Five cities means five arrivals and five departures, hours killed on logistics alone. Pick one base and run the occasional day trip from it if you must.

3. Stop fighting the local schedule and build around it. Restaurants close between three and seven, shops between one and four. Do your sightseeing before midday. Use a museum to hide from the afternoon heat. And accept the long lunch and the longer dinner as the structure of the day, not an interruption to it.

4. Use your eyes, not your phone, to pick a restaurant. Most reviews are fake anyway, and Google makes a genuinely low score almost impossible, so there is little to learn from the stars. You are in Italy. A bad meal is hard to find if you know what to look for. Learn and know the rules of picking a good place and save yourself the hours of scrolling.

5. Skip the summer months if you can. Pick July and August only if your plan is to swim. Pick any other month if your plan is to see the country. Maybe you are the rare soul who can climb a Tuscan hill town in the full heat of August, and if so I salute you. If not, come in May or June.

6. Definitely skip August. That is Ferragosto, the month the whole country takes off. Almost nothing runs except hospitality. The international tourists are everywhere, and so are the locals, because they are on holiday too. It is also the hottest month. The single worst window you can pick.

7. Accept that there is no perfect plan. Some countries are simple. You see Angkor Wat and you have essentially done Cambodia. Two or three weeks in the Kansai region and you have seen most of Japan. Italy does not work that way. The basics alone, Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, want four or five days each, and that is already a rush. You cannot do Italy in one trip. So stop trying.

8. Some places are worth the hype, and some are only hype. A few are genuinely one of a kind. Rome, Florence, Venice, the city of Naples. Others got famous for reasons no one can quite explain, while the next town over is almost identical with a hundred times fewer people. The Cinque Terre, Amalfi, most of the Tuscan hill towns. Learn which is which before you book.

9. Travel will not change your life, so stop demanding that it does. Yes, the Vatican and the Colosseum and Venice will stay burned into your eyes. But most of a trip is not a revelation, and it was never supposed to be. Sometimes you just need a quiet square, a good trattoria, and three days of looking out from behind your own eyes without taking a hundred photographs an hour.

10. Learn the language before you come. More than the restaurant basics if you can manage it. The more of the language you carry, the more of the culture opens, because they are the same thing. The camera only documents. Eating, speaking, and asking are the roads to anything deeper. I recommend trying out Babbel.

About stays

11. Your room is not where you sleep, it is where you wake up. This is mostly a note for everyone who isn't American, since Americans already overspend on hotels. If you were ever tempted to go cheap on the stay, don't, and the temptation fades with age anyway. The room sets the tone of the whole day. What you are buying is a clean, calm, rested start to every morning.

12. Stay inside the old city. Almost every Italian town has a historic center, the centro storico, sometimes still ringed by its medieval walls. Sleep inside them if you can. It is simply better to walk the city freely than to hunt for a cab, wait for a bus, or circle for parking with the last of your energy.

13. Try the agriturismo. It is the Italian version of the country hotel, a working farm that feeds you what it grows and gives you slow time and real quiet. Local, personal, and the best place by far to take a cooking class if that is what you are after.

14. Get a room with a window over something. The best days are the unplanned ones, when nothing on a list is pulling you out the door. A slow morning on a small balcony, coffee and breakfast while the square wakes up below you, is worth more than the view from any monument.

About moving

15. Rent a car. Dead serious. On day one. The worst thing you can do is hand your days to a tour company's coach. The best thing you can do is take your own car and drive. Every experience worth having is off the usual route, and every one of those routes needs a car. Take the maximum insurance while you are at it. Here are some driving tips in Italy.

16. Get used to walking. Most Italian towns ban cars from the old center. A few buses and taxis get in, but mostly people walk, and walking here is not about getting from one point to another. It is a national pastime with no destination. Walk after lunch, walk after dinner, walk all day.

About destinations

17. Know the alternative to every popular place. By alternative I mean a near-identical experience with ten times fewer people. The Cinque Terre villages have Tellaro, Lerici, Portovenere. Portofino has Rapallo, Chiavari, Nervi. Capri has Procida. The list goes on as far as you want to take it.

18. Crowds kill the experience. By now you've seen how much weight crowds carry in all of this. A crowded town means longer queues, fewer free tables, more noise, less of everything you came for, and sometimes the sheer number of people ends the experience entirely. So the first goal of slow travel is a simple equation: ninety-five percent of the original, with ten percent of the crowd.

19. The alternative is the better story anyway. Some of us travel to talk about it later, and there's nothing wrong with that. So consider which is the better thing to describe. Venice, where you took the same boat down the same canal and ended on the same square as everyone else. Or two days in Chioggia, the fishing town below it, where you hit the local fish market, ate at the local fish place, took a boat round the lagoon islands instead of just the famous one, and slept in a local house.

