Every month, I am delighted by the conversations we have during Ask Me Anything About Italy. Yes, people bring their questions, but it’s still a conversation, and a deeper one than is being had in other similar forums. Thank you fo…

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I’m looking forward to seeing you tonight at 8 pm ET!

If you can’t join me live, send your question to danielle@danielleoteri.com

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83910068423?pwd=WSbkAZllcf8AnyaX9OxbKp5i3QqrTF.1

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Instead, I believe that history becomes an agent of positive change when we can see ourselves in the tapestry of the human experience. That’s why my posts and podcasts have been much more history-focused lately, and based on the number of downloads, it seems these topics are resonating!

If you missed them, here’s a quick summary:

The Mozzarella Highway

I spoke about the unusual historical connections that made mozzarella di bufala possible, the most delicious thing you can taste in Southern Italy.

The Loss of the Picturesque

Last week, I published a podcast about a guidebook from the 1890s that describes “vanishing Naples” and made me realize that every generation sees the last of something, and nothing is ever as constant as we’d like it to be.

The Secret of Florence’s Dome

There was a second podcast last week — unusual for me — but with the threat to annihilate a “whole civilization,” I felt compelled to share the fascinating story about how the dome of Florence was not a revival of ancient Rome, but of innovation from medieval Iran that Florentine merchants acquired on the Silk Road. This isn’t hypothetical; it was proven in 1971 by Professor Piero Sanpaolesi, but his work has been ignored in favor of the myth. Now, a new generation of scholars has taken up the work where Sanpaolesi left off in 1980. I really hope you’ll listen to this episode.

And don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned Italy travel advice! This Thursday, April 16th, at 8 pm ET is the April Ask Me Anything About Italy Zoom call. The Destination Deep Dive on Tuscany will be delivered as a podcast late this month to paid subscribers only.

Happy Sunday!

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But Filippo Brunelleschi’s innovation — a double-shell dome built with herringbone masonry — had been used to build mosques and mausoleums in Iran. And 15th-century Florentine merchants, who had large networks and communities in Iran, particularly Soltaniyeh, were no doubt very well acquainted with them.

In this episode, I’m discussing this incredible story with Massoud Katebeh, an Iranian-American engineer who studied in Florence. We are both fascinated with the story of Piero Sanpaolesi, the professor who first revealed these Persian models for the dome of Florence in 1971, and was ignored.

Now, a new generation of scholars, in particular Dr. Lorenzo Vigotti and Prof. Hadi Safaeipour, is building on Sanpaolesi’s groundbreaking research and adding brilliant new insights. Please learn more about DOMES: Architectural Technology Transfer on the Silk Road at iraniandomes.eu, an ongoing project that is very much imperiled by the war.

If you enjoyed this essay episode, you can subscribe for more at danielleoteri.com. If you’re planning a trip to Italy and would like some expert guidance, book a trip consultation at danielleoteri-italy.com. Lastly, you can always buy me a coffee.

Also, if you like stories about history revealed through science, listen to the episode Vittoria Colonna Had It All, and find out how the most famous woman of the Italian Renaissance had an extraordinary secret that was only revealed in the 1980s when scientists conducted tests on her mummified body.

Guidebooks have several lives, and despite the internet, they have been diminished but are far from dead. That’s because they are among the only fact-checked pieces of travel material available. When you are paying for a guidebook, you are paying for knowledge. The transaction is clear.

Purchasing a guidebook is first a dream. It’s a catalog of possibilities. Then it becomes a strategic tool, a travel companion, and, when it returns home, either a beloved souvenir or totally useless. Often, people will hold on to them until they have to move or really clean and make space, and then Lonely Planet Prague has to go in the trash. And don’t even try to “donate” your 15-year-old guidebook; you know nobody wants it.

But guidebooks have another life if you hold on to them long enough. They become a time capsule — an eyewitness account that was also aggressively fact-checked about a world that no longer exists, that you can use to reflect on that world, and see just how much has changed.

That’s what has suddenly caused an essay I wrote in August of 2022 to go viral. It’s called “The Before Sunrise Generation,” and I wrote it in response to Gen X clients who were returning to travel now that their kids were leaving home and they had time and money to travel once again. They would ask if they should buy a Eurail pass or stay in a pensione, and I found myself explaining how the way they had traveled in the 1990s really no longer exists.

Then this current wave of 90s nostalgia — inspired by “Love Story,” about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette — has the children of Gen Xers marveling at how free the 90s seemed. One hundred percent of social interactions were in real life, with total presence, nobody on their phone because they didn’t exist. Think about Jesse and Celine, the protagonists of the 1995 film Before Sunrise. They start talking while riding the train, and decide to get off together in Vienna, and spend the night wandering the city and talking. Nobody is tracking their location, and no photos are taken. Two strangers on a train, just figuring it out. If this movie were set in the present day, maybe they’d meet in line for a much-delayed Ryanair flight and maybe start talking only if they had been there so long their phone batteries died.

