Like all the world’s most fertile places, Sicily has been chronically exploited and is right now undergoing a form of luxury colonization. What’s been happening is that many small 3-star hotels are being acquired by hotel chains and renovated into 5-star properties with spas, restaurants, and services such as hot-air balloon rides and spritz picnics in a FIAT convertible. Right now, this market is enormous. I recently had a conversation with a colleague who serves the highest level of the luxury market, and he told me that availability is so tight this year that even those willing to do a full buyout of a property won’t get a late check-out because someone else is arriving promptly that morning on a private jet.

I believe Sicily is so attractive to today’s luxury traveler because it has the color and texture that offers a sensory vacation from the ultra-sleek, minimalist aesthetic of the wealthy in London, Los Angeles, or New York. The shouting fishmonger in Palermo is visceral and exotic for someone accustomed to sending their housekeeper to Whole Foods, with a list assembled from their Amazon Prime account. And as Sicilian economist and writer Claudia Fauzia said, the Italian south is the last place to experience authenticity while still being in the West.

Is this actually bad?

There are the predictable arguments for and against Sicily’s luxury tourism industry. Yes, it creates jobs, but the low-wage seasonal jobs do nothing to stem the Sicilian brain drain. People with law degrees don’t want to make beds. But at least people are coming to Sicily, many argue, and they will eat in local restaurants and pay entrance fees to the stupendous abundance of historic sites, all of which need more money and attention.

Food tours are popular; they visit markets, and the business is appreciated. Tourism is an effective way of helping local communities preserve their traditions. But it doesn’t help the vegetable seller or fishmonger who needs a daily clientele. The locals who buy ingredients for a weeknight dinner can no longer afford to live in the city center, because rents have been driven up by short-term rentals. The vendor making money is the one who sells shrink-wrapped cheese that won’t be confiscated at the airport, or bottles of limoncello in boot-shaped glasses. As such, Palermo’s Vucciria market, ongoing for a thousand years, is shrinking.

Old Bari

It has also happened in Puglia. More than a decade ago, the government of Bari finally got fed up with the mafia-controlled ports, empowered the prosecutors, and “cleaned up” the most historic section of Bari, essentially renovating the city for tourism. In the area that I remember friends in the early aughts telling me would often be shut down by police because there was so much drug trafficking, there’s now a Ferris wheel and an Eataly. The women who sit outside making pasta by hand, an artifact from a time when small apartments meant much of life was lived outside, are now photographed thousands of times per day by tourists from around the world.

So many Italians in northern Italy who held ancestral properties in Puglia began renovating old, dilapidated apartments and palazzi that no one knew what to do with until the tourists came and Airbnb made it possible to earn money with them.

It’s hard to argue that ousting organized crime and bringing in fresh eyes to marvel at a beautiful place is a bad thing. But in Sicily, as in Puglia, if you spend time in the places in between the tourist zones, you find a lot of unhappy people and difficult places. Tourists following the filtered path of social media influencers wrinkle their noses at the graffiti, garbage, or lack of reliable public transportation because infrastructure investment is continually lacking. My clients often ask me why they have a hard time finding more local experiences in parts of Puglia, like local bars and restaurants. I explain that the rhythm of local life doesn’t support those kinds of businesses well. People in the service economy work seven days a week during the high season, then have no work at all from November to May. They have either little time or little money.

Is the Luxury Colonization different than other takeovers of Sicily?

The Greeks began colonizing eastern Sicily in the 8th century BC due to overpopulation in Greece, and Sicily’s fertile lands were perfect for grapevines and olives. At roughly the same time, Phoenicians (people from what is modern-day Lebanon and Syria) colonized western Sicily to establish strategic trade ports between North Africa and Spain.

The Byzantines ruled in the early Middle Ages, extracting taxes and grain to feed Constantinople, until the Aghlabid emirs of North Africa chipped away at their authority, ushering in roughly two and a half centuries of Muslim rule. Under Arab governance, Sicily became wealthy from agriculture, but the ruling family tore itself apart in dynastic feuds, and the island broke into warring factions, leaving the door open for the Normans, descendants of Vikings, who completed their conquest of Sicily.

Today, Sicily's identity is built on conquest, with each wave drawing on its spolia to create something new. These transformations live most vividly in food and art. Like the Cappella Palatina, a Catholic chapel whose ceiling is adorned with muqarnas — an ornamental vaulting form born in mosques — and walls shimmering with Byzantine mosaics. The Spanish colonization of Sicily was part of the same empire that colonized the Americas, and through which tomatoes and chocolate arrived in Sicily from Mexico, then took off in their own direction.

The Luxury Elite

The wealthiest people of our age aren’t identifiable by their country. (Is Elon Musk South African, American, Canadian, or Martian?) But the wealthy do let us know who they are by where they show up. Lake Como, in clean, pristine Northern Italy, right on the Swiss border, is dominated by 5-star hotels, with a large clientele from China and the wealthiest nations of the Persian Gulf, places where wealth at this scale is newfound. Sicily’s luxury tourists come primarily from the United States and Europe. The Palermo fishmonger becomes a charming detail of a folkloric era that, gasp, still exists here. For now.

But does the luxury tourist add a new layer of history, or is Sicily just a colorful backdrop for vacation photos that live online? I wholly support the restoration of Sicily's beautiful palaces, and doing so requires a wealthy clientele. I have no problem with that. What makes me uncomfortable is when people become characters, rather than the protagonists of their own story. I fear the jig is up for the shouting fishmonger in the thousand-year-old market, unless he monetizes the theatrical experience like the pasta ladies of Bari. And I really hope that doesn’t happen.

A Better Model Does Exist

The model I find most useful is Matera, where the legal framework has shaped the restoration of the ancient Sassi, cave dwellings. Roughly 70% of the sassi are government-owned and leased under concession — available to anyone willing to cover the full cost of restoration — with Italian Law 771/86 requiring that all work adhere to strict conservation standards, preserving the character of the caves. The result is a city that wears its history openly: the luxury hotels built in caves feel like a new chapter, not a colonization. There are still debates and controversies for sure, but Matera feels reimagined, not just renovated.

The Rione Sanità in Naples is also an inspiration. Long a poor and mafia-dominated neighborhood, a priest began organizing local kids to help clean out ancient Christian catacombs, and abandoned churches Foundations and programs have been developed for locals to give guided tours and make history a deeply personal story.

Tourism is always eager to move on to the next hot place, which is why I wish local governments would have the guts to protect their best cultural assets: human beings.

Internally, it happens through legislation that favors locals, such as regulations on short-term rentals. New York did it, and even though it has made the city much more expensive to visit, it has been a very good thing for the city's dynamism and energy. Externally, I ask tourists to go to Sicily (and everywhere) with curiosity. Please do not complain about the graffiti or offer your ideas on efficiency. Sicily has spent three thousand years turning conquest into something beautiful and distinctly Sicilian.

Whether luxury tourism leaves anything behind or just leaves is the open question.

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June 25 at 8 pm ET is the next Destination Deep Dive, which will visit Ischia.

The Honest Take: Why I Have Mixed Feelings About Tuscany

Tuscany is picture-perfect, and that’s why the region has become the postcard of Italy and of Italian tourism itself. And Tuscans do the business of tourism well. When I send clients there, I know they are in capable hands. The roads are extremely well managed, and the guides and drivers all speak excellent English. You find pretty good mattresses and a wide variety of accommodations. But sometimes I have mixed feelings about Tuscany because it has done so well in business, in marketing itself, in figuring out how to give tourists exactly what they want, and especially well at the high-end level, that I feel like it has given up too much of its soul.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: Pienza, a gorgeous UNESCO World Heritage site, was rebuilt in the 15th century by Pope Pius II to emulate the highest ideals of Renaissance architecture. And today, they no longer ring the bells in their historic bell tower because of complaints from the tourists in their hotels in the morning.

We’re not talking about leaf blowers, folks. I think Pienza should ring its own bells.

If you feel discouraged, I assure you that there’s plenty of soul in Tuscany, but maybe not in the places you’ve heard about. As such, I put together this Deep Dive to give you a good sense of the places that will satisfy your eyes and the ones that will also satisfy your heart.

Who Is Tuscany (and Who Isn’t It) For?

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Ideally, you need just a four-wheeled suitcase and a carry-on bag. I have a Calpak backpack with a strap on the back that slides right onto the suitcase handle. It also fits my 16-inch laptop. Any system that is too complicated stresses me out, so I keep my stuff organized while traveling with packing cubes. They let you move from place to place without fully unpacking, and they make it easy to see exactly what you have to work with in your capsule wardrobe. They also prevent me from overpacking by forcing me to look at all my clothes as a system and make sure everything goes together.

Ensure your day bag has ample space for your passport, a phone charger, and sunglasses. You may want to bring a couple of cotton tote bags if you’d like to carry a sketchbook or do any grocery shopping during your trip.

For the women who want a detailed list with links, here we go:

• Two to four pairs of cotton or linen pants in neutral colors

• Jeans, but not skinny jeans, in the summer. If you’re traveling in a cool season, and you’re a jeans person, bring 2 or 3 pairs

• One casual dress

• 5-8 T-shirts and tank tops (if traveling in winter, substitute T-shirts for simple sweaters). You can get a variety of scoop necks and V-necks. Get them at Uniqlo, J.Crew Factory, AYR, or Perfect White Tee

• 1 blouse in a print or bright color. This is your going-out shirt. (Remember the aughts, my elder Millennial friends.)

• 1 blazer or cardigan

• 1 cotton scarf

• 1 pair of pajamas, cotton

• Bras, panties, of course

• 1 pair of simple white trainers

• 1 pair of ballet flats or loafers

• Sunglasses

• 1 white or blue collared shirt

Let’s get more specific:

This dress from Marine Layer. You can roll it up, stuff it into a beach bag, drive a FIAT over it, and it still looks great.

I wear jeans almost every day, and that makes traveling easy. They match with everything, don’t show panty lines, don’t wrinkle, and don’t need to be washed as much. However, if you’re traveling in the hottest months, they’re not ideal, though I find these wide-leg jeans from Kut From the Kloth to be cool and comfortable. Just make sure to size down with this brand. I’m a size 8, but I got these in 6 petite, and they're still a little roomy.

This Frank & Eileen blazer seems wildly expensive for an unlined jacket, but I have done unspeakable things to it over the course of 5 years, and it has retained its shape and looks fantastic with everything. You don’t have to buy this one specifically, but the idea is to bring a casual, versatile jacket that adds a little polish to your lewk while still being low-maintenance.

These shirts from AYR are worth every penny. Button them up, wear them open over a tank top, or use them as beach cover-ups. You can pretty much wear this shirt with a mix of tanks and dresses for your entire trip.

I also love these scoop neck shirts from AYR. The black-and-white striped one has been out of stock forever, but it’s the most useful shirt I own. It’s soft and light and pairs with everything.

• Bombas socks. They are just so well-made and give you a little extra cushion for those 20,000-step days.

• A toiletries bag with a hook to hang on the back of the bathroom door.

• Miracle Balm from Jones Road is indeed a miracle. I travel with the Flushed shade, a tube of their black mascara, and lipstick. I think Korres makes the best lip balm ever.

• A Tide pen that’s always in my purse.

• Soak for hand-washing undies in the sink.

  ---

The Italian Pharmacy

Hyaluronic acid, particularly the French brands. I see a major difference, and I’ve got one of those Anna Magnani faces that has a distinct line and wrinkle that appears instantly for everything I don’t like or find even mildly suspicious.

Note: This is not medical advice, and I’m not a doctor. This is something I personally buy and use. OKI is a popular Italian over-the-counter and prescription painkiller. It contains Ketoprofen lysine salt, an NSAID used across Italy to treat headaches, toothaches, menstrual cramps, joint pain, and sore throats. I’m not a doctor; I’m not giving you medical information. Obviously, check with your doctor, but as a lifelong migraine sufferer, this is like a religious experience. Again, I’m not a doctor, and definitely not your doctor. I’m just sharing my experience, not giving you medical advice.

Pack your toiletries in a bag that can unfold and hang by a hook on the back of the bathroom drawer. Especially in cities, hotel bathrooms can be tiny, and you won’t have to store your things in the bidet if you bring the right stuff.

For the men

Man friends, if you’re actually reading this, my advice is to keep your clothes simple like Stanley Tucci. Cotton pants or jeans, a polo shirt with a collar you can pop if you’re feeling the Italian vibes.

If you want to really look like an Italian man, wear lots of blue, and also blue on blue. Again, no one nails it quite like Stanley.

And finally, the Italian word for a blow-out is piega. Want to get your roots done? The term is la ricrescita.

To paid subscribers, I’ll be sending you the full notes and resources from the Tuscany Deep Dive on Thursday. And Thursday evening will be the monthly “Ask Me Anything About Italy”.

June’s Destination Deep Dive goes to Ischia. Mark your calendar here.

But now, I want to tell you about the carpet I purchased.

Ever since completing Episode 37: The Secret of Florence’s Dome, I’ve become obsessed with finding Persian carpets in Renaissance paintings. Niche, I know, but what I love most about researching history is how one thing unlocks the other, and sometimes that thing was right under your nose, but no one was giving it any attention, and so neither did you.

For quick context, this episode shares how the knowledge used to build Florence’s famous red dome was transmitted along the Silk Road during the Italian Renaissance. Scholar Lorenzo Vigotti also just published a new article tracing communities of Florentine merchants and monks in the lands that are now Iran, particularly Tabriz, which then and now remains a center of carpet weaving. And when you start looking at Renaissance paintings, not only do you find Persian carpets, but you find them specifically from Tabriz. Like Saint Jerome in His Study, a 15th-century fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio, in one of Florence’s most important churches.

So of course I became obsessed with buying a Tabriz carpet for my new apartment. If you ever feel Facebook or Instagram is too toxic, start searching for Persian carpets instead. There is a lovely world on social media of people who are well-educated about the many types of carpets and hunt through estate sales and Facebook Marketplace to discover historic gems. They clean them, fix them, and sell them. House of Tocumen showed me that the price of many vintage carpets is often less than what you’ll pay for some half-plastic beast at Homegoods and find serviceable but never really love. The most high-end is the Farmand Gallery in Rome, which shares beautiful Instagram videos, and I am learning so much from them. I also can’t wait to visit.

I found my Tabriz carpet on Instagram from a store called Salvaged Beauties. It was probably woven in the 1960s. It’s in impeccable condition, but also clearly vintage, which brings me so much joy. It’s sun-bleached on one side, which means it lived in the same spot in someone’s home for a long time. Maybe a cat slept in that sun patch. Maybe little boys zoomed their Matchbox cars up and down the lines. When I first unrolled it, Lenù, my dog, sniffed it for over ten minutes. Could she smell that cat, or maybe just the hands of whoever packed it?

You know how Gen Z says “touch grass”? It means go do real things outside, away from your screen, because nature can truly put your mind and body at ease. I feel the same way about this carpet. Massoud, whose voice you hear in that podcast episode, said to me, “That’s because it’s nature.” He didn’t mean that it symbolizes nature with vines and geometric flowers, but truly that it is nature; made by hand, woven of sheep’s wool, and colored with natural dyes harvested in Iranian fields that right now, we can literally only dream about. It reminded me of Jackson Pollock’s famous declaration when another artist challenged him about why he didn’t work from nature: “I am nature.”