20. Slow travel fits inside a normal trip. People treat it as binary, slow or the Red Bull sprint. It isn't. Give yourself a rhythm. With two weeks, do the basics in under ten days, then leave four days entirely unplanned in the middle of the trip. It slows you down, settles your nerves, and on a good day it talks you into canceling the rest of the plan.

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About table manners

21. Avoid the obvious tourist traps. If someone is out front inviting you in, walk on, because a good place is already full and needs no host. More tourists than locals, walk on. Baseball caps, shorts, and flip flops at the tables, walk on. Food from the wrong region, walk on. Spaghetti bolognese in Tuscany is the tell, and it is tagliatelle in Bologna anyway. Pizza with no wood oven in sight, walk on. More rules here.

22. Learn the regional specialties. Italian food is fiercely regional, by area, by town, sometimes by village. Knowing what belongs on the plate in the place you're standing does two jobs. It keeps you out of the traps that serve anything to anyone, and it teaches you more about the local culture than any plaque.

23. Skip the tip, but pay the coperto and buy the water. Most tables carry a coperto, a small cover charge of a couple of euros for the bread and the setting. It’s part of your bill, consider it as a tip. Don't ask for tap water, order the bottle. It’s also normal and this is where most restaurants make their profit. Together they are closer to the local idea of a tip than anything you'd add at the end.

24. Don't try to rewrite the food. Allergies are real and respected, so flag those. Preferences are a different thing. The American habit of reciting a list of swaps and removals and extras to the waiter does not translate here. The kitchen has made this dish ten thousand times. Eat it the way they make it.

25. A reservation is all but mandatory, and easy. Most good places expect reservations in the evening, but here's the part nobody tells you: almost none are full during the day. See a place you like while walking at noon, step in, book it for tonight. Usually it's there. If not tonight, then almost certainly tomorrow.

About pace

26. One thing a day. The simplest rule I have. One museum. One small town. One big experience. One long dinner. The Duomo and the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio and the David in a single day, capped with a meal, is not a trip but a checklist.

27. Familiarity is underrated. Go back to the same place at different hours of the day. Found a café near the room you love? Have breakfast there once, pass through in the afternoon, take your aperitivo there in the evening, stop in again the next morning for an espresso standing at the counter. Slowness lives in repetition. It is the closest a visitor gets to being a local for a few days.

28. Visit the great thing twice. Counterintuitive, and worth it. Some sights have no alternative and are famous for the right reasons. The Colosseum. The Uffizi, the finest Renaissance collection on earth. The Vatican Museums. The Grand Canal. They all land the first time. Go back and they land differently. I've been through the Vatican Museums maybe 10 times, and it is always the most recent visit that was the fullest.

29. Boredom is your friend. Sit somewhere for hours. Buy a paper at the kiosk. Circle the same ten streets. Drive aimlessly through towns. Spend a day doing nothing in particular, and leave the phone in your pocket while you do it. A day like that, traveling or at home, is a deeper luxury than any five-star room.

30. Embrace the closed doors. Plans break. The restaurant is full, the museum is shut for works, the church is closed for a wedding. All of it is good news. Every broken plan is a door into improvisation, and I can tell you that nearly all of my best days traveling came from a morning that fell apart and a shrug of "fine, what now?"

About money

31. Almost all souvenirs are tasteless. Ninety-five percent are made in China regardless of the sticker, and the rule is simple: if you can order it from Amazon, there is no reason to buy it on a trip. The genuinely handmade, artisan thing is the exception, and it is worth it, but never expect it cheap. Real Tuscan leather starts in the four figures. Anything under that is poor quality, not really Italian, or not really leather.

32. Pay extra for convenience. The direct flight. The better room. The breakfast included. Any spend that buys back time or removes stress is money well used, and it matters more the older you get.

33. Pay for knowledge. Yes, it's all online, and you can read a site like this one and build your own pace and route. But sometimes the faster move is a two-hour call with a planner, or a local guide for a morning. They save you the time and hand you the thing you cannot Google or generate, which is what a local actually knows.

34. Tipping is not a thing here. Not in restaurants, cafés, taxis, or hotels. Round up if you like, leave a little extra if the mood takes you, but nobody expects it, and the American twenty or thirty percent reads as strange rather than generous. Honestly it looks weird me too. Pay the staff properly, or fold it into the bill as margin, and let the guest just eat.

For second visits and brave travelers

35. Skip the branded regions entirely. On a first trip it's hard to talk yourself out of Tuscany, so this takes either nerve or a second visit. But the best places are the ones no one has turned into a brand yet. Skip Tuscany, take Umbria. Skip Amalfi, take Le Marche. Skip the Cinque Terre, take Calabria. Skip Sicily, take Basilicata and Puglia.

36. Learn the airport rule. The closer an international airport, the heavier the crowds. Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan. The further a place sits from any of them, the lighter the tourism. Look up the nearest international airport to Calabria, Basilicata, Le Marche, Abruzzo, or the far edges of Puglia, and you'll understand why people reach for the word ‘untouched’.

37. Drive south. The simplest bravery rule there is. Anything below Rome counts as the south (if you ask a Tuscan, anything below Grosetto is South :D). Anything below Amalfi is genuinely local. The further down the boot you go, the less the place performs for you. Two days in a town on the Calabrian coast or up in its mountains is about the deepest experience the country offers. The name is hard to pronounce, and there is not one English article written about it.

On food

38. Eat the parts of the animal you'd normally avoid. The tripe, the intestines, the blood sausage, the lung. Almost all of it has a local version and a local fame, and there's a reason for both. Vegetarian? No problem. There are vegetables here that simply aren't standard where you live. Artichokes. The boiled greens. The black kale. It's also the right place to learn how many things a tomato can be. And the olives!

39. Trust your waiter. Ask what's good today, what's fresh, what they'd order themselves, what's in season and what the locals are actually eating. Ask it in Italian if you can. Then let them bring what they want to bring. You will almost never be disappointed. The same goes for the house wine, which is always good.

40. Skip the restaurant dessert, eat the sweet on the move. Two reasons. Most of the best ones, gelato above all, are made for walking. And the walk itself is the point, a chance to move and change the view between dinner and whatever comes after it.

41. Do the aperitivo. The whole ritual is built around slowing down. A drink, a few snacks, a conversation, the deliberate winding-down before dinner. And it is something Italians actually do, not a thing staged for visitors. Do it right, and you have effectively scheduled the act of relaxing.

42. Markets. Any market. One of the best things you can do anywhere in Italy. By the sea, the fish market. Inland, the farmers' market or the covered mercato centrale in the middle of town. At nearly all of them you can either buy the produce and eat it somewhere later, or have the vendors cook it for you on the spot. Either way it is one of the great experiences of a trip.

About being a good guest

43. You are a guest, so behave like one. It should go without saying. Respect the local culture and keep reminding yourself you are a visitor. The rules you'd follow at home apply here too. This is not only manners. Forget it and doors quietly close in front of you.

44. You are not a local, and that's fine. No matter how hard you try, you won't be one, and the trying is what exhausts people. I've lived here for years, I'm at home in my own corner of Tuscany and Versilia, and I'm still not a local across the rest of Italy, and certainly not an Italian. Accept it early and you save yourself a lot of effort.

45. Respect the places that ask for it. Italy is full of churches and sacred spaces. Dress for them. It is also full of old buildings, monuments, and ruins, so move through them with care. Which means: don't climb the stonework for a photo, and keep the performances for the camera out of the museums. Plus, you might get a well-deserved fine for it.

46. Leave the place better than your photograph found it. This should be obvious, but after watching how some travelers behave abroad, I'll say it plainly. The town that lets you wander it for the price of a coffee is doing you a favor. The least you can return is to put your bottle in the bin, and to stay off the monument when the sign tells you to. Like, please, don’t be an a-hole.

47. Street photography has rules. The main one: people are not scenery. The street is full of others moving through their own day, plenty of them not tourists but working, running errands, living. Your extra-long selfie stick and your constant filming are not the most courteous way to pass through someone else's town.

The golden three, under all the others

48. Everything good starts past the crowds. The first job in planning a trip is to choose a pace and a route that put you among the fewest other travelers. Not alone, the empty version isn't the goal, but in the quiet middle. Avoid overtourism at all costs and most of the rest takes care of itself.

49. Short plan + long trip = better travel. The fewer items on the day, the better the day, and not only in travel. Having the time to do whatever you want is the real luxury. Travel is discovery, discovery needs surprise, and the enemy of surprise is the plan.

50. You cannot finish Italy. I've lived here for years and traveled it more than I can count before that, and there are whole regions I haven't seen, obvious places I've never reached. Few countries are this densely packed with things worth your time. So stop trying to finish it inside one trip. You can't, and once you accept that, you're finally free to enjoy it.

That’s the fifty. The thread underneath every one of them is the same: the crowd is the enemy of the experience, so build the whole trip around being where it isn’t. Stay longer, plan less, drive further down the map than feels comfortable, and let the country reach you instead of you chasing it.

What did I miss?

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It is also, and nobody selling it to you will say this out loud, a performance, and most travelers arrive in the middle of the show and mistake it for the place.

I lived in Florence for a stretch once, years ago, before Versilia, and I have driven this interior more times than I can count since, out of Florence on day loops, south through it on the move down to Rome, back into it as a resident who finally had the time to do it slowly. What all those drives taught me is that the postcard is real and the postcard is built, both at once, and holding both in your head is the whole trick of the place.

Take the Val d’Orcia, the single most beautiful stretch of country in Italy, which I will not pretend otherwise about. The cypresses are not native trees. The most photographed cypress road on earth was planted by an Anglo-Florentine family in the nineteen-twenties, which makes the eternal soul of Tuscany younger than the motor car.

Pienza, the perfect little town at its heart, was a peasant village that a pope flattened and rebuilt from nothing in three years as an argument about how the countryside ought to look. The valley is not nature. It is a set, one of the oldest and most successful pieces of landscape design ever made, dreamed up by city people who never worked an hour of it.

That is the pattern under everything here. Florence won the wars, financed the art, and built the picture, and the picture is what the world flew in to see. The towns that lost to Florence are the ones that kept the truth. Siena lost, and stopped, and became the most intact medieval city on earth because after the siege, it could never again afford to change. Arezzo lost out at the edge, off the road and off the river, and kept working its gold for three thousand years while the prettier towns nearer Florence traded their crafts for souvenirs stamped on another continent. Down on the coast, the story runs further back still, to the Etruscans who smelted so much iron on one beach that the slag buried their own tombs, and to the steel town that dug the slag back up two thousand years later to feed a furnace. This is the country that did the work and lost the argument, and losing is what saved it.

So there are three ways under the postcard, and the guide is organized around them.

• You beat the famous hill towns with time: sleep inside the walls, and the town is yours for the hours after the buses leave, which are the only hours that matter.

• You beat the famous valley with motion: drive it slowly and never stop where the cars are already stopped, because the good part is the space between the things, not the things.

• And you beat the whole performance by going to the towns that never learned to perform at all, the working ones, the ones that lost, where nobody has ever once pulled over to photograph a field, because down there a field is a thing you work.

One warning before the towns. This is the crowded Tuscany, and I am not going to tell you it is empty, because it is not. The theme-park towns are real, and they are grim. Montepulciano and Pienza have been hollowed out and refilled with pasta, no local eats, and leather finished in a sweatshop. The food court between the rides and an afternoon in the wrong one at the wrong hours can nearly ruin the whole region for you.

You have to work for the good version. You get up early or stay out late, sleep in the right place, and keep the car moving through the famous valley instead of parking at the overlook with two hundred other people. Do that, and this is the best country in Italy. Do the opposite, base in Florence and arrive everywhere at noon, and you will spend the trip wondering what the fuss was about.

TLDR

The famous interior of Tuscany, the postcard country, seen honestly. The most photographed countryside in Europe, and a performance most travelers walk into halfway through.

The pattern beneath it all: Florence won and built the picture. The towns that lost to Florence kept the truth. Siena, Arezzo, the working coast.

Three ways under the postcard. Time: sleep in the hill towns and own the hours after the buses go. Motion: drive the famous valley and never stop where the cars stop. And the working towns that never learned to perform.

Do not base in Florence. Sleep inside a hill town or an agriturismo in the hills between them. Everything is an hour from everything.

The trade: you give up nothing, because the postcard still earns its fame, and you gain the hour it was hiding.

Planning a slow trip? My planner builds it for you. Free, no paywall, no email gate. Answer five questions (hub town, interests, travel month, days you want for slow discovery, and fitness level, because some of these towns make you climb), and you get a personalized route from my handpicked list of the 1,000 towns most travelers skip, with festivals, drive times, and a line on what each place is. Don’t like it? Refine it, swap towns, or browse the whole database by region.

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Where to base yourself

Make this decision before you make any other, because it settles the whole trip: do not sleep in Florence. Almost everyone does, and almost everyone has it backward. Florence is where the day-trippers come from, and the day-trippers give up the best hours of every town in this guide to drive back down and sleep in the city. You want to be going the other way, up into the hills against the evening traffic, arriving in the town as they are leaving it.

Sleep in Florence for Florence. See the city and its beauty for multiple days. But don’t do the day trips. Move out, sleep somewhere on the mainland.

Everything in mainland Tuscany is about an hour from everything else, so a base in the middle saves you the daily commute to the city and back. That is the practical reason. The real reason is that the good hour, the one after seven when the buses are gone, and the town returns to the people who live in it, is the hour that happens outside your window instead of two hours away.

So base yourself in one of the towns, inside the old walls, or better still in an agriturismo out in the hills between them, a farm stay with a kitchen and a long view and no front desk.

