You can tell a good day from the morning
Sunday Espresso I.
Buona domenica!
There is this Italian saying, il buon giorno si vede dal mattino, which roughly says, ‘you can tell a good day from the morning.’ I picked this not just because it is a bit fatalistic, but also because it signals a start. I started Anywhere Italy a week ago. Our community already needs a 3-table reservation at a trattoria, which makes me even more optimistic about something that started as a love project.
The best thing about being an expat in any country is the ability to see things with fresh eyes. I don’t see the deepest depths, the transgenerational problems, or the nuanced details, since I don’t work with other Italians, haven’t married an Italian, don’t have an Italian family, or even a circle of local friends here. But for sure, as a straniero, I see things without any social pressures. Fresh. Not correct, just honest. I want to share this honest view with you every week, and through the posts we create on our page.
Allora, since this is a weekly newsletter, I’ll share where we went & did this week. I immediately want to break this not-even-existing habit by telling you where we went last week instead, because this week, well, we were busy launching Anywhere Italy. So, last week we went to Umbria.
Umbria is a better version of Tuscany in that it is free of tourists. Compared to Toscana, there is literally nothing extraordinary to see there. There are Assisi, Gubbio, Todi, and some other smaller hilltop towns. Nearly identical to Volterra or Montepulciano, but compared to those, almost no one goes to the Umbria ones. Umbria is also one of the few Italian regions without access to the sea. It has steep hills, deep forests, and almost no international airport connections or bigger cities. Yes, there’s Perugia. But that’s pretty much that.
So, naturally, we love Umbria so much. We were able to score a week's stay in San Savino, a small borgo (a medieval castle-like mountain-top village) overlooking Lake Trasimeno, one of the largest lakes in Italy, just a few minutes’ drive from Perugia.
We visited Assisi, which has one of the most dramatic basilicas we’ve seen in such an old town like this, and it is famous because, of course, St. Francis of Assisi. The town is amazing if you skip the main road from the basilica to the main square and you take the small alleys, otherwise, you end up in a weird Catholic Disneyland. I’m almost certain that not just Jesus, but St. Francis would have set fire to the gimmick shops selling trinkets to everyone passing by, and I am a bit surprised that no one tried to sell a St. Francis-styled coffee mug.
There will be new posts shared from this trip, as we have so much to tell about Perugia, Todi, Assisi, and the Trasimeno Lake area, especially the fact that I could taste freshwater fish that wasn’t trout. By the sea, we are pampered with endless options of seafood, so having freshwater fish is something that we treat almost like a delicacy. If you are around that area, don’t be afraid to try some.
As you can tell from the pictures, the weather was kinda April-like. We did have rainfall on us in Perugia multiple times, which made climbing up and down to the old town, which is obviously on the top of a mountain-hill-something, so we had to climb a lot, and I mean a lot, despite the beloved minimetro that is famous in Perugia.
The weather has improved a lot this week, so, on top of launching Anywhere Italy, we visited the flower festival, which is an annual event on the first weekend of May here in Marina di Pietrasanta. This time, it was combined with Labor Day and Mother’s Day, so extra-super-special, it truly feels as if all of Firenze is trying to fit onto our small piazza.
We’ll share more about that experience next week.
Alla prossima,
Peter
Pietrasanta, 3 May 2026
Our new guide
We publish a new guide every other week, sometimes weekly. They are collections of articles around one area, region, or topic. Our first guide was obvious to produce for us, since we actually live here: Versilia. The beautiful coast of Tuscany, which most tourists totally overlook.
If I say the word Toscana, you probably picture cedar trees, hilltop towns, the Chianti region, the Vall d'Orca, the Renaissance of Firenze, and so on. Almost no one pictures this 20km of uninterrupted sandy coast, with the dramatic backdrop of the Apuan Alps on one side and the Tyrrhenian Sea on the other.
Our guides are published weekly, and we constantly update them with new articles. So worth checking back on them from time to time.
Read our Versilia guide here: