One of the things I love about life in Italy is the cycling, and today the Giro d’Italia goes over the nearby hills where I regularly ride my bike. There are many famous climbs that have featured in the  Giro’s history, such as the Stelvio, the Gavia, Pordoi, Abetone, and many more. Today’s Giro d’Italia stage is going…

Italy has so many wonderful, beautiful amazing places and things, and all if it in an area about the size of California.  And yet, it’s got a lot of problems too.   What drives me crazy in particular is that you can’t copy most of what’s good about Italy, but the bad things are fixable, even if…

One of the things that initially drew me to Italy was my love of bicycle racing.  The area where I grew up in Oregon is actually a pretty good place for bicycles, with lots of nice roads and hills, but the Veneto here in Italy is the heartland of cycling; or one of them, at…

This past year, I discovered something of a ‘hidden gem’ in the Venetian lagoon. I’m going to admit up front that I’m generally not that wild about Venice – it’s beautiful and very much worth seeing, but between hordes of tourists, an economy based on gouging them, and my own preferences for hills, mountains, forests…

It’s always interesting to see where you’re from through someone else’s eyes: you learn both about yourself and your home, but also about the person doing the observing, as their own experiences and point of view will be put on display. There are plenty of people who make comparisons that are a little bit superficial, although…

One of those funny moments: It was a hot day at the end of the summer, and I was riding my scooter back from work. At that time of evening, traffic gets very bottled up in the “Piazzale Stanga” here in Padova, a major, 6 way intersection that is every bit as bad as you…

When you read “do you have change?”, are you picturing a beggar asking for some spare coins?  Italy has more than its fair share of those, but think again – the person most likely to ask you for change in Italy is the person working the cash register at a supermarket. I don’t know for…

Or, translated from the Italian “metalmeccanico” more accurately, “machinist”.  When I hear that word, I picture someone working with high-end precision tools to make machine parts, or something like that.  Little did I know, however, that I, a computer programmer with little to no knowledge of power tools or metal working of any kind, am…

“Disgusting, gross, repellent, icky, revolting” are how the dictionary translates “schifoso” or something that “fa schifo!” (literally ‘it makes disgust!’), but it’s such a delightful word to use because it sounds so right. You pronounce it “SKI-fo”, but you can really draw it out depending on how repugnant the object in question is.  “Che SSSSCHIIIIIIFO!”,…

My parents were visiting us recently, and had come down with persistent colds that were beginning to feel like sinus infections because of how long they had dragged on.  That’s a condition best judged by a doctor, and their own doctor was on the other side of the world, in the US.  What to do?  We…