San Gimignano works if you want the towers standing over your evening. Volterra works if you want the biggest and highest of them, with the best long look in the region falling away from its walls. Any of them beats the city. Book the room inside the walls when you can. The walk home is shorter, and the morning is closer.

The whole case against Florence and the two roads that actually lead you into this country are in this piece. Come from the west off the Pisa highway, climbing through the working land to Volterra and San Gimignano, or drop down from Florence through the Chianti wine hills via Castellina. Both roads run into the walls of Monteriggioni before the last short stretch to Siena, and you can take one in and the other out and see all of it in a few days. Pick ANY towns to sleep in during this road trip.

The most photographed hill town in Tuscany, and the argument for sleeping inside its walls. Book three nights, watch the buses clear out at seven, and stand in the main square when it empties of everyone holding a phone at arm's length and fills instead with the evening you came to Tuscany hoping still existed. The restaurants change their menus when the buses go. Nobody sells you the fake dinner at seven thirty, because by then there is no one left to sell it to.

The places not to miss

Grouped the way you would actually drive them.

The heartland. If you care about one place in this whole guide, care about Siena. Not Florence, not the Chianti, not the Val d’Orcia. Siena is the city that built the Renaissance, lost the last war to the Medici in 1555, and was preserved by losing, the most intact medieval city in the world, because it stopped mid-sentence five hundred years ago and never had the money to start again. The Palio and the contrade, the buses come to photograph twice a summer, are not costumes; they are the one thing here that has never stopped mattering. Stay until the day visitors drain out through the gates, walk the streets after dark, and the modern century peels off layer by layer until it is 1450 and you are the anachronism.

The postcard valley. The most beautiful country in Italy and the most constructed, a set maintained beautifully for five hundred years. Go anyway. It earns the crowd the way Venice earns it. But drive it, do not stop in it. The famous overlooks are chains of parked cars with a photographer at each one, handing over a piece of the afternoon for a frame of grass and a tree. Skip the hilltop canteens of Pienza and Montepulciano, carry your own bread and water so the food court cannot hold you hostage, and aim the car at the empty back roads and the space between the famous things. The valley is best at thirty kilometers an hour through the parts nobody bothers to photograph.

The working east. My favorite city in mainland Tuscany, and the one that will not notice whether you come. Arezzo sits out at the edge, off the road and off the river, which is why it lost its empire to Florence and why the tour buses never found it. It has almost nothing to photograph, no tower, no dome, one great sloping square too big to fit in a frame, and it has been working gold for three thousand years, since the Etruscans cast the Chimera here, while the prettier towns nearer Florence sold their crafts off for fakes. A city grand enough to ignore you, selling nothing, performing nothing, running its schools and working its metal. You could love a place like that for a long time.

The coast the postcard forgot. West of all of it, below Livorno, an industrial coast wearing a beach towel, a strip of tall pale holiday blocks that feel closer to a socialist seafront than to the Tyrrhenian, and the most honest coastline in Tuscany precisely because it stopped selling anything a long time ago. Under the beach is iron: Populonia, where the Etruscans smelted so much of it the slag buried their tombs; the foundry town of Follonica with a church cast in metal; the steel mill at Piombino; Elba out on the horizon where the ore came from; and the tropical-turquoise water near Rosignano that is the color of a hundred years of chemical discharge. Base here and the postcard country becomes your day trip, an hour inland, which is the right way around.

You reach Bolgheri up five kilometers of cypresses, and everyone on that avenue is driving up for the wine, the rarefied bottles that cost what a week costs. I was the exception on the road that day. I came for a café on the square and a bitter Hungarian drink hanging on its wall, Unicum, carried out of communist Budapest in a coat pocket by the family that still keeps the place, and for the old Habsburg thread that ties this wine village to the country I was born in. The famous town, entered through the one thing on it that has nothing to do with why it is famous.

The cattle country. South and inland from the coast, past Grosseto, the land stops performing altogether. This is the Maremma, the real rural life that the Val d’Orcia is only the postcard of, cattle worked by men on horseback, a country where nobody has ever pulled over to frame a field because down there a field is a thing you work.

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My final note

This guide is alive. I update it whenever a new piece on the Tuscan mainland goes up, and there are more coming, the cattle country of the Maremma first.

Everything in here is a place I have driven to, walked through, and eaten in myself. I do not write about towns I have not seen or restaurants I have not sat in. If a place is in this guide, it's there because I went, looked, learned something, and decided it was worth your time.

And the whole of it comes down to one instruction. This is the most famous country in Europe, and it is worth the fame. The only things standing between you and the good version of it are the hour you choose to be there and the place you choose to sleep. Get those two right, and the postcard opens to reveal what's underneath.

Lastly, most of my guides require you to drive a car here. It’s the best way to do slow travel. In almost all cases, it is also the only way to do it. So, here is a very practical manual for driving in Italy.

Guide last updated: 9 July 2026

I came off the highway and into it on purpose, and I booked a day at a place called Corte degli Ulivi near Grosseto, and I did it for a reason that has been sitting in me since I was a boy, which is that if a few things in my life had gone differently, I would not be a writer in Italy at all. I would be a man on a horse in Texas, in the empty country, with cattle, and a long way from any city.

That life was never going to happen, and what is left when a life like that closes off is a kind of fandom. A deep respect for the people who do the work, I would have wanted. And I do not come to it as an outsider, which matters, because I come from a country that has its own.

On the Great Plain of Hungary there are horsemen we call Csikós, herdsmen who run cattle and horses from the saddle the old way, and they are the surviving end of a longer thing, because the people I descend from, the Magyars who rode in off the steppe, were horsemen before they were anything else, archers who could loose arrows at a gallop and even turn and fire backward off a moving horse.

That skill is mostly a show now at home, kept alive on a few stubborn farms and performed for tourists everywhere else, which is the fate of every tradition like it. But it means that when I drove into the Maremma, I was not a traveler discovering something quaint. I was a horseman from one end of the continent come to look at the horseman from the other, the same trade in a different dialect.

Because I think that is all it is, finally, one trade in many dialects. I do not believe some clever culture invented herding cattle from horseback and graciously taught it to the rest. I think every person who ever had horses and cattle in the same place worked out the same answer, because it is the obvious answer, and that somewhere far behind all of them is a single rider on the steppe, sometime after the ice went back, who was the first to climb up and go after the herd instead of walking. The Spanish carried their version across the ocean, and it became the Mexican vaquero, and then the American cowboy, and that line at least is written down. The rest I cannot prove and would not try to. The Csikós, the Italian buttero, the vaquero, the Texan, I look at the four of them, and I see one man.

The clearest proof of the kinship is in how they sit a horse, and here I can speak from the saddle. There are two ways to ride, and they come from two different worlds.

The English way, the one nearly every equestrian sport is built on, comes down from the aristocracy, from men who rode for sport and the hunt and the afternoon, a few hours at a time toward a single purpose, one horse trained for the chase and another for the field. It is elegant and rigid. You sit in it, folded slightly forward, in a narrow, hard saddle. You carry a crop. You need boots, guards, and gear, and after a few hours, it is punishing on the body.

The other way is the worker’s way, which most of the world now calls Western, and it is the opposite of all of that. The saddle is built like an armchair, wide and deep and padded, because the man in it is going to be there from before dawn until after dark. The horse knows a handful of commands and obeys them, and you steer with your legs, no crop, which is the whole reason for the spur. You need a pair of trousers that breathe and a hat against the sun, and nothing else. It is not elegant. It was never meant to be. It is a tool, and the man is the driver, and the horse is the vehicle he works from all day long. I learned to ride the worker’s way, of course. Anyone who rides to do something rather than to be seen does.

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So I rode out. At a place like this, there is a foreman who takes you, and mine looked like the Italian edition of Chuck Norris, and you do not work, you ride alongside while the herdsmen do, for three or four hours, out into the flat country among the cattle. This is the part where you have to choose a place carefully, and by now, I know how to read one.

The tell is cleanliness, because there is nothing clean about cattle, and any operation that has scrubbed the dirt and the smell out of itself has done it for you, the guest, which means the real work is happening somewhere else or not at all. If the room still smells of lavender after you have left it, if the man who runs the herd shakes your hand with a soft, clean one that carries a note of cologne, you have booked a performance.

What you want is the place where nothing has been arranged, where the show is not a rodeo staged twice a day to display what these men can do, but simply the work itself, happening in front of you in real time, whether or not you are watching. If you are lucky, you see something extraordinary. If you are not, you spend the afternoon on a horse watching cattle move and men shout, which is itself the truth of the thing, and worth more than any rodeo.

These men carry a long staff to move the herd, where the American cowboy reaches for a rope, and you can tell a buttero across a field by it. They have been famous for a long time, and the story they tell to explain the fame is a good one.

In 1890, Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show to Rome, and a Maremma cattle duke watched the American cowboys perform and was unimpressed enough to put up a challenge, his butteri against Cody’s men at breaking horses. The way it is told, the butteri won, a herdsman named Augusto Imperiali riding an American horse none of the cowboys could stay on, and Buffalo Bill took it so badly that he struck his tents the next morning and left the city without paying the bet. The papers in Rome carried it.

What the story does not tell you is how few of them are left. The great estates broke up, the swamp was drained and handed to farmers, the cattle went industrial, and the trade thinned to almost nothing. A handful of families still run the grey long-horned Maremmana the old way, and their meat is priced so high that it goes only to expensive restaurants and people with the right phone number, while the rest of the country eats beef that was never near a horse. The butteri survive now as a few real working estates and a great deal of summer theater. It is a frontier in its last light, and the honest thing is to say so rather than pretend the plain is still thundering with riders. It is mostly quiet out there. That is the point of going.

And then, in the evening, the fire. They set a grill at the place I stayed, a guest’s fire, and I want to be precise that this was for us and not some scene of herdsmen eating together that I am dressing up, because I did not see that and will not invent it. But the method is the method, and it is the rawest good thing I have eaten in this country. The grill is filthy and enormous and has no equipment to it, a sheet of metal over wood and coal. The meat goes on without oil or salt or anything else, a slab of beef the thickness of a fist, and it cooks five or six minutes a side and comes off black on the outside and red within, and a man takes a heavy knife and cuts it into rough cubes, and only now, at the end, does the salt go on, and the oil, and sometimes not even that. You lay it on slices of the unsalted Tuscan bread, and you eat it standing, with your hands, no plate and no fork, and it is as close to the animal as cooking gets.

There is a lie folded into this that I should unfold, because the great Tuscan steak, the fiorentina, is not really a Maremma dish at all. It is Florentine, and the white cattle it is properly cut from, the Chianina, are raised over in Chianti, not here. And the deeper truth is harder than that. The men who spent their lives herding cattle in this bitter country could not afford to eat the cattle. What they ate by their own fires was acquacotta, cooked water, a soup of stale bread and whatever grew wild, with an egg in it on a good day. The slab of beef was the feast, the rare day there was a reason, set against a lifetime of the poverty soup. So when you stand at the grill with two kilos of charred meat in front of you, understand that you are eating the celebration and not the life. Life was the soup.

The capital of all this is Grosseto, and it is the right capital for it, a flat working city on the plain with a small old center wrapped inside a ring of perfectly preserved Medici walls, and you can walk the whole way around. No one puts Grosseto on a postcard, which is exactly its honesty, a real town doing real administrative work in the middle of cowboy country. If you want the food but cannot face the horse, this is where you come and eat it, the heavy carbohydrate-and-meat plates that every cattle culture on earth converges on, the kind that demand a loaf of bread to mop them up and a bottle of the local red, the Morellino, per person to wash them down. It is the same food a Texan would know in his bones.

I drove back toward Rome that night, having done no work at all, only ridden along, and I was destroyed. My legs would not answer, my hips had quit, I was burned through the cream, and I carried out of there a smell I could not wash off, horse and cattle and dirt and sweat, of which the dirt and the sweat came out in the shower and the rest needed three runs through the machine on the highest heat before my clothes stopped reeking of the afternoon. It is the only souvenir worth having from a place like this, and I was glad of it the whole way down the dark road, because for one day, sore and stinking and useless in the saddle, the Hungarian who would have been a Texan got to ride out among his own kind.

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I will give the valley its due first, because anything else would be a lie, and you would see through it. The Val d’Orcia is magical. The hills run off in soft waves to Monte Amiata, the cypresses stand in their files along the dirt roads and crown the rises, the light does the thing the Sienese painters spent three centuries trying to catch, and it is, with no argument from me, the single most beautiful stretch of country in Italy. You should go. It is overrun and overphotographed, and you should go anyway, the same way Venice is drowning in people, and you still have to stand in it once. Some things earn the crowd. This is one of them. I am not going to be clever about that.

What I am going to tell you is that almost none of it is what it pretends to be. The Val d’Orcia is not nature. It is a set. It was built on purpose by city people as an argument about how the countryside ought to look, and it is one of the oldest and most successful pieces of landscape design on earth. Pienza, the perfect little town at the heart of it, was not a town. It was a peasant village called Corsignano until a man born there became Pope Pius the Second and decided to flatten his birthplace and raise in three years, from nothing, a flawless model of a Renaissance city, an idea of human-scaled perfection built to be looked at.

The cypresses that signify Tuscany to the entire planet are not even native trees. They were planted by landowners for shade and for the look of the thing, the way you would place furniture. The most photographed cypress road in the world, the zigzag everyone knows, the one below the villa at La Foce, was laid out and planted by an Anglo-Florentine family in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which makes the timeless eternal soul of Tuscany younger than the motor car.

When the film industry needed a picture of heaven, of the fields a dead hero walks home to, they came and shot it here, and that is the truest thing anyone has ever said about the Val d’Orcia. It is not a place. It is the afterlife as imagined by people who lived in cities. It is how the country looks to men who never spent an hour in it, dreamed up by Florentine bankers five hundred years ago and maintained, beautifully, ever since.

