Experience.

 

My family and I have been traveling around Italy since 1992 learning the towns, sites, foods, language, and culture. I’ve been studying Italian since time immemorial and can now say, “Ciao.”

 

I believe in slow travel.

 

My books focus on small towns and culture for repeat visitors to Tuscany — the kinds of places that most guidebooks cover in 30 words or less. To me, second timers want to travel slower to engage more in the culture — gelato — than try to “collect” as many sites as possible.

 

Family makes all the difference.

 

My Italian cousins give me a unique perspective from other writers. They show me the real “Inside Tuscany” with its hidden tiny hill towns, incredible panoramas, and restaurants and pizzerias known only to the locals. They have taken me to sagre (festivals dedicated to a single food like steak, or porcini mushrooms) and weekend long festivals and antique fairs. They “try” to teach me how to "act Italian” - but it is still hard to get used to eating dinner at 8:30.

 

I speak Italian.

 

To communicate with the family I had to learn Italian, only a few spoke any English, and that was limited. Or so I thought. It turns out that they’d rather listen to my Italian than use their English.

 

It’s impossible to recall how often a church caretaker or museum docent has opened up and taken me on a private 40 minute tour because I could understand them. Or the number of times I learned about specialties in a restaurant that aren’t on the menu or found the perfect Vino Nobile for the secondo piatto. Thanks to the the language I’ve learned to harvest grapes and olives to make wine and olive oil.

 

I live in Tuscany two months a year.

 

My base is in Arezzo and from there I study Italian, branch out to discover new places and events, participate in festivals and daily markets, walk in the evening passeggiata, and make friends.

Where did the idea for my books come from?

 

In 2008, after retiring form the University of Colorado Denver, I was thinking about what to do next. I asked, “What do I know and love?” The answer was writing and traveling in Arezzo and Tuscany, so decided to begin a series of guidebooks. The first was the book on Arezzo. It took 18 months to research, write, and publish it. The next four more followed in what I call the “Inside Tuscany: A Second Time Around” series.