Back in Italy, I was able to check out a number of sites I’d been planning to visit for quite a while. First was Genoa, home to Christopher Columbus; and also (more importantly for many!) the neighborhood where Livia, the fictional girlfriend of the Sicilian police inspector Montalbano, lives. Boccadasse is a former fishing village, and plays an important role in that detective series (which I’ve now finished reading). Our guide only mentioned the Montalbano connection in Italian, assuming that the English-speaking tourists weren’t familiar – so we had to make clear that he is now truly an international star! And of course no one needs such an introduction to Cinque Terre – already internationally famous as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Previous postings have mentioned my “ongoing, lifelong, never-ending Michelangelo appreciation tour”….. and one destination long on that tour list was the marble quarry site at Carrara. It was a really great tour, in four-wheel-drive Land Rovers – and yes, we climbed that steep twisting, winding road in the photo below. It was definitely not for the ‘faint-of-heart,’ given that the primitive roads had no guardrails. A truly excellent wish-you-were-there guide to the place: Eric Scigliano’s Michelangelo’s Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara.