After five days of preliminaries, the big day had arrived. Up until today we had butchered pigs, made sausage, tried our hands at pizza dough and pasta, shopped for fresh vegetables and foraged in fields for their wild brethren, we had baked, broiled and boiled, kneaded, preheated and weeded. We had broken bread and baked it too with Danilo, Moreno, Gabriella, Jennifer, Simone, Salvatore, Ernesto and Mauro. Tonight, however, we were on our own. Dinner was ours to imagine, conceive, develop, design and execute. Tonight we were cooking – cooking with gas. And with wood and carbone. Preparing a dinner for the ages. Dinner for 30. Continue reading Cucinapalooza
After nearly two weeks in Italy mostly in just each other’s company, Suzy and I began welcoming the guests back into our life. On Thursday Collin and Yoko arrived from Dubai. The following day Vicky jetted in from Washington, DC. And today we welcomed Bobby and Meryl from central Florida, also welcoming back to Umbria our friend Valerie from New York. The arrivals continue this week. We’ve got our innkeeping on. 
How do you follow up a quintessentially American experience like the Fourth of July here in Italy? Invite a bunch of your Italian friends over for American breakfast. 
Until we started spending our Julys in Italy several years ago, the Fourth of July was always a big deal in our family. For years we would spend our summers together with the rest of my family on a mountaintop in western North Carolina and the Fourth always seemed to be important. There were pig pickings, local fireworks shows, picnics by the pond. And my brothers were always into doing their own fireworks display for the family, the two of them stopping independently in South Carolina on the drive up from Florida, stocking up on entire trunksful of explosives which they would choreograph for the family and a small group of friends and neighbors on a spot lower down on our property where the chance of setting the woods ablaze with an errant spark was smaller. 
Just a short post today. No, really. Brevity is not my forte, but we have been laboring over the past days getting our monthly news magazine, 
When seven o’clock rolls around in the morning it doesn’t matter if I am in bed at home in Washington, DC, or waking up to a cool sea breeze while the not so distant sound of waves lapping up on a white sandy beach soothes, or rubbing the sleep from my eyes as the sun rises over majestic towering mountains. And it doesn’t matter that the air is filled with the gentle clanging of church bells or the high pitched chirping of songbirds that mark the coming to life here in Umbria. The fact remain that I do not like to get up in the morning and dread even more the thought of taking a morning stroll. 
Sundays in Umbria. We’ve spent dozens of them at the villa and it’s safe to say that Sunday is our favorite day of the week. Lazy days. Family days. The day of rest. There is something special about a Sunday in Umbria. 
Perhaps it means we’re just getting old. But this year, at Bevagna’s Mercato del Gaite, there were not chants of “
On the day after our Poseidon adventure, a day of relaxing and taking the waters at the Poseidon thermal spa, our life had anything but been turned upside down. To the contrary, our party cruise seemed to be on cruise control with smooth seas fore and aft. The only ominous cloud the horizon? Our Ischia idyll was coming to an end. 
Those of you who know Suzy and me know that we agree on just about everything.
On a balmy New Years Day a couple of decades ago, a lifetime ago, really, when I was still a lawyer at a large DC firm, I made a snap decision that changed the trajectory of my life. Taking a rare day off I realized how much I really enjoyed time away from the office and discovered a world outside the cubicle where people meander, relax and enjoy one another’s company. On that day I vowed to myself that if my situation had not changed dramatically by the following New Years Day I would have failed miserably. And a year later I found myself setting sail on a new course for my life, a course into uncharted waters but one on which Suzy and I have had the opportunity to experience many excellent adventures.