But the thing that today seems so old school and authentic at one point, the vulgar new thing.

We Will Simply Drift

Prior to rail travel, making the Grand Tour of Italy required private transportation, personal invitations, and letters of introduction. You had to be a person of means and education. Trains democratized travel. And then another industry emerged to meet that new tourist: the guidebook.

Baedeker guides, first published in Germany, were famous for their red cloth covers. They were comprehensive guides to cities and rural places, and they removed the need for a letter of introduction forever. They liberated people from relying solely on local guides who were only available to elite networks. The term “Baedekering” could be used with the same snark I sometimes reserve for TikTok tourism.

In E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, “Baedeker” is a codeword for the pedantic sightseeing that Forster portrayed as typical of the English touring Italy. It’s funny that they were portrayed as kind of low-brow, because they were very dense with information on art and history, and were written by specialists. They were especially praised for their German precision, which was exactly what made them fall out of favor after World War II. German precision was uh, no longer a virtue.

Early in the story, Lucy is shown studying Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy and committing “to memory the most important dates of Florentine history.” Later, she meets an eccentric lady novelist who disapproves of such solemnity and tells her, “No, you are not to look at your Baedeker. We will simply drift.”

Overtourism in 1909?

The author Henry James was not a fan of the new train-traveling tourist. In 1909, he wrote Italian Hours, where he decried that Venice was overrun by tourists, totally devoid of authenticity — that the sentimental tourist’s sole quarrel with his Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone, to be original, to have — at least to himself — the air of making discoveries.

Just as I can be very eye-rolly about TikTok tourism, those who had experienced the Grand Tour were disgusted by the overtourism that proliferated in the 1890s.

I have been saying for a while that, because of technology, those of us born pre-Y2K have witnessed an accelerated period of time in which technology has changed more quickly than anything else in history. But Ada Palmer, the author of the fantastic book Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, articulated this in an interview, where she said people in the 1310s were nostalgic for the way it was in the 1300s, and there has always been upending innovation, even if we look back and don’t find the innovation particularly interesting. Chairs with backs, different kinds of metallurgy… people are always innovating.

Naples in the Nineties

But I fully confronted my self-important idea when I opened an old guidebook called Naples in the Nineties —about the 1890s.

The first chapter is called “Vanishing Naples.” The author, a British consul to South Italy, wrote a survey of Naples and the surrounding area for travelers. He speaks most about Naples as a place to see the last of the old world: superstitions fading, religious practices disappearing, a pre-industrial way of life giving way.

Naples had been the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies — a monarchy — that ended with Italian unification in 1861. This was to be a good thing, economically, for everyone, but of course, nobody had any idea how much more change was barreling toward them.

The 1890s were the heart of the second industrial revolution, which came later to Italy because the Italian peninsula had always had such a robust agricultural economy — really since the Roman Empire — that it didn’t need to industrialize until it was absolutely forced to.

The monarchies of pre-modern Italy fell when Italy unified as a modern nation in 1861. Wealth consolidated in the north, with an industrial corridor developing between Milan, Turin, and Genoa. Add in harsh taxation, and Southern Italy went into economic free fall. The result was mass emigration. Cheap labor for the northern factories, plus financial support from family working abroad, helped Italy fully industrialize.

The damage to the south had begun long before Italian unification, with the industrialization of wool production. The wool and olive oil trade had fueled the Renaissance and sustained the economy of southern Italy for centuries. The Medici and the great banking houses of Florence built their wealth on wool, and the whole system ran on transhumance, the twice-yearly migration of massive sheep herds along ancient grass paths called tratturi, from the highlands of Abruzzo down through Molise to the plains of Puglia. Shepherds had been following these routes since the 3rd century BC. The families who owned the flocks built the great palaces you still find in the mountain towns of Abruzzo. Then, the first phase of the industrial revolution at the turn of the 18th century gutted the wool market. British industrialization mechanized textile production, collapsing cloth prices, and eliminating the economic reason to maintain the herds.

In the 1890s, many of these rural places in Italy collapsed. Naples, chaotic and changeable, was wobbling through it.

Eustace spends much of his book discussing the wearing of amulets and the belief in spirits and spells, which are also disappearing. He catalogs the amulets people wore to keep away evil spirits: the mermaid, the seahorse — objects that would keep away the bad air that brought cholera and also malaria. The 1870s and 1880s saw terrible cholera outbreaks across Italy, spread by standing water, an easy fix that was finally resolved in the 1890s. Better sanitation diminished superstition. The mermaid is still a symbol of Naples, but you won’t see it as an amulet to ward off the bad air. You will see the cornicello, though — a little red horn. It’s everywhere in Naples: on keychains and dashboards and restaurant walls. It transformed from a tool to a symbol of identity.

And what’s interesting is that even though so much has changed, the descriptions aren’t that different from what you’ll experience today, which is really fascinating commentary on how the spirit of a place can persist. Henry James in Italian Hours described the waterfront of Naples, the lungomare, its lazzaroni, its peasants fishing on the waterfront, and the general air of beauty and chaos. Now it’s pedestrianized, lined with hotels and restaurants, but still chaotic in that Neapolitan way — full of life. You’ll still see locals with their fishing poles in the water, right next to the port where the cruise ships dock and where millions of Italians once departed for lives abroad. It’s completely different and yet completely the same.

The Loss of the Picturesque

Naples in the Nineties emphasizes much of the advice I pass on today. Go to Ischia. Visit the ruins at Baia. Go see the stadium in Capua, which is like seeing the Colosseum, except that there will only be you and an older Belgian couple visiting. (Every archaeological site in Italy has one Belgian couple visiting. I don’t know who writes their guidebooks, but they must be good people.) Yes, Capri is full of beauty, but hardly any Caprese live there anymore because the expats have taken over. Yes, that was what he said in 1897!

He discusses Torre del Greco and how coral supplies have diminished; the fishermen now have to go all the way to Sicily, where they find far inferior coral, yet they are still selling cameos there. One hundred and thirty years later, they are still selling cameos there because the craft has survived.

And Torre Annunziata, he recommended trying macaroni, since all the pasta factories are there. He writes: “The principal industry of the town is macaroni making, which may be seen here in great perfection on application at any of the mills. Until recently, it was supposed that macaroni, like wine, could only be made by manual labor. The skill of modern engineers has shown this notion to be fallacious, and macaroni is now almost universally made by machinery and is not at all inferior to that made by the old-fashioned plant. We have, of course, a loss of the picturesque, but we are learning to bear this loss with the serenity acquired by habit.”

How many times have I tried to frame a photo to block out the electrical wires, or looked for a Vespa or an old Fiat to anchor my shot instead of the more ubiquitous Toyota Yaris? In many ways, tourism is the biggest thing protecting the picturesque. Nobody wants to go on a food tour that takes you to Conad or Edil.

Here’s a detail I just loved — Eustace notices “the public writers at their tables in the streets, fewer of them now, their business decidedly slacker than it was in the old days.” These “scrivani” were people who served the illiterate: filling out documents, writing letters to relatives abroad, and also frequently writing love letters.

The post office was putting them out of business by centralizing bureaucratic operations. The scrivano, who had been the human interface between the illiterate citizen and the written world, was being replaced by an institution.

Their Business Decidedly Slacker

When I was traveling in 2001 and 2002, I used internet cafés the same way — once every few days, you’d buy an hour, log into your Yahoo or AOL account, and check emails that were still being written like letters. The smartphone erased the need to make the time and spend the money, and now AI empowers anyone to be completely uninhibited in their written expression in any language.

And speaking of AI, Eustace also writes about Herculaneum, buried alongside Pompeii in 79 AD. He describes the discovery of the Villa of the Papyri, originally called “the house of the coal merchant” because of the carbon fragments found there. Later, they discovered those pieces of carbon were charred rolls of papyrus. An entire Roman library, carbonized by the eruption.

He writes: “There is no saying what literary treasures this library may not contain. Hitherto nothing of the first importance has been found, the works being chiefly philosophical, but there is every reason to hope that a wealthy man’s library, contained in 79 AD, may contain many works which have been lost to the world.”

Going Very Rapidly Indeed

He wrote that in 1897. Those same scrolls — still unreadable for over a century because they crumble the moment you try to open them — are now being decoded by AI. The Vesuvius Challenge, a project that used machine learning to read the carbonized papyrus without physically unrolling it, has already recovered text. We may yet find out what was in that library.

Eustace couldn’t have imagined it. Neither could I, really, until it happened.

As someone who attended both high school and college in the 90s, the internet just seemed to happen. We had Prodigy, then AOL, and Instant Messenger, but they all seemed like new toys for about ten years, until everything rapidly digitized in the early aughts. It’s funny, because I feel like I saw the end of the old world in Florence in the 90s, when there were still little shops on the side streets with nothing more than a pot of hot oil and an older woman frying things in it. And I yearn for that again as I see people feel morally obligated to stand in line for viral sandwiches inspired by social media.

He closes the chapter: “If we have dwelt at some length on Naples from the old world point of view, it is because we love her best clad in her old garments… but we need not blind ourselves to the fact that all this must go. Naples is going very rapidly indeed.”

I opined in my Before Sunrise essay that the internet democratized meticulous planning, but it annihilated spontaneity.

But the lesson from Eustance is: We are learning to bear this loss with the serenity acquired by habit.

We are always witnessing the end of something and the beginning of something.

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Here’s the Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86531496365?pwd=P2REnO1AtSbBv6XWieElXfgq142dUc.1

The Destination Deep Dive is postponed until April because there’s too much for me…

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The most delicious thing you can eat in Southern Italy is buffalo milk mozzarella. Italy has earned such a sterling culinary reputation that most people just open their mouths and say yes to whatever is put in front of them. But every once in a while, someone says buffalo mozzarella, what the hell is that?

It is a strange thing to encounter, especially because the languid, enormous, but very sensitive water buffalo are cugini to the ones you’ll find in Vietnam or Cambodia, where buffalo milk mozzarella is not a thing. Buffalo mozzarella is made primarily in the region of Campania. It graces pizzas in Naples and has a different casein than most cow’s milk, so the lactose-intolerant among us can indulge. Buffalo farms abound in Caserta, near the stupendous Palace of Caserta, from where the Bourbon monarchy ruled over “the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” Before Italy became the nation we know it as today in 1861, it was a monarchy that pioneered several industries, including a dairy industry based on buffalo milk. But even more exquisite is the stuff made at a handful of farms, a little farther south.

If you’re driving there, maybe on a day trip from Naples or the Amalfi Coast, you’ll inevitably get snarled in traffic on what locals call “the mozzarella highway” through Battipaglia. Every sign on the roadside is flashing mozzarella di bufala. The traffic is largely due to hundreds of trucks that pass through daily to pick up mozzarella and transport it to supermarkets across Italy. I’ve heard waiters in Florence extol the virtues of its freshness, boasting that it just arrived in the restaurant that afternoon. I’ve also heard waiters in New York cooing that they just picked it up from JFK that morning. Keep driving; Battipaglia is an industrial farming zone, and everything is pasteurized for export. Better things await in the town called Capaccio-Paestum.

Paestum is most famous for three extraordinarily well-preserved Greek temples. They are massive and built of travertine, a volcanic stone, then coated in plaster and painted to mimic marble, which doesn’t exist in Southern Italy. Paestum was colonized by Greeks, conquered by Lucanians, who were the indigenous people of the area, whom the Greeks employed as their security goons, and then became a Roman city. Paestum was considered very old when the Romans conquered it. The oldest of the three temples was 280 years old. The Greeks regarded everything around the temples as sacred ground, but the Romans were insatiable real estate developers. There developed markets, civic buildings, a large Asclepieion, which was the closest thing to a hospital in the classical world, and dozens of smaller temples, all surrounding the big, very old ones.

Roman Paestum was bigger and far more important than Pompeii or Herculaneum, and though it’s beyond the reach of Mount Vesuvius’s molten tentacles, it is still affected by earthquakes. The Roman Empire declined, and Paestum sank. Literally. The reason: a phenomenon called bradyseism, which is a Greek word: bradys means slow, and seismos means movement.” It’s an imperceptible but continuous slow rising and falling of the earth - a slow-motion earthquake.

When the Greeks built the temples close to the glittering Tyrrhenian sea, things were on the up. But by the third and fourth centuries, Paestum was a swamp, infested with malaria carrying mosquitos. Mal aria means ‘bad air.”

The Paestani fled for the hills. Some went to the hills just above Paestum, founding Capaccio, my grandmother’s hometown, while others went higher to the sea-facing cliffs of the Amalfi Coast. The name Positano may be related to the Paestani who settled there.

And certainly people also went to Salerno, which was a Roman city, then under Lombard rule, and in 1077 was officially conquered by the Normans, proud descendants of the Vikings, loosely related to the Normans who just 11 years earlier had taken England at the Battle of Hastings. Salerno was a luxurious city, full of international merchants, and home to the world’s first medical school. Meanwhile, once glorious Paestum, not very far away at all, must have looked like the zombie apocalypse.

Just to let you know, I haven’t forgotten we were talking about buffalo and delicious cheese; they will soon re-enter our story, but first, we need to make a stop in Salerno.

Salerno was where the Norman king built a cathedral dedicated to Saint Matthew the Apostle. It’s believed he died in either Ethiopia or Persia, but his bones somehow ended up near Paestum, and two people had a dream, alerting them to the location. They retrieved the old bones, and the cathedral was built around them. The Normans also began to adorn the area we now call the centro storico of Salerno with Roman columns from Paestum. They’re embedded in many corners, and sometimes you’ll see a sign with a dog lifting its leg and a red line across it. It may read “Questa e storia” - this is history, and don’t let your dog pee on it. The massive columns that you’ll encounter in the courtyard of the cathedral came from what must have been another enormous temple at Paestum, which was clearly functioning as an open quarry.

Why? Because using Roman columns made an architectural argument that the new power is heir to the Roman one. For someone from somewhere else, Northern France in this case, to frame himself as the legitimate successor to Roman caesars. And how did they physically pull them out of the swamp and drag them back to Salerno? With water buffalo, which are naturally immune to malaria.

Buffalo arrived on Italian soil via Arab merchants, who first brought them from Southeast Asia to Egypt for use as work animals. For roughly two centuries, Sicily was under Muslim rule, first governed by emirs from North Africa. Sicily was wealthy and well developed, so much so that the various wealthy factions dissolved into infighting, which allowed the Normans to more easily conquer them. Neither gentlemen nor scholars, they kept what the Arabs did best, including mathematics, agricultural practices, and sugary desserts, including cannoli. Buffalo thrived in the marshy lands along the Italian coast and were incredibly effective at doing the impossible work of clearing rivers. As they plod through streams, the underwater reeds that are nearly impossible for humans to remove will tangle around the legs of a buffalo sauntering through the day and easily snap and break.