So before bed, I sit on my couch and stare at my carpet. Each night reveals something new to me and has helped me contemplate the words of Pope Leo, who just published an historic encyclical on Artificial Intelligence called Magnifica Humanitas, which means "magnificent humanity."

In my last podcast episode linked below — which had limited reach due to a technical issue — I spoke about the monastery of San Domenico in Naples, where St. Thomas Aquinas was writing the words that Pope Leo quotes in the encyclical. What Pope Leo and St. Thomas Aquinas both assert is the same lesson I’m getting from my Tabriz carpet — human creativity, reason, and craft are expressions of the divine.

This is why I will always encourage you to engage with art during your travels rather than viral trends. Listen to Vivaldi while you ride the vaporetto in Venice. Buy an antique bracelet or an old print as a souvenir instead of just a bottle of limoncello. Think about wine as a story of the land and the season, not a prestige item. Italy gives us so many opportunities to marvel at magnificent humanity.

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Here’s the link for the Tuscany livestream. The recording will be available to subscribers immediately after the event.

Florence needs no advertising or propaganda, and overtourism has had a massive impact on the city, especially in the past five years. Florence’s main economy has been tourism for two centuries, but today’s standard itinerary revolves around the viral spots: the wine windows, the affogato, the sandwich, and David. I recommend skipping all of that except for David. But maybe also skip David, because Florence has an embarrassment of riches for those who want to experience awe and wonder.

The best reason to visit Florence is to experience its art and architecture. If you’re not open to visiting churches and museums, honestly, don’t go to Florence. Italy’s twenty regions are so wildly diverse that you should always prioritize the experience you want to have first, then choose the city or region where you can best have that experience. Florence and Tuscany have become icons of Italy’s tourism market, but that doesn’t mean they are universally enjoyed or are “the best.”

The Basics

Florence is small and completely walkable. As a tourist, you won’t need to leave the historic center, the centro storico. The Arno River runs through the center, and the biggest concentration of sites is around the Duomo, in a pedestrianized zone where you’ll also find the biggest crowds of tourists, day trippers, and bus tours. The other side is called the Oltrarno, and (generally) it’s calmer, quieter, more residential, and more hip, especially if you’re in the neighborhood called San Frediano. But Florence is not a cutting-edge city; it has been a city of art and history lovers and students for over two centuries, always with a large population of English speakers.

What’s special about Florence:

• The cradle of the Renaissance

• Small and very walkable. If you’re a good walker, you may never even need a taxi or bus, other than getting to and from the train station with your luggage

• Long history of being hospitable to foreign residents and students

• Easy access to the Tuscan countryside

The challenges:

Over-tourism is a huge problem, largely accelerated by short-term apartment rentals. You have to be prepared for large crowds and be thoughtful about which sites you want to see, so that you can buy tickets in advance. Definitely invest in good tours. You should also make dinner reservations if you want to ensure you eat well, which you can definitely do in Florence, but not spontaneously unless you’re already very familiar with Tuscan cuisine.

Best time to go: Winter. Yes, it’s very cold, but the crowds are significantly less, and Florence in the summer can be unbearable. The city is ringed by the Chianti Hills, which are beautiful, but that also means it’s extremely hot in summer; the mosquitoes coming off the Arno should have EasyJet emblazoned on their sides; and the air pollution sometimes hangs over the city.

The Three Most Famous Sites

The Duomo. You can always orient yourself in Florence by looking up to see where you are in relation to the red brick dome. It’s an engineering marvel, begun in 1296 and completed in the late 1400s. The word “duomo” means cathedral, not dome, even though Florence’s cathedral is famous for its dome. The word comes from the Latin word domus, meaning house, or in this context, God’s house. Think of it as a spiritual football stadium, designed to bring the entire city together within a medieval vision of the kingdom of God.

The Duomo is the starting point for understanding Florence and why it became the cradle of the Renaissance. I strongly recommend that a visit to the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo should be on your first full day in the city, so you have context for everything you will see afterward. (Don’t worry, these details are all in the five-day itinerary down below.)

Also, the genius of the freestanding red-brick dome is attributed to Fillipo Brunelleschi, but recent research has revealed that the innovation originated in medieval Persia. Florence was rich largely due to textiles, and the rich history of weaving and carpets, particularly near Tabriz, included large networks of Florentine merchants. The innovation of the double-shell dome comes from the Dome of Soltaniyeh, with the signature herringbone pattern appearing in several other domes from about a century earlier in Persia. It’s fascinating, and here’s a podcast episode you can listen to about it: Ep. 37: The Secret of Florence’s Dome

Michelangelo’s David. One of the most famous works of art in the history of everything, and one of those pieces that, when you see it in real life, is way better. It’s in the Accademia, which is still an art school, and it is a madhouse to get in. Do not wing it with David. Get skip-the-line tickets. Book a tour. They release tickets in batches, so you have to book far enough in advance, but not too far. Make sure it’s on your trip-planning to-do list.

The Uffizi. One of the world's most famous art museums. Uffizi means “the offices” — these were all part of the Medici family’s home offices. It really is like walking through an art history textbook. That said, if you’re not familiar with the Renaissance and you don’t love museums, skip the Uffizi and see the art in churches instead. Being able to see iconic works of art in their intended setting is the real opportunity in Italy.

If you’re going during high season, pay for early-morning tickets because it gets really hot inside. The most famous work there is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and like David, it is extra special when you see it in person.

Food

Don’t go to Florence for pizza and pasta. I know that sounds ridiculous, but Italian food is different from region to region, and what we call “Italian food” outside of Italy is mostly from Naples. Trust me, you can have far better pizza in New York than you can in Florence.

Tuscans love their beans, vegetables, bread, and wild boar. They’re jokingly called mangia fagioli, the bean eaters, and a dish of white beans drowned in Tuscan olive oil and punctuated with a sprig of rosemary is to me the signature taste of Florence.

Tuscan dishes to try:

• Ribollita — a soup with lots of vegetables and stale bread

• Pappa al Pomodoro — mushy stale bread with tomatoes and basil, which doesn’t sound good, but I promise you it’s delicious

• Pici — pici are a type of pasta, hand-rolled noodles that sometimes have the texture of Udon. You’ll find them dressed with rich sauces, such as porcini mushrooms, or sometimes with stewed cinghiale (wild boar). It’s also common to have a wild boar ragù with pappardelle, which are flat, wide-cut noodles.

• Bistecca Fiorentina — thick cut from a specific Chianina cow, lean, cooked and served very rare (essentially raw in the center). If you like your steak well done, don’t get one. It’s not the tradition.

• Crostini Toscano— chicken liver pâté smeared on toasted bread. Looks like cat food, tastes like heaven.

• Schiacciata — like focaccia but thinner, crunchier, and with more olive oil. Get it fresh out of the oven at Pugi.

• Lampredotto sandwich — this is where I lose some of you. Lampredotto is the fifth stomach of a cow. This is the food of the poor; the nobles got everything else, and this was truly what was left. It’s called lampredotto because the texture is that of a lamprey eel, because eels were the thing to eat during the Renaissance; all the wealthiest people ate them, and this was the poor man’s version. I know none of that was much of an endorsement, but a lampredotto sandwich tastes like a really good roast beef sandwich. What makes it delicious is the salsa verde, a sauce made with capers, anchovies, parsley, olive oil, and day-old bread, all blended together. There are a few food trucks around the city that serve it, and my favorite is listed in the itinerary.

  

• Olive oil - while not a dish, I personally think Tuscany produces the most flavorful olive oil in Italy. Pane Toscano is the local bread, unsalted, but it’s best for mopping up high-quality olive oil and enjoying the magic of simplicity. In late fall, Tuscans go crazy for cavolo, what we call dinosaur kale, topped with freshly pressed olive oil.

The Markets:

The Mercato Sant’Ambrogio is my favorite. It’s much more traditional than the Mercato Centrale. Have lunch at Trattoria da Rocco, a little stand inside the market. It’s like a diner, no frills, and you’ll see lots of Florentines on their lunch break. Outside the market, vendors sell vintage clothing; I have some amazing cashmere sweaters from here. All of this happens in the morning.

The Mercato Centrale on the ground floor still has vegetables, meat, and cheese. The upper floor is more of a food court catering largely to students who want tacos and an international array of food. If you’re traveling with picky teens, this will be a good stopping point, but if you want traditional Florentine, choose Sant’Ambrogio.

Tourist Traps

Antico Vinaio. I probably can't dissuade you from waiting in this very long line because the FOMO is intense, but let me just offer that they also have locations in New York’s Times Square and Dubai, so you be the judge, ok? Also, it might take you a few days to desalinate after eating one.

That wine window. There are many wine windows, and the one featured on Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy has become a social media postcard. Don’t worry about getting a photo of that one, but do keep your eyes open for them around the city. They are a charming detail, and looking for them helps attune your eye to the architecture.

Vivoli’s affogato. I am very pro-affogato. Gelato drowned in a shot of espresso is among the most pleasurable taste experiences ever, but you do not have to go to Vivoli to get it. Their gelato is excellent, and this is not a criticism of their business whatsoever. But you can go to any gelateria and get an affogato. It’s just gelato drowned in a shot of espresso. It’s an Italian thing, not just a Vivoli thing, but elsewhere most non-Italians just don’t think to ask for it.

Trattoria Zaza. Famous because…I have no idea why. At least since 1997, when I first heard about it, it was not good. I actually sat down and had dinner there in 2021 to see if I was being a judgey jerk, and no, it was still awful.

The San Lorenzo leather market. Once upon a time, this was a good market, but it’s not anymore. The leather largely comes from India or Bangladesh, and it uses many toxic dyes. Good leather shops in Florence exist; they’re in actual shops and workshops, and they’re not cheap because it’s skilled artisan work.

If you appreciate my candidness, please subscribe. Getting traction on social media means being a slave to the algorithms. Substack is the place where I can tell you the truth. All my podcast episodes are free, but the Destination Deep Dives and resources are for paid subscribers.

Just Beyond the Gates of Florence

It’s very easy to get outside of the Florence city center, including on foot. If you cross the Arno into the San Niccolo neighborhood, you can then walk up the long, graded path to Piazzale Michelangelo. There you will get a beautiful panoramic view of the city. It can be crowded at sunset, but still worth the climb if you make it your evening passegiatta. From there, you can see the original city gates of Florence still intact. In fact, you will pass through them again when you re-enter the city.

Along the way, you will pass the Church of San Miniato al Monte, which has beautiful mosaics and is a delight to visit after hours when the church is still open, and the lights are on, causing the mosaics to glitter.

In the hills surrounding Florence, you will see villas that all belonged to the wealthy Renaissance families. They would have had their apartments and palazzi in the city and then their summer residences outside, where they could get the fresh breezes, especially in the summertime. Many of these homes are available today as vacation rentals, and a few are also hotels. If you’re traveling with family or friends and you want the extra space, this can be a lovely option. It’s also the perfect way to live out the Tuscan fantasy. Most of these places are not cheap, but if you’re going to stay in Florence for a week, it might be worth it

A Five-Day Itinerary

The detailed five-day itinerary, which includes restaurants, recommendations for leather shops, wine bars, and tours I recommend, is available to paid subscribers. Please upgrade your subscription to keep reading.

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You can see Spaccanapoli, the street that cuts a straight line across the old part of town — spaccare means to split, and the splitter is the original decumanus, the main east-west road of the original Greek city. The city is tightly woven, almost impossibly dense, and what catches my eye are the cloisters: enclosed gardens adjacent to churches, tucked right into the urban fabric. The largest cloister I can see from my hotel window is Santa Chiara, attached to one of Naples’ most historic and beloved churches. It’s a Gothic church built when the city was ruled by the French Angevins, and it has both a monastery and a convent, residences for Franciscan monks and nuns called the Poor Clares, separate, of course. There are still monks and nuns in residence, but in a separate, smaller area, separate from the nuns’ cloister garden, which is a major tourist attraction today for its beautiful majolica tile.

A cloister is an enclosed garden, which comes from the Latin word claustrum, which you will understand immediately if you suffer from claustrophobia, a fear of enclosed spaces. It’s open to the sky, but enclosed on four sides, with gardens designed for some practicalities but also for spiritual contemplation. Frequently, you will find four paths, which form a giant cross, but are also meant to evoke the four rivers of paradise. Also worth noting, the word paradise is a Persian word which means enclosed garden. It was a place of spiritual meditation and prayer. And as an outdoor space, it had practical functions — you can imagine people doing laundry there, getting some exercise, breathing fresh air.

I recognize the cloister not just as a historian, but viscerally, because I spent 16 years working at a museum called The Cloisters, in New York City. The Cloisters is the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, built from pieces of actual French cloisters, and a full apse from Spain that was deconstructed, shipped across the Atlantic, and reconstructed in upper Manhattan. It’s an entirely secular space, but it feels like a spiritual one. I know what it feels like to spend your days inside one of these places, inside an otherwise busy city. It is beautiful and serene, but also isolating and lonely. But I will say this, even on the loneliest days in late January when maybe only 50 visitors would come to the museum, and the staff was bored and mildly depressed and snipping at each other, and the sky was gray, and the gardens were dead, the space always felt privileged.

Who took monastic vows and why

For centuries, specifically in the centuries we label as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the cloisters of monasteries and convents were full of monks and nuns; today, this is no longer the case. And that’s not necessarily due to a spiritual crisis because most people did not end up in a monastery by calling. Your family put you there, and they had very specific reasons for doing so.

For sons: the eldest inherited the family fortune. Younger sons could work in the family business if there was one, or go into the military or the church. But deliberately placing a son in a monastery could be an act of piety, though it was often political. If he rose to become an abbot or a bishop, he controlled land and credit networks and could leverage political influence that could directly benefit the family.

For daughters, the issue was a dowry. In wealthy Venice, the cost of a dowry for a merchant family quadrupled in the early 16th century. In Rome, dowries climbed steadily over the course of the 1500s, inflation driven by status competition between elite families. In contrast, you could place a daughter in a convent for roughly 20 times less, so for a family with multiple daughters, that was an easy decision. In 16th-century Florence, more than a quarter of women from elite families entered religious institutions. In Venice, some estimates go as high as 60%.

There were metaphysical motivations as well, primarily the issue of purgatory — this temporary state of purification and suffering for souls that aren’t hellbound, but also don’t have the GPA to go straight to heaven. The prayers of the living, especially monastics, people devoted full time to God, without any distractions or opportunities to sin, which would dilute their spiritual intensity, could shorten that time for family in heaven’s waiting room. The more Masses said for the soul existing in purgatory, the more prayers, the more beautiful art and music that the family patronized for the glorification of God, the better. And the family members who lived in the monasteries and convents were like a stock, compounding spiritual interest over a lifetime.

But families didn’t just park their children in a cell and forget about them. They financially supported the community in which they lived and sometimes even funded private apartments. Those from lesser means did physical labor, while the wealthier ones held power. The convent was one of the few places where women could hold power in an official capacity. On the walls of Goleto Abbey, a gorgeous ruin in the countryside near Avellino, there is a fresco of a nun named Scolastica who holds a bishop’s staff, signifying she held that level of status. Goleto Abbey, by the way, is beautiful even if it was almost completely destroyed. It no longer has a roof, but it’s like walking around inside a Gothic skeleton, in the middle of a lush meadow, surrounded by rolling mountains where vineyards produce Aglianico, Falanghina, and Greco di Tufo.

