Karl and Leslie walk and study in Italy, Germany, and around the Med
To paraphrase Bob Dylan! We’re headed to a rather remote part of Germany to begin the first hike of our trip. We caught a flight to Munich out of Florence on Lufthansa. Got to Munich, and waited at the luggage carousel. And waited. And waited. The high tech screen kept saying our flight’s luggage was …
Continue reading “Stuck inside of Munich with them Memphis blues again”
. . . is the only word we can think of to describe how our next winery, Azienda Agricola Villa a Tolliaapproaches wine making. The winery is located in the ancient hamlet of Villa a Tolli which goes back to the pre Roman Etruscians. Villa a Tolli was once the commercial center of Montelcino. The …
Our second winery on our Montalcino tour was to Azienda Agricola Cava d’Onicea small, family run, winerywhere we had lunch and tasted their wine. The owner’s family had been involved in wine making for years (his father was the cellar master at a winery), but he was the first to own a vineyard. They are …
The first winery we visited on our tour was Podere le Ripi, which is owned by Francesco Illy, the oldest male in the third generation of the Illy coffee dynasty. I don’t know what Francesco is worth, but IllyCaffé S.p.A. grosses something like $460 million a year. At any rate, he seems to have thrown …
Continue reading “Bonsai! Throwing money (and innovation) at winemaking.”
Wanting to continue our studies of Tuscan culture, we booked a tour of the Montalcino district, which included three wineries. We’ll cover the town of Montalcino and each winery in a separate post. There were eight of us in the van, four Californians and two New Yorkers, one a native of India and the other …
Consider the virtues of the definite article in English, “the.” What a wonderful word! We never appreciated this until we started studying Italian. “The” is, of course, beautiful all by itself: a sturdy, little one syllable, three letter, word made up of two staunch vertical letters, T and E, joined by a vertical and horizontal …
Forgive us for being off line for a week. Not to make excuses, but the school work has been nearly killing us! Faithful readers will recall that, in addition to having to study the intricacies of Italian grammar, with its prepositions, pronouns, verbs, SEVEN versions of the definite article (all of which just mean “the”, …
The Palio is the wildest horse race in the world. Held twice (occasionally three times) a year, the Palio has ten horses, each representing a Siena contrada (neighborhood), racing around the Piaza del Campo with the jockeys, in medieval regalia, riding bareback (at least for as long as they can stay on their horses). There …
As if studying Italian, with its prepositions and pronouns and the such weren’t enough to tax their brains, Karl and Leslie Ruth are diligently studying Italian culture as well. Each Tuesday evening, at 6:30, the students and instructors meet at Bar Manganelli for a course of study entitled “The Aperitivo In Its Many Forms, Including …
We’re back in school again, at Scuola Saena Iulia. It works this way: Everyone starts on a Monday. Monday mornings at 9:00, all students, new and old, report to school for coffee and a meet and greet. The new students are interviewed by instructors to see how far along they are in Italian (we range …
ITALY, GERMANY, AND MORE!