Paestum doesn’t appear in the historical record again until the 1700s, during the period known as the Grand Tour. Part of a complete education was a trip to the Italian peninsula, where something astonishing had happened. Pompeii was discovered. The Bourbon kings of Naples not only founded the buffalo mozzarella industry, but also the field of archaeology, which didn’t exist. Pompeii fever swept the educated world and set off the Neoclassical movement. Paestum, though never completely abandoned, defined the word backwater, and was a more adventurous leg of the Grand Tour. In paintings from this period, you can see these beautiful Doric temples, their reflections in pools of water, and grazing buffalo all around them.

Can you imagine what a sight that must have been to citified elites from England and Germany? People who had never seen or even imagined a buffalo, or were accustomed to having their dopamine spiked by imagery hundreds of times every day?

In those paintings, you’ll also notice houses, and the locals – my ancestors – guiding the buffalo, or sitting on a hill wearing loose pants and a floppy hat, playing a flute, or some other peasanty activity. As a sidenote, I don’t understand how my lineage in this area survived long enough to produce me, as I am target number one on every mosquito’s agenda.

When you arrive at Paestum today, you will also find the very best farms producing buffalo milk mozzarella within a mile of the temples. Most well-reputed is Tenuta Vannulo, a local family-owned farm that has made artisanal cheesemaking and the highest standards of animal welfare a point of attraction. You can tour the facility and watch buffalo using state-of-the-art self-milking machines, getting massages with what look like car-wash brushes, while a guide explains how Mozart is played for them in their pens. The result is a product unlike anything on the mozzarella highway, and it is exquisite. I especially recommend the buffalo milk gelato. If you’re a coffee person, get the coffee flavor, drowned with a shot of espresso. (To the uninitiated, this is called an affogato.) That’s it, that’s the peak coffee experience of your life.

But my favorite place is Barlotti, partially because it’s within walking distance of the Paestum temples. You don’t have the full organized tour experience that you have at Vannulo, but you can hang out with the buffalo, who are very quiet and relaxed in a very Southern Italian way. Have lunch inside their beautiful glass-encased restaurant or in the garden underneath the pergola. Don’t overthink your menu choices. Get the sample plate that includes fresh mozzarella, smoked mozzarella, and a mound of ricotta, followed by a plate of cooked vegetables, a selection of whatever is growing at the moment. For dessert, a cannoli filled with buffalo milk ricotta.

After lunch, walk to the Paestum temples. The swamp was officially drained in the 1930s by the Fascists, another group that sought to legitimize itself by resuscitating Roman ruins, and the ground continues to be managed today. After the war, when malaria was eradicated, a modern Paestum was fully developed. If you walk on the right side of the road, you’ll see water running – there are ancient springs here, which certainly inspired the placement of the temples nearly 3,000 years ago. The presence of the Asclepieion, natural springs, and temples together indicates that the Greek colonists identified this as a place of healing. And you can squint past the sunlight and use your imagination to see a parade of buffalo, pulling a plough with a giant Roman column atop it, en route to Salerno. Because everything good from the old world should be used to build the new one.

In this episode, I speak with writer Susan van Allen about Ischia, the island very close to Capri that I like to call paradise for normal people. The last time I was there, Susan introduced me to her favorite place to stay on Ischia, the Pensione Di Lustro, a throwback to another era of travel and the place where Truman Capote spent 97 days living and writing “Local Color.”

I hope you enjoy it!

Links from the episode:

Episode 4: Vittoria Colonna Had It All

Naples Destination Deep Dive

Rome Destination Deep Dive

Florence Destination Deep Dive

The good news: I turned the whole session into a full written guide that might be more useful than a replay anyway. You can actually reference it while you’re planning instead of scrubbing through a video looking for what I told you about that Airbnb in Scala you think is a good idea.

This Destination Deep Dive gives you the honest truth about what the Amalfi Coast actually is (and isn’t), so you know exactly how to plan for it and how to avoid being disappointed. I included:

• Town-by-town breakdowns.

• What to eat

• What to skip

• Where to stay, how to get around.

• The tip about not swimming at the beach in Positano that will save you a diesel-scented afternoon. All of it.

Your Amalfi Coast Deep Dive — The Full Notes

The Amalfi Coast is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s also been built entirely for tourism since the 1950s. There is no “authentic” fishing village that you can walk to from Positano, no off-the-beaten-path neighborhood where all the locals are sipping wine, no hack that makes it cheap or easy. (Actually, the hack is Cilento, where all of these things are very real and affordable.) The sooner you accept what it is, the more you’ll love it. The people who come back disappointed are the ones who thought they could wing it with Airbnbs, the train, and the bus.

These two things, specifically, will save your trip...

