Like so many others who visit Italy, I fell in love with the sound of the language, the landscape, the cobblestones, the moons, the...

I bought the house from an older man named Nick, who’d been born there. He and his wife had emigrated to Canada and remained there for...

When I closed on the house, I, like Frances in Under the Tuscan Sun, had only the dimmest idea what to do next. The similarity in our...

As it turned out, the GC wasn’t good enough. Expenses were piling up and work was moving glacially. When my father, a builder and land...

This is the little house as it stands now. There’s still a lot of work to be done, partly to reinforce it structurally because the roof...

Perhaps only in a second home in Italy can you have a shrine to yourself at the top of the stairs. Yep, that’s me, sort of — if I were 30...

This last August, the heat wave across central Italy was intense. One evening toward the end of my stay, when my fresh blow-out from the...

The significant work I’d still like to do would be twofold: tame and landscape the outdoor area and extend the house into part of it....

Check out this image! This is the shadow thrown by the statue of Neptune built to represent Pope Pius IV in Bologna’s Piazza del Nettuno....

Like many Americans, I have a weakness for things Italian, men included. Unlike many Americans, I’ve allowed my weakness to become a...

To savor Italy unyoked from the herds that clog the narrow cobbled arteries of Rome, you might try a few days in the alpine Abruzzo...

Pescocostanzo’s entrance promenade looks like a backgammon board made of chocolate and vanilla brick. It’s a welcome visual metaphor for...