Tuscia, Uffizi, and a woman who owes you nothing
Reading Table I.
I write about Italy and the towns and experiences most people skip. Mine is one point of view. Others have theirs, and I love to read them all. So most weeks, I find a few pieces from other writers worth passing on.
This is Anywhere Italy’s Reading Table. Here are the latest articles from writers who made my days better.
Italy Untold — The Woman Who Owes You Nothing
Everyone arrives in Italy with a grandmother already in their head: apron, sauce, feeding you against your will. This piece introduces the other one, the sciura, a Milanese woman in her seventies who spends her day on a standing coffee, an exhibition at Villa Necchi, and dinner near the old racecourse, and owes you precisely nothing.
Same country, same generation as the nonna, opposite answer to the question of what a woman’s life is for. I went in expecting a fond little character sketch and got a real argument about freedom and what it cost the women who took it. It rearranged a cliché.
Lisa Ellzey — How I Became Illegal in My Own Neighborhood
Italy has a quiet talent for deciding, on your behalf, which of your homes is the real one. Lisa learned this when a registered letter, the kind you have to sign for in person, hunted her down in a Calabrian town of six thousand on the same morning the bookshelf she’d chased for a month finally turned up.
I have stood in that exact ‘anagrafe’ line, so I read the whole thing nodding. What she does with it is turn a piece of bureaucratic cruelty into something close to comedy, the postman cast as envoy of a state that has misplaced you on purpose. The funniest thing I read all week was about paperwork, and I did not expect to type that sentence.
The Italy Edit — Secret Italy: Tuscia, Rome’s Most Underrated Escape
Tuscia is the region I keep promising myself I’ll write about and keep not writing about, so it stings a little that someone got there first and did it well. It’s the Etruscan country north of Rome, the people who more or less invented central Italy before Rome swallowed them and stamped its own name on everything. Her point is the one I make in my sleep: a place doesn’t get overlooked because it has less to say. It gets overlooked because it has the misfortune of sitting between Florence and Rome.
It was also a good reminder for me to write about this region. I’ve spent a year in Rome, and Tuscia was one of our most frequent day-trip destinations. I have quite fond memories of Ronciglione in particular.
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Letters from Tuscany — Fewer shoulds, more coulds
Most writing about the Italian summer is about sunsets, tomatoes, and a glass of something. Giulia writes the version that also includes the heat that flattens you by noon and the cooking classes she still has to run through it. It’s a quiet seasonal essay from rural Tuscany, wheat going gold, raspberries, dinner outside, the garden making its demands. What I like is that she lets the pleasure and the exhaustion sit in the same sentence instead of selling you only the good half.
To be honest, I don’t read cooking blogs that much, but Giulia always mixes her recipes with real stories, so it’s always worth reading her articles.
Beppe Castro — My Journey to Civitavecchia
A place everyone passes through and nobody stops in is usually worth a day, and Civitavecchia is the purest case I know: a working port most people experience only as the walk between a train and a cruise ship. She takes the train out alone, half-chasing an overnight ferry to Sardinia she may or may not board, and finds exactly what I go looking for in a port, an Italy with a job to do and no interest in performing for anyone.
The history sits underneath, Etruscan then Roman, but the piece stays in the unglamorous present of the place. I have a soft spot for cities and areas that have no time for you. This is one of them, well seen.
Eric J Lyman — Ditch the Apps. Look for a Dog.
Eric played some old memories on me by writing this article about dogs, because we also had a dog. Sadly, he passed away 2 years ago. He was 18 years old, which for a medium-sized mutt is a medical miracle.
Anyway, Eric shared a trick worth more than any app: when you’re lost or hungry in an Italian city, find someone walking a dog and ask them. The writer, a local who kept getting mistaken for a tourist while walking her own dog through the Ghetto and Trastevere, makes the case that dog owners are easy to approach, know their streets block by block, and carry the kind of local knowledge no algorithm will surface.
Alexandra Lawrence — What’s in a Room?
I never once thought about who decided where a painting hangs, and now I can’t stop. The Uffizi just rearranged its Botticelli rooms, and rather than write about the Birth of Venus again, Alexandra digs up the gallery’s first director, a man who in the 1770s argued that ordinary kids should come in and train their eyes on beauty, that a museum was a school for seeing and not a vault for the rich. One fact does a lot of work here: Botticelli sat unfashionable for roughly four hundred years before anyone decided he was great. Taste is not permanent. It is just confident. A sharp, specific piece about how a room quietly tells you what to admire.
Italy with Antonio — Italian Food, Wine, and Spirit Labels Explained
I love Antonio’s blog because he explains the basics of this country with finesse. This time: food labels. Every foreigner in Italy eventually learns to nod along to the DOP and DOCG alphabet without quite knowing what any of it means, and Antonio is the one who finally makes it click.
The stretch I loved is the Super Tuscan story, the Bolgheri renegades who broke the Chianti rulebook, got dumped into the table-wine bin for it, and then watched a 1972 Sassicaia beat the great Bordeaux estates in a blind tasting in 1978.
If you’ve ever stood frozen in front of a wine shelf in Italy pretending to understand the fascetta, this is the piece that unlocks it.
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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Peter, thank you so much for including me in this roundup. Let me know next time you’re in Florence and we can go analyze a museum room together!
Thank you so much for this mention Peter — I'm so glad to find another Tuscia lover!! 😊