But I am digressing from my point that monasteries and convents are where you find the most beautiful art, architecture, and music, and are an enormous part of Italian culture; in one way or another, you will encounter them on your trip to Italy. Moreover, much of the art in famous museums like the Uffizi was originally made for churches and later displaced. I think that if you’re not already an art lover, viewing art in museums is challenging because you’re totally lacking the context for which the artwork was intended. To understand why those artworks got displaced — and also why so many 5-star hotels in Italy were once convents or monasteries — you have to understand one of the most dramatic cultural ruptures in Italian history.

A Hinge Point in Italian History

When Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Alps into northern Italy in 1796, he did so with the idea that the Church was an instrument of oppression, that its hoarded wealth belonged to the people, and that the monastic life was a waste of time. In Bologna, Venice, Milan, and Rome, he ordered the suppression of religious orders, and monks and nuns were expelled from their houses so the properties could be seized by the state. It’s also important to remember this was about 65 years before the nation of Italy that we know today was formed, so he was invading a series of kingdoms and papal states, where the church held enormous power.

In Bologna alone, which had a population of about 70,000, there were 70 convents and monasteries. Napoleon’s law gave them six months’ notice: any monastery with fewer than fifteen local members was dissolved immediately. The rest were consolidated, taxed, and stripped. And the artwork was being evicted and stolen simultaneously. Tommaso Puccini, an official of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace, secretly loaded 75 crates of Florence’s most precious artworks and dispatched them to Sicily on a British frigate, just to keep them out of Napoleon’s hands.

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He didn’t save everything. Napoleon’s commissars moved systematically through Italy’s churches, convents, and palaces, pulling paintings off walls and loading them onto wagons headed for Paris. A significant part of the Louvre was built on this confiscation. If you’ve visited the Louvre and been surprised by the endless galleries of Italian Renaissance masterpieces, they are there in large part because Napoleon took them. The masterpieces that didn’t go to Paris were concentrated into newly created civic museums in Italian cities.

The most significant was the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, called by Napoleon the “Italian Louvre,” and it was filled almost entirely with paintings stripped from churches and convents across northern Italy and Venice in particular. The word pinacoteca means painting gallery.

The Brera doesn’t have the splendor of the Louvre, and it’s not on the tourist radar in the same way as the Uffizi, but if you’re visiting Milan, it’s an incredible museum and a better investment of your time than visiting Leonardo’s Last Supper. Also, the reason it’s so hard to get tickets to see the Last Supper is that it’s in its original place — a convent, where the scene was painted on the wall of the dining room where the nuns ate. Leonardo used oil paint on a dry plaster wall rather than the traditional fresco technique, and the wall opposite the dining room was the kitchen. When the kitchen heated up, the paint began to deteriorate, and the Last Supper has been pretty much a disaster ever since. It’s been repainted many times, and if Leonardo hadn’t been so famous both in his day and after, that painting would have long been gone. Back to the Pinacoteca Brera — it shares a space with the art school, so there are always many art students sketching in the courtyard. And once inside, especially if you took art history in college, it’s just one greatest hit after the other. Because everything here was stripped out of the most beautiful, well-funded churches, convents, and monasteries from across northern Italy. When you consider the extraordinary wealth of the Republic of Venice in particular, and then think about the amount of patronage that produced, you can start to appreciate why any art lover needs to visit the Brera.

After Napoleon fell, the modern nation of Italy was formed in the 1860s, and the new secular Italian state dissolved all remaining religious orders and confiscated their properties. The buildings were converted into schools, courthouses, hospitals, barracks, and prisons, or were simply left vacant.

By the late 19th century, thousands of magnificent medieval and Renaissance buildings — built to last, set in extraordinary landscapes, with thick walls, vaulted ceilings, and large communal spaces — were rotting. At the same time, Italy was experiencing mass emigration, mostly from the South, but not exclusively. People left Liguria and Tuscany for California and Argentina, laying the foundations of the future wine industry in those places. Then, as Italy’s tourism economy grew in the 20th century, these buildings began to be used as hotels. The cells were already the right size for guest rooms. The refectory — where the monks had eaten in silence — was already a dining room. The wine cellar was already a wine cellar, and the cloisters were a perfect courtyard.

Indulge me this one short rant….

Before I share with you a few of the hotels you should know about, indulge me with this little rant. I know a tour operator who has a very quiet “no church” policy on their tours. This person, like Napoleon, I guess, is strongly anti-clerical and believes her clients think churches are boring anyway. And I want to be clear when I say, whatever your personal beliefs are, and those belong to you, and I respect them completely. But if you choose not to visit any churches during your trip to Italy, you may as well not visit Italy at all. Catholicism is a fundamental piece of Italian culture, even today, when most Italians aren’t particularly religious.

And I would apply this idea to visiting any country where faith and religion have shaped the culture. I have covered my head to visit a mosque and removed my shoes to visit a Hindu temple because any space that people have entered for centuries to be in relationship with the metaphysical world is one of the most interesting, meaningful, and potentially transformative opportunities that come with travel. To reject it would be like going to Italy and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in your hotel room because you’re not willing to try Italian food.

Monasteries Turned Five-Star Hotels

Across Italy, in any region, you will find beautiful hotels named Monastero or Convento — because that’s what they were. I have wondered to myself if occupying these spaces is a desecration, but really, no, the wealth and the status were always here too.

The most famous example is probably San Domenico in Taormina, a very swish Four Seasons hotel now famous for having been the set of season 2 of The White Lotus.

Castel Monastero in Tuscany is a social media darling, a 5-star resort created from an 11th-century monastery. It delivers on every Tuscan dream there is, from cypress-lined roads to hot air balloons. The wine cellar has always been epic, both when it was a monastery and now. The property has been enhanced with pools and a spa, and a Michelin-starred restaurant that was run by Gordon Ramsay for several years. And all the marketing copy promises to deliver the tranquility and peace of the original monastic atmosphere.

My dream hotel is the Monastero Santa Rosa on the Amalfi Coast. Fifteen hundred dollars a night is the starting place. It’s on the Amalfi Coast but not near the water. The monks and nuns were not going swimming — and more practically, malaria was an enormous problem at lower elevations. They built high, above where the mosquitoes could reach them. Which means they have the most incredible views, and now there is an extraordinary, Instagram-famous infinity pool. The restaurant is called Il Refettorio — the refectory, where the nuns once ate together in communal silence. It is now a Michelin-starred restaurant.

And then there’s the sfogliatella. The shell-shaped pastry filled with ricotta cream — the signature pastry of Naples — has its origin legend at this monastery. If you go to Amalfi, find Andrea Pansa right next to the cathedral, and order the Santa Rosa sfogliatella. It has an amarena cherry in the center.

Life At the Bottom of an Ancient Lake

If you really want to step into this experience and go far off the beaten path, head to Padula. You’ll need to drive through the Cilento National Park — one of the largest protected areas in Italy — past hilltop villages that see almost no foreign tourists. The drive is easy because the population around here is tiny, and there are few people on the highway. Along the way, you’ll notice little hilltop villages that were there 700 years ago when the monastery at Padula was built. And then, on the valley floor, below the village of Padula, you come to the Certosa.

The Certosa di San Lorenzo is the largest monastery in Italy and has the largest cloister in the world. Over 51,500 square meters. 320 rooms and halls. A great cloister measuring 12,000 square meters, ringed by 84 columns. It is magnificent. Also, unless there’s a school bus parked out front, you may very likely be in this enormous space all by yourself.

