We have been joined in San Gimignano by an Italian couple and their two young children. After a dinner (barbecued sausages and a half-dozen skewers of meat and peppers) and some very nice wine our visitors brought us, we sat down in the living room to talk about life in the UAE … and it […]

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The fly in the ointment of your dream vacation to Tuscany? Mosquitoes! Or as the Italians say, onomatapoetically, it would seem, the zanzara. (Hear it? Buzzzzz.) Summer, not surprisingly, is the high season for mosquitoes here, and mosquitoes in Tuscany are particularly infamous. (A google search for “Tuscany” … “mosquitoes” yields 101,000 hits.) One blogger […]

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Three of us decided to take a walk through the rolling countryside surrounding San Gimignano. The area practically calls out for a hike. Lots of up and down, but most of it not really intense, and it generally stays off paved roads — in favor of dirt tracks or rutted secondary roads leading into dense […]

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Speaking generally, Italy is a country where failure to eat what is put in front of you is often met with disappointment. Sometimes the disappointment is internalized and then becomes a bit aggressive. “You don’t like it?” (Disappointed.) Why not?” (Vaguely accusatory.) While in Florence, at a perfectly adequate restaurant, I did not feel like […]

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The world seems to be shrinking, day by day. More of it seems within reach than ever before. But plenty of nooks and crannies of human existence remain outside our body of knowledge. For instance, the Italian city of San Gimignano.

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That was the subject line on an email my daughter sent me 14 years ago. “Il Palio is Madness!” Her brief account of the horse race run inside the medieval Piazza del Campo of Siena, which she witnessed while studying in the hilltop Tuscan city in the summer of 2000 … and it put in […]

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It had to happen. In addition to the various and sundry tours of Florence, we have a semi-new option: The Dan Brown Inferno Tour. Not to be confused with Dante’s Inferno. Though in 2014, especially in English, Dan Brown’s “Inferno” might be better known than that other guy’s “Inferno”. The “other guy” being Dante Alighieri, […]

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Let’s be honest. We often don’t know what we’re looking at. The Grand Canyon. The Eiffel Tower. The treasures of Florence. A guide can enhance our understanding and appreciation of what our eyes take in. A good guide can make us see things in an entirely new way. Our group of six spent most of […]

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Modern travel is fairly astounding. When it works, of course, and it generally does.  Far more than it did in the past. Wake up in Abu Dhabi, and two cab rides, one six-hour flight and an 80-minute train ride later … you can be checking into your friend’s hotel in Florence, Italy, in plenty of […]

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Twice in a year the UAE has hosted a world Under 17 sports event. Last fall it was the Fifa U17 World Cup. This month it is the Fiba Under 17 World Championship. Fiba is the international sanctioning body for basketball. And this basketball tournament has been more interesting than was the soccer tournament. Even […]

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