Travel news, information on the best places to visit in Italy, where to go for vacation suggestions of travelers, personal trip experiences, and HIKING: follow me on my exploration of the most exciting adventures
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Looking for the Slow Life, trying to escape the hectic pace of our lives, is the dream of having a peaceful life like our ancestors. I'll tell you today what their life was really like.
Your phone has buzzed seventeen times since you started reading this. Mine too. We live in an age where everything arrives instantly, yet nothing feels like it truly lands.
But let me take you somewhere else. To a woman I never met, walking a path I’ll never walk.
A friend told me about his grandmother. Every month, she would fill a wooden chest with whatever her hands had made—preserves, woven goods, vegetables from the terraced garden clinging to the mountainside. Then she would lift that chest onto her head and begin to walk.
By mid-morning, the procession had already begun. First came the motorcycle outriders, their engines growling importantly. Then the police, lights flashing their blue authority across shuttered shops and closed intersections.
This Sunday, I'll stand in a garden that took 140 years to become what it is. Not because anyone was slow. Because that's how long it takes to grow a masterpiece.
I’m volunteering with FAI—Italy’s National Trust—at Villa Silvio Mosca in Biella, a place most tourists will never see.
Have you ever seen doorbells like this? Lovely!
It sits in the shadow of the Alps, in a town known for wool mills and rain. The kind of place many of us skip on our way to more photogenic destinations. But here’s what they’re missing: a lesson our accelerated world desperately needs.
In 1889, Silvio Mosca—an engineer who’d made his fortune in textiles—stood on a bare plot of land. He could have hired an architect. Instead, he drew the plans himself. For two years, he personally oversaw every stone, every tree placement, every sightline. He planted a cork oak, exotic and improbable in Piedmont’s climate. He positioned cedars where they’d frame the mountains just so. He created artificial hills to make a small garden feel infinite.
In Italy, time isn't chased—it's shared. The tagliere, a rustic wooden board laden with simple abundance, invites you to slow down, one bite at a time.
Water that tastes of vanished oceans, flowing toward a sea that inherited the dreams of Tethys.
The green stones of Monviso are not alone in their exile.
Fromthe hills above Turin, from the ancient terraces of Biella, even on the clearest days, from the distant spires of Milan, one mountain alone commands the western horizon.
Not the highest peak in the Alps—that honor belongs to Mont Blanc—but the most imperious, the most solitary, the most impossible to ignore.
For many of us, Italy is sun-drenched piazzas, the gentle clink of wine glasses, and the slow, sweet rhythm of days that have unfolded the same way for centuries. It’s a romantic vision, but
But Italy, like any ancient place, is a palimpsest. Layers of beauty are written over layers of blood and iron.