In 1306, this was not the middle of nowhere, but a critical corridor. It was the main overland route connecting Naples to Puglia to Calabria — an important road that the Romans called the Via Popilia, which had run straight through this valley since the 2nd century BC. If you controlled this area, you also controlled all the movement through southern Italy.

When Tommaso Sanseverino founded the Certosa di Padula in 1306, he deliberately chose the Carthusians. They originated in France, and at that time, the French Angevins ruled from Naples. But more importantly, Carthusian monks would be able to work the land, which at that time was a flooded marsh. The Carthusians’ engineering expertise came directly from their Rule: because each monk lived in complete solitude in his own cell, the order required individual running water to be piped to every cell in every monastery they built, which made hydraulic engineering an institutional skill they carried with them wherever they went. At Padula, that same expertise drained the valley floor — the silted bed of an ancient lake — turning it into some of the most productive agricultural land in the region. The result was that the Certosa became not just a spiritual institution but an economic powerhouse, controlling the farmland, the water, and the road traffic of the entire valley for five centuries.

When Charles V passed through in 1535 on his way back from defeating the Ottoman fleet at Tunis, he stopped here — not because Padula was remote, but because the Certosa was the grandest and best-provisioned stopping point on the entire road through southern Italy. The monks fed his entire army. For the Emperor’s breakfast, they made a frittata with 1,000 eggs. He stayed two days and confirmed the monastery’s privileges in gratitude. Today, every August 10th, the town of Padula still cooks an enormous frittata in the piazza to commemorate the visit.

When Napoleon’s forces suppressed the Certosa in 1807, they stripped five centuries of accumulated wealth: 172 paintings alone were carted to the Royal Museum of Naples — what is now Capodimonte — while manuscripts and documents were absorbed into Neapolitan state archives, and we can assume quite a lot was sold, stolen, damaged, or destroyed. After Napoleon’s fall, the monks briefly returned, but the Italian unification ended monastic life there permanently. The gorgeous structure became a military barracks, then an orphanage for boys, and then a WWI prisoner-of-war camp. What survives at Padula today — the architecture, the elliptical staircase, the ceramic floors — is essentially what was too heavy or too fixed to steal.

But what remains is an extraordinary peace. The fresh air, the pristine landscape. The ability to imagine what a life here was like, quiet, contemplative — the hum of all those monks, all moving in patterns of silence. Then you go up to the village of Padula and look down at the Certosa and across the landscape, and understand that you’re looking at the bottom of an ancient lake that was masterfully engineered by monks 800 years ago.

The monastery is a museum now, formalized in the 1980s, and UNESCO-listed in 1998. There’s a museum of Lucanian art there that’s not often open, and some contemporary art installed, which… is not good. My favorite part to visit is the kitchen, with a great stone fireplace and a copper sink, and beautiful ceramic tile from Vietri sul Mare on the Amalfi Coast. A monumental elliptical marble staircase — a double helix in white stone — leads to the library. It was the last addition to the monastery before Napoleonic suppression.

You can also have lunch in Padula. Just make sure you eat before 2 pm because the whole town shuts down for the afternoon and doesn’t re-open until dinnertime.

Where the Monks Still Pray

Let’s go back to Naples, where we started this episode. Naples has over 600 churches, and many of them are built atop Roman and Greek temples. But I want to walk just a short distance away to San Domenico Maggiore, a church we first visited in Episode 4: Vittoria Colonna Had It All. It was once the most important church in Naples, and I strongly believe it should be better known today. If you remember that episode, the Aragonese kings of Naples are buried there, and after the 1980 earthquake rocked their tombs, their skeletons were studied by paleo-archaeologists, revealing something very surprising that you’ll just have to listen to that episode to learn.

At San Domenico, in the 13th century, a young nobleman named Tommaso first encountered the Dominican friars. Tommaso was the youngest son in his family, whose brothers had gone into military service, while he was to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and become the abbot of Monte Cassino, the great Benedictine monastery near their home in Aquino. But after receiving his early education at the monastery, his family sent him to the university in Naples, where he would discover the Dominicans — a mendicant order of poverty, wanderers, preachers in beggars’ robes — and he decided that was the life he wanted, not the cushy life of a Monte Cassino monk. His mother was so furious, she had him kidnapped and held at the family castle for over a year to talk him out of it. It didn’t work, and he began a long career between Naples, Paris, Rome, and Orvieto, writing many of the most important texts in the Catholic intellectual tradition.

From 1272 to 1274, the man we call St. Thomas Aquinas was given the opportunity to set up a school anywhere he wished, and he chose Naples. He lived in the monastery at San Domenico and wrote the third part of the Summa Theologica — a systematic, comprehensive attempt to reconcile faith and reason and insist that rigorous intellectual inquiry and deep faith are not enemies. And this is why Thomas Aquinas is having a remarkable moment right now.

There is currently a significant wave of conversion to Catholicism underway, and much of it is coming from Silicon Valley. The engineers, philosophers, and venture capitalists grappling with the implications of artificial intelligence are finding that the medieval Church thought deeply about consciousness, personhood, and the nature of intelligence. The Vatican has been hosting conversations with AI leaders, and Thomas Aquinas keeps appearing in those conversations, because he asked the right questions.

You can visit the church of San Domenico for free, but if you pay the extra 10 euros, you can visit the monastery and visit St. Thomas’s cell. There, witnesses reported that they found him before dawn, suspended three feet off the ground in prayer before a crucifix, completely oblivious to the world. A voice reportedly came from the crucifix and asked what reward he wanted; he said, “nothing but you, Lord.” There’s also a reliquary holding a piece of bone that belonged to St. Thomas’s arm, and pilgrims will go there to pray in front of it. There’s also a heart of someone — we don’t know who — but at one point there were the hearts of three different Neapolitan kings, all lost when, you guessed it, Napoleon’s troops suppressed the monastery.

But San Domenico is somehow still active. There are just a few brothers still there, all elderly. If you pass through the monastery to see St. Thomas’s cell, and it’s just before lunchtime, you might smell the pasta al forno — what we call baked ziti.

I pray the monk’s cells at San Domenico never become a hotel. I hope there’s a renaissance of visitors who want to see this beautiful place. Please put it on your itinerary. Go to learn more about it, but also to feel it. I remember my friend Don saying that he didn’t like to go to yoga classes at the gym, that he liked this yoga center on 14th street in New York City, because it had been a yoga studio for decades, and he said places that have been meditated and prayed in for a long time have a sort of patina, a peaceful vibe that facilitates the experience. The monastery cells at San Domenico have been active for 800 years.

That’s why I want you to go to San Domenico.

🗺️ SHOW NOTES & RESOURCES

Everything you need to plan your own visit.

🏨 WHERE TO STAY

NH Napoli Panorama (the hotel at the top of the episode)

Naples’s tallest building — 24 floors — with rooms facing either the Bay of Naples toward Posillipo, or over the historic center toward Spaccanapoli. A practical base for a night before a flight or a first night in the city.

📍 Via Medina 70, Naples

🌐 nh-hotels.com/en/hotel/nh-napoli-panorama

Monastero Santa Rosa Hotel & Spa (my dream hotel)

A 17th-century convent perched on the cliffside above Conca dei Marini on the Amalfi Coast. 20 rooms, an infinity pool carved into the cliff, and the Michelin-starred restaurant Il Refettorio — the nuns’ former dining hall. The spa is the original convent winery. Open April through early November. Starting around $1,500/night. No guests under 16.

📍 Via Roma 2, Conca dei Marini (Amalfi Coast)

📞 +39 089 832 1199

🌐 monasterosantarosa.com

Castel Monastero (Tuscany)

A 5-star resort built within an 11th-century monastery and medieval hamlet in the Chianti hills. 68 rooms and suites, a Michelin-starred restaurant, a wine cellar, hot air balloons, pools, and a spa.