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Did you know the first medical school in the world was on the Amalfi Coast? That Positano was first inhabited by people fleeing mosquitos? That Salerno was a major port for Crusaders leaving for the Middle East? There’s a lot about the Amalfi Coast that will fill you with awe and wonder, while most conventional travel advice will only fill you with froz…

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Join me tonight as we separate Instagram fantasy from Italian reality.

Italy isn’t a monolith. Each region has its own identity, cuisine, and rhythm. Tonight’s session will help you plan a trip that matches your vibe, not someone else’s highlight reel.

I’ll see you here at 7 pm ET: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83896549169?pwd=Fge5pjOhxFgyM1htm4kMyHB83NK7vf.1

Paid subscribers can find the full replay below the paywall.

Start with the Flights

When you see an airfare that works for your budget, book it and stop obsessing over “the perfect time.” Airline prices have more to do with fuel and corporate stock than your ability to outsmart the algorithm. Once your dates are confirmed, your trip is real, and you can manage your reservations with clarity. The caveat is that I’m not a points maven or an optimizer. I don’t like feeling paranoid that I missed out on a better deal by not refreshing the browser when Mercury aligned with Pluto. When I find a price that I can afford, I purchase and move on.

Sicily: Train, Plane, or Boat?

We talked about the classic “how do I get to Sicily?” question:

• The train: long, scenic, and a bit of a production. You go all the way down Reggio Calabria, the train car gets rolled onto a ferry, you cross the Strait of Messina, and then keep going in Sicily. Romantic, but it’s your whole day.

• The plane: there are lots of daily flights to Palermo or Catania. You’ll spend half the day between the airport and security, and then 25 minutes in the air.

• The boat: this is the fun one. Overnight ferry from Naples to Palermo. You board around 9–10 pm, have a proper dinner on board, sleep in a cabin, and wake up in Palermo. Very old‑world, very Gen‑X adventure energy. I like to imagine the next installment of the Before Sunrise series taking place on this boat. Jesse and Celine are boarding the boat for their 25th anniversary. A conversation turns into a fight in the middle of the wine-dark sea, which all gets resolved as they pull into Palermo at 6 am.

Renting the Car (and the Boring but Crucial Paperwork)

In places like Tuscany, Puglia, and Sicily, you really do need a car. A guest asked about using Agropoli as a base for exploring Cilento because it has a train, but it’s really for commuters heading into Salerno or Naples, not for people on vacation. All the major rental car companies are in Italy, and you can reserve a car exactly the same as you would anywhere else in the world.

You do need an International Driving Permit. It’s just a piece of paper, hopefully you never need it, but if you get pulled over and the police want to give you a hard time, they can. (One of these days, I’ll tell you the story of my night with the police in Calabria.) It costs $25, and it’s usually free with an AAA membership.

“We Love the Sea, and We’re History People. Now What?”

If you love the sea and you’re traveling with a history buff (or you are the history buff), there’s no better place than Campania.

Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis, Baia, Paestum, Ischia, and the Cilento. You get ruins, volcanoes, underwater cities, Greek temples, and excellent food, plus the sea. Campania has an embarrassment of riches that are always overlooked in favor of the Amalfi Coast, which, yes, is beautiful, but also not very interesting compared to everything else you can see or do (and eat) within a 2-hour radius of Naples.

Also, a bunch of new discoveries at Oplontis were just announced in late 2025. Archaeologists do most of their digging in the summer when there are students available, so if you can only travel during the scorching months, the upside is that you may see archaeologists at work.

Puglia: The Real Choice You’re Making

In Puglia, don’t agonize over which pretty town is 3% prettier. You’re choosing: interior or sea.

Around Martina Franca and Locorotondo, everything is broadly similar in a good way—whitewashed streets, soft hills, nice food. It’s very easy driving; Puglia is mostly flat, and even the hills aren’t serious hills. The coastline is made of rocks, so I think it’s fine to stay inland and then spend a day at a beach club that makes it possible to enjoy the water without destroying your feet.

If you want the coast, I generally send people to Monopoli instead of Polignano. Polignano is the famous Instagram beach with crowds and “Volare” on repeat all the live long day.

Torcello: Why It’s Worth the Boat Ride

Torcello, an island in the Venetian lagoon, is worth it, but not as a full‑day production. Think of the afternoon into the evening.

You go for the fabulous, unhinged Last Judgment mosaic. You could spend hours staring at this. In particular, on the bottom, there’s a black‑and‑white section of skulls with snakes coming out of their eye sockets. Am I weirdo for loving this so much? Maybe so.

The rhythm is: lunch in Venice, boat out to Torcello, see the mosaics, walk around a bit, maybe a drink, and then head back as the sky turns unicorn pink.

Paid subscribers, the full replay is below.

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The February Ask Me Anything About Italy is happening Thursday, February 12th, at 8 pm ET.

