Tuscany
The Adventure of Travel: My first journey to Italy was in 2009. I traveled with Friday, my collapsible bike. I bicycled the backroads of Tuscany from olive farm to olive farm. Working in the groves and vineyards I met a myriad of wonderful people and personalities...their stories, as well as my search for the essence of Italy, is told in my first book ~ An Italian Journey: A Harvest of Revelations in the Olive Groves of Tuscany.
Lazio
My second journey to Italy was in the fall of 2015. My wife Mardi and I flew to Rome and then took a train north into the Sabine Hills to work on a farm picking olives. On our days off we hiked to the surrounding hilltop towns of Torri in Sabina, Casperia, and Montasola. The stories of our adventures and the people we met on this sojourn in the Italian countryside will be told in our upcoming book due to be released in late 2017.
Trentino-South Tyrol
Following a wonderful weekend in Rome on my second trip to Italy we boarded a high speed train to Bolzano in the Italian Alps. Our hosts operated a thriving agriturismo in a gorgeous high mountain valley. If you've seen The Sound of Music, you have a good idea of the beauty that surrounded us. To earn our keep we worked as shepherds and carpenters. In exchange we got to live a Heidi-like life hiking from village to village and discovered that few people in these remote alpine towns speak Italian. Our English wasn't much use either. German was the language of the villagers. Our sojourn in South Tyrol, and the stories of the people we met, will be chronicled in a new book to be released in late 2017.
Campania
For our journey of a lifetime, my third trip to Italy and Mardi's second, we traveled to Italy by ocean liner and chose the spectacular Amalfi Coast to celebrate our much delayed honeymoon. We could not have been more delighted with the beauty of the coastline and the mountains or the hospitality and friendliness of the people. We fell in love with every town we spent time in during our month long sojourn. Each village seemed to have its own unique character and spirit. The stories of these towns and the people who live there, and their effect on us, will be told in our new book to be released in late 2017.
Basilicata
After spending three delightful weeks on the Amalfi Coast in the spring of 2016, Mardi and I rented a car to travel to the remote town of Aliano which was built atop calanchi, deforested, sandy, rocky hills that are highly susceptible to erosion. Aliano came to the attention of the world because of the beautiful book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, that Carlo Levi wrote about the years (1935-36) he spent in Aliano (Gagliano) as a political prisoner of Mussolini. On our journey to Aliano we fell in love with the people of Pietrapertosa, Castelmezzano, and Accettura. Their stories and a portrait of Aliano today will be told in my new book to be released in late 2017.