I was in Pisa in the early 80s, as part of a choir concert tour. We were a busload of high school juniors and seniors, traveling around Italy for a week, sleeping on the floors of gymnasiums and churches and singing at various military bases. I have lots of fun memories of that trip, augmented by a travel diary and photos but after this week in Italy I realized that most of my memories had frayed and tattered around the edges. Things I thought I remembered had softened, blurred, sometimes been completely skewed by the passing years. We only stopped...

After 3 days of drizzle, downpours and cloud cover, the sun finally broke through and lit up Italy for us. We took the train from Rapallo about an hour south to Cinque Terre. After consulting the guidebook, we decided to skip the northernmost village of the 5 coastal towns that make up Cinque Terre and started at Vernazza, which was touted as the “most quaint”. Our plan was to walk around town, eat lunch and when we were ready to move on, hike the mountain footpath to the next village south. But after alighting from the train and stepping into...

One thing that mesmerized me in Italy was the feat of engineering that is the autostrada (motorway) through the northern Apennines down to Liguria along the west coast of the country. Italy was the first country in the world to begin building motorways. The ones that we used to get from Milan to Genoa to Rapallo and the ones to Florence and Pisa have lovely names: The Motorway of the Flowers and the Blue Motorway. To distract myself from the rather narrow lane widths and the high-speed (130km/h limit for cars) race-car driving style of our fellow motorists I concentrated...

Apparently the time to skip Italy, if you want to avoid the tourist jam is July, August & September. What luck for us, then, that we chose to go the first week of November. The weather could have cooperated just a teensy bit more, but we had some sunshine at the end, so we were happy, and after all, rain in Italy on vacation is better than rain at home, right? The place we stayed was an apartment building up the hill in the west coast town of Rapallo. It belongs to the parents of my colleague, Sara, another love...