Here is the Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81834755971?pwd=OzVJgpzbayLa7uRmJqvahWubLGa7jx.1

This month’s Destination Deep Dive will cover the Amalfi Coast, about which I have very strong opinions! I guarantee you will get a perspecti…

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Today, Italy is relentlessly marketed as la dolce vita, spritzes at sunset, a Vespa ride with a chestnut-haired hunk, and pasta that doesn’t make you fat. And yes, that Italy is most certainly for sale, but I much prefer the nuanced, complex Italy that is more accurately twenty different countries, each with its own cuisine, history, and even language.

You can see this right now if you’re watching the Winter Olympics coverage from northern Italy, which has Alpine landscapes and lots of boiled meat and dumplings. That’s Italy, every bit as much as Sicily’s black sand beaches, where you can eat razor clams fresh off the boat. Planning a trip without understanding how different Italy is from region to region is setting yourself up for either getting ripped off or being sorely disappointed.

Sometimes you want a trip that’s nearly frictionless: well-organized, easy logistics, clear expectations, maybe even a quasi-resort experience. Other times, you want to explore and have experiences that you couldn’t have anywhere else. Both are valid. What’s hard to know from searching online is which regions, cities, and price points actually align with who you are as a traveler.

So I’m hosting a free live session called The Italy Vibe Check to help you understand what you’re truly signing up for, before you book a trip. I will provide clarity on the most famous places and share the less well-known ones. (That’s what I do best.)

Date: Monday, February 16
Time: 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

This session is especially for those of you in the early stages of planning an Italy trip whether it’s a once-in-a-lifetime “see all the big sites” journey or your second, third, or fourteenth trip.

I’ll discuss:

• How to think about the “big four” cities—Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples—honestly: yes, they’re super crowded, but with the right expectations and timing, they can still be extraordinary.

• How to plan your trip to Italy based on your preferences. Do you want coffee and cashmere Italy, or spaghetti and hot springs Italy? Do you want castles and museums or temples and catacombs?

• The “under-the-radar” places that are actually the best.

• I’ll also address pricing, as this is one of the least transparent parts of trip planning. I’ll walk you through what’s realistic across different regions and travel styles, so your budget and expectations don’t contradict reality.

How to join the Italy Vibe Check

To keep things simple, the Zoom link will go out only via this newsletter.

• If you’re already a subscriber (free or paid), you don’t need to do anything right now. On Monday afternoon, I’ll email the Zoom link to all subscribers. Click on it at 7 pm, and I’ll see you there.

• If someone forwarded this post to you, and you’d like to join, please hit Subscribe so the link lands directly in your inbox. Free or paid, either way, you’re invited.

For paid subscribers

For those of you already supporting this work as paid subscribers (thank you!), we also have our regular sessions this month:

• Monthly Q&A on Zoom

  • Date: Thursday, February 12

  • Time: 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time

• Destination Deep Dive: Amalfi Coast

  • Date: Thursday, February 26

  • Time: 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time

    Subscribe now

This episode is dedicated to Morton Kaish, who taught me how to “walk like an artist” in Italy and how even passively taking in great art and architecture can change you for the better.

You will also hear a conversation with illustrator Jenny Kroik. We talk about why places that don’t photograph well often end up being the ones that stay with you, and how sketching can help you process complex, layered moments that don’t fit neatly into “good day/bad day.”

Finally, I walk through what is planned for Jenny’s Art Retreat in May at Borgo La Pietraia, including Chef Mario’s deceptively simple food, daily gentle art prompts, visits to the Paestum temples, a buffalo farm, Amalfi’s historic paper mill, and the turquoise waters of Cilento.

I share these details as inspiration for planning your own self‑guided trip to Italy: choosing a single home base, slowing the pace of your days, leaving room for serendipity, and designing an itinerary around the kind of beauty you want to experience.

Links

• Retreat details and booking: Jenny’s Art Retreat at Borgo La Pietraia (May 17–24)

• Jenny Kroik’s Arthur Avenue illustrations for The New Yorker

• Jenny’s website and her Substack newsletter

  

Here’s the replay: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/2Edsd8JBfhiGrtDQpt7Pf1Plhu8-rp-S2SWCAtvrzCiyCoNJ-Zyx-0e34RXNRjA.RA2tPsQtuvD9bbxy

Passcode: f9&YonB.

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On a map, Venice is in Italy. Historically, it’s a city of merchants, sex workers, and gangsters, and understanding that will transform your experience.

For about a thousand years, Venice was its own republic, an independent maritime power looking toward the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean rather than toward the Italian countryside. Its incredible wealth came from ships, trade, and colonies, not from fields or vineyards. Venice didn’t grow atop a Roman grid; it emerged from muddy, useless islands, settled by people fleeing for their lives.

Venetians were gangsters. They quite literally stole the remains of Saint Mark in 828, when two merchants smuggled his body out of Egypt by hiding it under slabs of pork so that Muslim customs officials wouldn’t search the cargo too closely. They were also trying to steal the relics of San Nicola (yes, Santa Claus) from Turkey, but gangster sailors from Bari got there first. Venice has its own language, customs, and cuisine, all unique.

Why does this matter?

One of the big themes of the Destination Deep Dives is orientation: how to “tune your dial” to each city instead of treating Italy as one big, interchangeable menu with endless breadsticks.