📍 Località Monastero d’Ombrone, Castelnuovo Berardenga, Siena

🌐 castelmonastero.com

San Domenico Palace, Taormina — A Four Seasons Hotel (setting of White Lotus Season 2)

A 14th-century Dominican convent above the Ionian Sea. The original 16th-century cloister is still intact at the heart of the hotel.

📍 Piazza San Domenico 5, Taormina, Sicily

🌐 fourseasons.com/taormina

If you are booking a 5-star hotel, use my advisor network for your reservation and receive perks and upgrades. I earn a 5% commission on your stay. Once you create an account with Classic Travel linked to my advisor account, you can use the same portal to book 5-star hotels anywhere in the world and receive the same benefits.

https://www.classictravel.com/Danielle

Borgo San Gregorio (for visiting Goleto Abbey — Irpinia, Campania)

A wine resort and restaurant in Sorbo Serpico, in the heart of Irpinia, set on the estate of Feudi di San Gregorio winery. 12 rooms with panoramic views of the Irpinian hills, surrounded by vineyards producing Taurasi, Fiano, and Greco di Tufo. Chef Danilo Uva serves traditional Campanian cuisine. About 30 minutes from Goleto Abbey.

📍 Località Cerza Grossa snc, Sorbo Serpico (Avellino)

🌐 borgosangregorio.com

Santa Chiara Boutique Hotel (Naples)

A 4-star boutique hotel right on Spaccanapoli, steps from Santa Chiara and San Domenico Maggiore. An ideal base for this entire episode’s Naples itinerary.

📍 Via Benedetto Croce 23, Naples

🌐 santachiarahotel.com

🏛️ PLACES TO VISIT

Santa Chiara — Cloister, Museum & Basilica (Naples)

The church is free. The majolica cloister and museum (including the Roman baths) cost €6. Open daily 9:30 am–5:30 pm.

📍 Via Santa Chiara 49c, Naples

📞 +39 081 551 6673

🌐 monasterodisantachiara.eu

San Domenico Maggiore (Naples)

Church is free and open daily, 10 am–6pm (closed for lunch, 1:30–2:30 pm, weekdays). The monastery visit — including St. Thomas’s cell, his arm bone reliquary, and the sacristy with the royal tombs — costs approximately €10 and is accessed separately. Check hours in advance as they vary.

📍 Piazza San Domenico Maggiore 8A, Naples

📞 +39 333 863 8997

Abbazia del Goleto (near Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, Avellino — Irpinia)

A Benedictine abbey founded in 1114, now a magnificent roofless Gothic ruin set in a meadow in the Irpinian hills. Free to visit; the grounds are managed by the local community. Check locally for current access, as hours are informal. About 1.5 hours from Naples. Best combined with a stay at Borgo San Gregorio and a meal at Antica Trattoria di Pietro.

📍 Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, Province of Avellino

Certosa di San Lorenzo, Padula (the largest monastery in Italy)

Open Wednesday–Monday, 9:00 am–7:30 pm. Closed Tuesdays. Admission €6, reduced €2 for ages 18–25, free under 18. Campania ArteCard accepted. Allow at least 2 hours.

📍 Viale Certosa, Padula (Salerno)

📞 +39 0975 77552

Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan)

Open Tuesday–Sunday, 8:30 am–7:15 pm. Closed Mondays. Admission €20; reduced €4 for ages 18–25; free under 18. Free first Sunday of every month (reservation required). Book at brerabooking.org. Metro: M2 Lanza stop.

📍 Via Brera 28, Milan

📞 +39 02 72105 141

🌐 pinacotecabrera.org

🍽️ WHERE TO EAT

Andrea Pansa (Amalfi)

In business since 1830, right on the cathedral square. Order the Santa Rosa sfogliatella — the original, with the amarena cherry in the center. Open daily 7:30 am–11:00 pm.

📍 Piazza Duomo 40, Amalfi

📞 +39 089 871 065

La Locanda dei Trecento (Padula)

Traditional Cilento cooking. Eat before 2 pm, or the town closes until dinner. Open Thursday–Tuesday 11:30 am–late. Closed Wednesdays.

📍 Via Annunziata, Padula

📞 +39 0975 77680

Antica Trattoria di Pietro (Melito Irpino, Avellino — for visiting Goleto Abbey)

In business since 1934, now in its fourth generation. Slow Food Osterie d’Italia award-winner for best regional Italian cuisine. This is the kind of place where Italian-American visitors have been known to cry at the table because the food tastes like their grandmother’s kitchen. Traditional Irpinian cooking — handmade pasta, cured meats, local cheeses, wood-fired focaccia, and Aglianico from the family’s own vines. Closed Wednesdays and two weeks in September.

📍 Corso Italia 8, Melito Irpino (Avellino)

📞 +39 0825 472010

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So forget the Zoom link, join me here: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/206606

See you at 8 pm ET. If you can’t make it, send your questions to danielle@danielleoteri.com

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Before you dive in, I will start hosting the monthly Ask Me Anything About Italy sessions right here on Substack instead of Zoom. That will make the recording immediately available to those who can’t attend live. If you’d like to join with your questions about trip planning, history, or culture, please become a subscriber.

Introduction

My grandmother, Evelina Scariati, was from Capaccio Paestum, and her stories about the temples of Paestum were my introduction to art history and Italy. Her father would take her and her sisters to visit the temples built by the Greeks nearly 3,000 years ago and still standing. In the 1930s, the temples sat unprotected on the plains, about a mile from the beach, without a fence or ticket office. The young girls pulled pottery shards from the ground and fit them together like puzzle pieces. Those shards must have been at least 2,000 years old and are now in the Paestum museum, which didn’t open until 1952.

The temple grounds were chosen, I believe, because there’s a special charge here. Or maybe all those years of sacred practice imbued the land with something that feels supernatural. Fortunately, the Cilento is protected from mass tourism, unlike its supermodel sister, Amalfi, which means it’s quiet enough for anyone who wants to feel that charge to do so. It may take a day or so for the peace of the area to settle in, but it will, I promise.

What’s Special About Cilento

The Cilento is a part of the region of Campania. It’s immediately south of the Amalfi coast. When you are in Cilento, especially on the beach at Paestum or from the hilltop village of Castellabate, you can see Positano, Ischia, and Capri on clear days. They’re right there. But the Cilento is part of a national park. There’s no mass tourism, no cruise ships, and it’s significantly less expensive than the Amalfi coast.

The land within the Cilento National Park is regulated, and much of the food is organic. The quality of the soil is incredible because it sits on an ancient seabed, between two volcanoes, one extinct, one active. In terms of agriculture, it is one of the most productive regions in Italy, and the area's vegetable dishes are among the best.

The three most famous things about Cilento: 1) the 3,000-year-old temples at Paestum, 2) buffalo mozzarella, and 3) the Mediterranean Diet, which was first studied and codified in the seaside village of Pioppi. Cilento is also a Blue Zone, with an extraordinary number of centenarians.

If you want to stay in luxury hotels, feel like a movie star, get the boat ride with a spritz, get the photo of the famous view, spend the money, and choose the Amalfi coast. If you want small villages, excellent food, ancient temples, turquoise water, and sandy beaches, then Cilento is your choice. And if you want to do both, you can easily day-trip to the Amalfi coast from Cilento by taking the ferry to Amalfi and Positano, or (better) drive to Vietri-sul-Mare or Cetara.

The five-day itinerary is for paid subscribers — where to stay, where to eat, the buffalo farm you should visit if you want a tour, and the one you should visit if you prefer a long lunch and cannoli filled with buffalo milk ricotta. It also includes the fig and chocolate laboratory in the ancient oil mill, and the night fishing trip that costs only €40 and ends with dancing and fried anchovies on a private beach.

