I laughed a little too hard recently when reading Anne Lamott’s words, “By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards”. I cannot be the only human whose covid days, home-cooked meals and masked conversations have become excruciatingly banal. We’re all yearning for discovery, spice and a rollicking time anywhere but […]
Holidays are lurking and with it, more Coronavirus cases and renewed lockdowns. It’s all been enough for anyone to reach for the bottle. As we hunker down for the winter, we asked around our planning team to see who’s got the bartending chops in the Trufflepig farm. Below are some road-tested recipes that came back […]
Italy’s food culture is a constellation of countless regional specialties, so place-peculiar that dishes can vary significantly in the span of just a few hundred meters. Such is the case of some mountain valleys, for instance, where the natural landscape has helped keep the local from spreading further. But one aspect that unites all these […]
Meet the region of Tuscia [“Two-Sha”] – Tuscany’s rugged cousin. A few weeks ago, once the lockdown was partially lifted in Italy and we could travel within the regions where we live, I decided to escape and so to Tuscia, just a few kilometres outside Rome, did I head. Geographically, Tuscia stretches from the coast […]
Here we are in a snow globe of uncertainty. At first, we read every headline. Then we retreated from the media all together for mental well-being. Some wore masks. Some went rogue. We all wonder when we will next travel? How far? Where to? Will the buoyant snow flakes of our current globe settle to the […]
I was in elementary school when the images of magistrate Giovanni Falcone’s car blowing up on its way back from the airport filled every TV-screen in the country. The third instalment of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather had come out just a couple of years prior, but this was not a scene from a movie. […]
As Italy and most of Europe are gradually lifting the lockdown, many of us over the past few months have become intimately familiar with the concept and the challenges of ‘quarantine’, or sheltering in place for an extended period of time as a measure of public health. Italy reached the mark of 70 days. Some […]
Venice recently made headlines for all the wrong reasons. On November 12th the city was swallowed by a whopping 187 cm (or six feet) of “acqua alta” (high tide) above mean sea level. It was just a few centimetres below the record reached in 1966, which Venetians still refer to with horror as ‘Acqua Granda’ […]
Often, when people think of Lake Como, their mind conjures up images of sumptuous historic villas and luxurious gardens – and rightfully so. There’s an embarrassment of riches, mostly clustered between Como and the central portion of the lake: think for instance of Villa del Balbianello (where they filmed a scene from Star Wars Episode […]
Naples doesn’t do subtle. Everything in the Southern Italian city is about abundance: if you’ve been there before, you’ll certainly know that food doesn’t come in small doses, nor with light preparations. And if Baroque is one of the arts that best encapsulates the city’s spirit, Naples has also made a name for itself for […]
The church of Santa Croce is one of those monuments that never ceases to amaze me, no matter how many times I visit; and truth be told, I plan on spending some time there each time I’m in Florence. There are so many reasons as to why it keeps luring me back: for one, this […]
We’ve been out on the road this year…. a lot. At half-time on 2019, our trotters are worn smooth, and it’s time to take stock. The pictures above flooded my inbox when I naively wrote to our planning team to ask for a few shots from recent research trips. I was struck by the awesome […]
Nowadays, Negroni is one of the most popular Italian aperitifs in the world, but its origin is steeped in legend. According to tradition, Count Camillo Negroni invented it in Florence in 1919, when he asked the bartender at his usual watering hole (Caffè Casoni in Via de’ Tornabuoni 83, now closed) to fortify his Americano […]
Luisa, the newest addition to Trufflepig’s planning team, begins her Sounder career, like her days, with a strong Roman coffee: The Bad The belief that coffee in Italy is something extraordinary is very deeply rooted in popular culture worldwide. But, truth be told, this is more myth than fact. Not all coffees are created equal, […]
Quit your job. Tell your friends. Dust off your résumé and fire up your arrabbiata recipe. We’re hiring a new Italy planner. This is a full-time position within our award-winning European planning team, handling our trips to Italy and beyond. Excuse me: handling our highly-orchestrated, unusually pungent, exceptionally quirky and universally acclaimed trips to Italy and beyond. That’s more like […]
In Palermo, the driving is best left to the natives. I can only surmise that local licence holders have genetically mutated to remain placid in this perpetual game of chicken. Motorists bicker with their horns like an island of squabbling siblings. In the big city, our advice is: call a cab. Palermo aside, I confess […]