Food might be the easiest way to explain it. When most people say they love “Italian food,” they’re usually thinking of the pizza and pasta of southern Italy, whether they realize it or not. Venice is bigoli in salsa: thick, rough buckwheat noodles with onions and anchovies. It’s risotto because northern Italy has abundant rice paddies, with sauces of squid ink, or in the spring, with pancetta and peas. Venice is whipped codfish on bread, or sardines, eaten standing up at a bar with a little glass of wine.

Tonight, I will walk you through five days in Venice, unfolding the history, art, neighborhoods, and food with enough context to make your next trip feel like a second visit, not a first.

Afterward, each Deep Dive is turned into a kind of Masterclass-style video series with:

• Edited video modules you can watch (and rewatch) at your own pace.

• A very detailed, practically usable itinerary built from everything covered in the session. It includes restaurants, specific tours I recommend, day trips, and shopping tips.

  

  Right now:

• Naples and Rome are already available in that polished video + itinerary format.

• Florence is with the video editor right now.

• Venice will go to her next month, once tonight’s premiere is done, and I re-record it with much better lighting and a fresh blow-out.

Next month’s Deep Dive goes to the Amalfi Coast

You already know the Amalfi Coast brings out the saltiest of my opinions. But my Amalfi Deep Dive will anchor in Salerno, home to the world’s first medical school, and

• Introduce you to Trota, a medieval female physician who was very famous, and take you to a medicinal garden with the most amazing views.

• Take you into the building where ships were built to sail to Jerusalem, laden with crusaders and luxury goods like the Salerno Ivories.

• Show you the Roman villa beneath the cathedral in Positano, which has only been open to the public since 2019.

Take you to Vietri sul Mare, where the ceramics are made, and walk through its residential alleys, where you’ll find this window where poor people would leave their children to be raised by nuns.

If you’re reading this on the free side and want to get my best stuff, this is your nudge. Right below this line is the link for tonight’s Venice Deep Dive, as well as a code to get 50% off the Naples and Rome Deep Dives.

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We had another fun session, not just of Q&A but also of discussion and follow-up on trips recently taken. The questions submitted via email happen at 46 minutes.

Watch the recording here: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/p0rReM-kDvmc…

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Join me this evening at 8 pm ET for the January Ask Me Anything About Italy. If you can’t join us live, send your question to danielle@danielleoteri.…

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In this episode

• Why most popular Venice advice is shallow, and how “hit‑and‑run” tourism (20–30 million visitors a year, most of them day‑trippers) is reshaping the city.​

• What changed when large cruise ships were banned, and how the new €5 day‑tripper fee on peak days actually works.​

• Why Venice is not an ancient city like Rome or Naples, but a preposterous “upside‑down forest” built on millions of submerged wooden piles in a lagoon.​

How to experience Venice without the crush

• Why a day trip to Venice is “the worst way to see it,” and why staying at least three nights changes everything about your sensory memory of the city.​

• Practical timing advice: understanding when day‑trippers flood in (roughly 11 a.m.–4 p.m.) so you can have quiet mornings and atmospheric evenings.

• Trip‑planning strategy: skipping the Rome–Florence–Venice conveyor belt in favor of flying in and out of Milan and pairing Venice with a few days in Turin.

A local lens with Gillian Longworth‑McGuire

• Meet writer Gillian Longworth McGuire, author of the Substack Gillian Knows Best, who spent many years in Rome before making the unexpected decision to settle in Venice.​

• What drew her to the “real life” of Venice: garbage boats, the total absence of wheels, and the pleasure of living in a city where everything happens on foot or by boat.​

• How she navigates living near the Arsenale in one of the last streets with mostly Venetian neighbors, and what it means when only 13 longtime residents remain on a street that once held hundreds.​

• Why her wish for Venice is simple: slow down, stay in Venice proper (not on the mainland), and stay longer than you think you “have time” for.​

Glass, budgets, and where to stay

• How to experience Murano glass without the timeshare‑style hard sell: asking your hotel to connect you with a trusted furnace, or booking with Wave, a younger collective of master glassmakers and students.​

• Honest talk about Venice pricing: why Venetians have always been merchants, why Venice is less forgiving than Rome or Florence, and why you need to research carefully and budget more here than elsewhere.​

• Hotel strategy: why it often pays to spend more for a well‑located, non‑damp, genuinely comfortable room.

About the Destination Deep Dives

• What you get as a paid subscriber: a live Zoom premiere, with Q&A, then 50% off the beautifully produced, MasterClass‑style course with video lessons and a fully detailed 5‑day itinerary.​

• What each Deep Dive covers: what makes the city special and challenging, how to tackle the “must‑sees,” and thoughtful alternatives that help you avoid lines and TikTok‑driven FOMO.​

• Existing and upcoming Deep Dives: Florence (being migrated to the new platform), Naples (available now), Rome (landing shortly), with Matera, Cilento, and Venice all in the queue.​