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And the May Destination Deep Dive: Tuscany is on May 28th, also at 8 pm ET - Zoom link

Here’s an update on what else is happening:

In Italy, gas prices are starting to affect travel decisions in ways we weren’t really seeing until this past week. As the war in Iran has gone on longer than anticipated…

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Among my favorite trips to plan are multigenerational family trips — especially when they involve a roots-finding day for those with Italian ancestry. But really, the reason I enjoy planning these so much is that I know how much value I can offer. There are so many things you don’t know that you don’t know, because planning one of these trips is genuinely not easy.

Everyone is excited. Everyone has a different film running in their head. The boomers want Dolce Vita — the café, the piazza, the slow lunch. The Gen X/Millenial parent dreams of wandering like Before Sunrise, unscheduled and open. The grandkids want Pisa for TikTok. Everyone thinks their version of Italy is the best one. The gap between the fantasy and the logistics nobody discussed is what this episode is about.

The weight lands in the middle

The first thing I want to name is something nobody says out loud. When grandparents offer to pay for a significant portion of the trip, it feels like a gift — and it is —, but it also creates an invisible obligation. Now, the Gen X or millennial in the middle is responsible for making sure the investment pays off. Grandma needs to be comfortable. The kids need to be engaged. The teenager needs wifi. The eighty-year-old needs to sit down every twenty minutes. And somewhere in there, the person holding all of this together needs to have something that resembles a vacation.

This is not a complaint about multigenerational travel. It’s an honest description of the dynamics so that the middle generation can go in with their eyes open and build a trip that accounts for what’s actually going to happen — not just what everyone imagines will happen.

Before you book anything, do this

Have the bucket list conversation — but do it properly. Not “what do you want to see?” which produces a list of everything, or more commonly, a big uuuuuh, I dunno. Limit the options by raising the stakes: if you get to choose only one thing on this trip — the Colosseum or the Vatican — which one? Give people time to actually think. Let them sit with it for a few days. What comes back will surprise you. The grandparent who you assumed wanted the Vatican might actually want to see the Forum because her father talked about Rome his whole life, and that’s what he described. The teenager who you assumed wanted Instagram content might actually be obsessed with gladiators. You don’t know until you ask the right question.

The purpose of this exercise is not to eliminate destinations. It’s to identify the two or three experiences that each person would be devastated to miss — and protect those ruthlessly — while letting everything else be negotiable.

Keep it simple: two locations, not three

Do not pack in many locations. Seriously, two locations instead of three for a ten-day trip is plenty. I understand that you want to maximize the experience — you’ve spent all this money to fly across the ocean — but I’m thinking about how many times you need to get to and from a train station, all the bathroom trips the grandparents and the little ones are going to need while you’re trying to figure out what track your train is on, and getting taxis on either side that usually only fit four people. Your time is better spent people-watching in a piazza, trust me.

If you’re choosing between Florence, Venice, and Rome, eliminate Venice. The narrow streets and difficulty getting a quick taxi when you need one can make the trip heavier than necessary.

The Pisa problem

All the Gen Zs will say they want to go to Pisa. It’s purely for TikTok. And here’s the honest truth: Pisa is an entire day trip that won’t deliver much beyond the photo. You’re not eliminating TikTok moments from the trip — you’re not a monster — but you are being strategic about which ones are worth a full day and which ones can be woven into something you’re already doing. The leaning tower is a destination. A beautiful doorway in Florence or a terrazzo floor in Naples is a TikTok moment that happens on the way to something else. Let the kids find those. They will find them. Ludovica in Naples is the perfect example — she was finding restaurants with lines around the block that nobody had heard of, not because she was Italian but because she’s 16 and online.

Give them one meal to find entirely on their own. Let them navigate one afternoon. Two things will happen: they’ll find something surprising, and they’ll feel like participants rather than passengers, which is what makes teenagers tolerable on group trips.

Do not rent a villa

This is the most counterintuitive piece of advice I have, and it’s going to stop people mid-listen. The villa seems perfect. It seems cost-effective. It seems like everyone has space and the setting is beautiful, and you’ll have long lunches on a terrace. You’re dreaming about drinking a glass of wine by the pool, napping in a hammock, gazing at the rolling hills of Tuscany. You’re not thinking about who gets stuck doing all the driving, how many rental cars you’ll actually need, sharing a bathroom with people you don’t normally share bathrooms with, who is going to make breakfast every morning, who is going to go grocery shopping for the coffee and breakfast foods, who is going to be picking up towels, or who thinks the A/C isn’t strong enough and wants to call the owner — but oh wait, you call, you have the number, and you took Spanish in high school, right? Yeah, Spanish is not just like Italian. You know why hotels cost more? Because they head off a million little annoyances.

What it actually means is that the person in the middle is now doing the driving, grocery shopping, morning coffee, meal planning, and activity coordination — on top of everything they were already doing. The villa removes all the infrastructure that actually gives the middle generation a moment to breathe.

The alternative: a large apartment in a city. Florence, or even the outskirts of Florence, where you can walk or take a short train into the center. Here’s what that buys the middle generation — the ability to walk out the door, find a piazza, sit in a café, have a glass of wine, and exist alone for forty-five minutes. That is not a luxury. That is the thing that makes the difference between coming home restored and coming home more depleted than when you left. No matter how loving and well-intentioned everyone in the group is, the middle generation will need that exit. Build it into the trip’s structure before you go.

On the ground: how to structure each day

The toughest part about traveling with an older generation is that people aren’t always honest about their limits — and sometimes they’re not honest with themselves. Or they get confronted with those limitations for the first time on the trip. Walking around a suburban neighborhood every day is very different from traversing cobblestone streets in humid Rome.

This is why I recommend booking one activity everyone does together each day, and then leaving time for people to do things on their own. A private tour solves a lot of problems. You’ll have a guide to lead the way, a local person to ask questions of, skip-the-line tickets already taken care of, and a shared experience that everyone will inevitably process differently — and talking about it later becomes an experience unto itself. Then leave the second half of the day open. Take in more history, shop, park yourself in a piazza and gelato the afternoon away.

For dinner, reservations are a must in the most popular destinations — there’s a lot of very mediocre, if not downright bad, food in the most touristy places. For a big group you’ll need to plan ahead. You can make reservations directly through the restaurant’s website or through thefork.it. One meal together per day — a lunch or a dinner — and then leave people to do their own thing.

When to call a professional

If you want everything planned — drivers, restaurant reservations, guided tours across multiple cities — I strongly urge you to book through a professional. The value you’ll receive, especially when amortized across all the people and problems in the group that are easily mitigated, is tremendous. We just had a family return from a multigenerational trip to Sicily: roots day, city and countryside stays, daily guided tours, van rides between cities, and restaurant reservations for lunch and dinner every day. For a pro, this is easy. For the DIY traveler, plan to take a sabbatical from work to get it done.

So if you’re DIY-ing it: keep it simple. One tour a day, one meal a day, and basta.

The reframe

A multigenerational trip to Italy is one of the most meaningful things a family can do. It is also very complicated in ways that nobody who hasn’t done it will warn you about. Going in with clear eyes about the dynamics, the logistics, and the invisible labor does not diminish the experience — it protects it. The families who have a terrible time are almost always the ones who planned the fantasy and ignored the logistics. The ones who have a transformative time are the ones who planned both.

If you’re in the middle of planning a multigenerational trip to Italy and want someone to pressure-test it before you go, that’s exactly what a one-hour consultation is for. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. If you’re a committed DIY-er, I also offer Customized Itinerary Design, where I go much deeper than best advice and actually plan the day-by-day — but you make the bookings. And if you want to turn it over to Arianna and me to just handle it, make an appointment for a free Bespoke Trip Planning consultation, where I’ll be able to give you a price estimate once I know more about your ideal trip.

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

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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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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.