Situated along Italy’s Adriatic Coast in the Emilia Romagna region, Ravenna is an often-overlooked location for travelers. But there is much to discover in this history-laden town, from Roman and Byzantine structures to art and culture to crypts, libraries with cats, and adventures galore. Find your home base via Azzurro Club (check for seaside locations, so you can have the best of history, culture, and beaches), and then get ready to explore!

The Via Francigena (fran-CHEE-jee-nah) is a pilgrimage route from the Middle Ages that starts in England and crosses France and Switzerland before entering Italy at the Gran San Bernardo Pass. Less known than the Spanish pilgrimage route, the Via Francigena was revived in the 1990s and is becoming more traversed each year. 

In 2009, after a divorce and a traumatic illness, I undertook a solo pilgrimage on the Via Francigena, inspired by a desire to purge emotional demons and achieve more of a heart-mind-body connection. 

Do you love your fiction to be intercultural, full of travel and learning about new things and cultures? Me, too. One such read is a new book by Katherine Reay, entitled A Portrait of Emily Price. It's a book about finding yourself, in more ways than one. It's about family, and doing what you love (and finding out what you love, which is a whole different ball game), and intercultural adjustment, and love, and moving to another country, and finding a new family. Here's the truth: I couldn't put it down.

The best way to see Italy - and Europe, for that matter - is with your own set of wheels. I was once told by our friend Vicenzo in his deepest Italian accent speaking perfectly broken English, "Italians like the curve on their roads and their women," and from the voluptuous Sophia Loren to the hair pin turns of the Alpe di Siusi in the Dolomites, there has never been a more true statement.

Maggie Burr is a DPhil candidate in Classical Archaeology at Oxford, where she spends her time trying to understand what ancient farmers did, and why. She grew up in Lexington, MA, Austin, TX, and Beverly, MA. 

High up in the northwest corner of Italy is the town of Andalo, in the province of Trentino.  

I have a new obsession with Pinterest. It’s a travel photographer's dream!

It’s not what you think. My obsession is actually finding the places I discover on Pinterest.

Castello di Sammezzano

After reading Diana Baur’s post entitled Forty Things I’ve Learned in Italy, I couldn’t help but be inspired to write my own.

The cliffside hike from Monterosso al Mare, the most northern seaside village of Italy’s renowned Cinque Terre, to neighboring Vernazza is extraordinarily scenic, but it’s also arduous—the two colorful, ancient towns are connected by an endless series of steep stairways that overlook the rugged coast. “I can’t endure another step,” I breathlessly told my thirty year old daughter after a few minutes of strenuous climbing. She suggested I turn around and take the train back to our rented apartment in Riomaggiore, the southernmost village, while she continued on.