If you want the country itself, the real one, dirty and sweating and unphotogenic, I have already told you where it is, and it is not here. It is over the hills to the southwest, in the Maremma, where the work is real, and the cattle are real, and you come home smelling of it. The Val d’Orcia is the postcard of rural life. The Maremma is rural life. Drive both in one trip, and you will understand the difference in your body, the dream, and the thing the dream was painted over.

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And yet the dream is built on something solid, and this is the part worth slowing down for, because it explains every stone house with a new pool that a foreigner has paid a fortune for. The reason the Tuscan countryside is romantic, the reason it is dotted with handsome stone farmhouses worth restoring instead of the mud and rot that most of peasant Europe left behind, is feudalism, and a particular and unusually decent version of it.

Think of the feudal bargain as a dial. At one end sits the lord, his wealth and his power, and at the other sits the peasant, his freedom and his welfare, and you can turn the dial either way. Turn it hard toward the lord, and you get the dark version, the one in the history books, peasants dying young and poor and rising up in revolt. Turn it toward the peasant and something else happens. The land grows prosperous, because a farmer who keeps most of what he makes builds real things, a stretch of land, a few animals, and a solid stone house his children will inherit and work in turn. There is always a lord nearby who has to be paid, but it is closer to paying your taxes than to bondage. In the Tuscan hills, the dial sat about as far toward the peasant as it ever sat in Europe, and the proof is standing in every field, those stone houses, peasant houses, built to last by people who could afford to build to last.

The system outlived all reason. Its agricultural descendant, the mezzadria, the sharecropping arrangement where the farmer and the landowner split the harvest down the middle, survived in these hills until the nineteen-sixties, inside living memory, by which point Italy was a republic and the rest of Europe had buried feudalism centuries earlier. It lasted because it more or less worked, and the deep, recent bond these people have with their specific patch of ground is the residue of it.

The same world produced the rest of the Tuscan character too. The Italian city-states fought their wars not with mass armies of levied peasants but with hired companies of mercenaries, the condottieri, professionals with no wish to die for someone else’s quarrel, so the wars were often closer to theater than to slaughter, elaborate, maneuvering, comparatively bloodless. Machiavelli, a Florentine clerk who watched it up close and despaired, mocked one famous battle as having killed a single man, and him by falling off his horse. He was exaggerating to make a point, and the point was that this beautiful, bloodless game had left Italy soft and undefended, which it proved to be the moment real armies came down from France and sacked the place. That is the world this landscape grew out of: rich, fragmented, over-clever, fighting with money and politics instead of peasants, the world that produced both the most civilized countryside in Europe and the man who wrote the coldest book ever written about power. No accident that Machiavelli was Italian and not English or French.

So that is what is under the postcard. Now, the postcard itself, the towns, and here I have less to say than you would expect, because Pienza and Montepulciano have become, and I mean this precisely, the canteens of a theme park. They are where you go to park, walk a pretty street, use the toilet, refill the water, eat a plate of something, and buy a thing to take home. They are the food court between the rides. Montepulciano is the worse case and I have written about it before and I have not softened on it: it is constructed like everything else here, but it has also been hollowed out and sold back to you, the shops full of pasta no local eats and leather made on another continent, the streets a slow river of lanyards, and on the afternoon I spent there it nearly ended the whole region for me. The valley’s beauty does not redeem the town. It makes the town’s emptiness uglier by contrast.

Which is why the only real advice I have is about how to drive this place rather than how to stop in it. The good news is that the valley is enormous, far bigger than the famous spots, so even with the rented convertibles full of loud people and the cars abandoned at every viewpoint and the photographers giving their half-hours to the grass, you will not feel crowded once you are off the main stops. The crowding is only in the hilltop towns and the canteens. So skip them, or touch them lightly. Pack your own bread and water so you are not held hostage to the food court. Find one of the small towns the buses cannot be bothered with, the kind with a single piazza and one bar and one restaurant and two streets, sitting on a back road off the circuit, and aim the car at the spaces between things instead of the things. Keep moving. The valley is best at thirty kilometers an hour through the empty parts, not standing still at the famous overlook with two hundred other people.

We did exactly that, the last time through, on the way down to Rome. We found a town I will not name because naming it would ruin it, no bigger than a wide spot with a church, and we sat on a low wall in the late sun and ate our sandwiches with the whole gold valley dropping away in front of us and not one other person in sight, while somewhere back on the ridge the line of stopped cars went on photographing the grass. Then we got back in and drove on, down and out of the painted country, south toward the hills where the cattle are, and the dirt is real, and nobody has ever once pulled over to photograph a field, because down there a field is a thing you work, not a thing you frame.

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