It’s zero hour. The time of our first ever webcast.

Tune in today to our first ever webcast, a live streaming event from Italy on Bill and Suzy TV. The broadcast begins at 12:00 noon with a visit to the Dionigi winery and continues every hour on the hour until 4:00pm.

Suzy and I love to share Italy with folks. Friends, acquaintances (who will become friends) and strangers (who will become friends). And this week we are organizing a group of six friends to join us on a Cucinapalooza cooking tour. Each day will be unique, with a different chef spending the day with us organized around some particular activity. It promises to be the first of its kind and we’ll be bringing it to you on our blog and through webcasts.

Suzy and I love to share our love of Italy with others. That’s why we opened Bella Italia. That’s why we bought and operate our villa la Fattoria del Gelso. That’s why we wake up in the morning and how we go to bed in the evening. Every day is una giornata italiana in one way or another.

So when we conceived of our Cucinapalooza tour, we also thought, how can we share this with those who can’t be there? It will be too priceless to restrict to 6 or 8 people.

And that is where the idea of the webcast originated. We have been blogging for over a decade now. Bill and Suzy’s Excellent Adventures started before the word blog had been invented, but we managed to do it anyway.

We have written more and more as time goes on, trying to give you a flavor of our experiences in Umbria. But as hard as we try, it’s not the same as being there. So we’re going to try our hand at webstreaming, so you can see what we see and hear it from the folks that are living it, as they live it. Live.

One word of caution. Web streaming requires a certain level of technical competence and a lot of logistical support. We have been working hard at acquiring the former but are dependent upon a certain amount of luck regarding the latter. We have bought microphones, run tests, practiced with new software and spent hours and hours in front of webcams, camcorders and computer screens repeating “testing one, two, three.” We have gotten it to work flawlessly. And have also failed spectacularly. But we try because we care.

Our biggest obstacle is the internet itself. In order to send our images and voices across the interverse we have to find a way into that great big system of piping and tubes. At home it means making a connection to our wireless home network. In Italy it means finding a hotspot with sufficient speed to handle our broadcast. Occasionally it may mean using a cellphone with internet access. But in testing internet connection here over the past two days we’ve had more freezes than Fargo, North Dakota. Simply put, we do not hold all of the cards. Viewers are just as likely to see “We’re experiencing technical difficulties” displayed on screen as they are the faces of Americans in paradise.

We try because we care to. They say faith can move mountains. Let’s see if it can transmit Bill and Suzy TV today.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy