"You can see the entire history of Sicily right here in Cefalù."

The owner of Hotel La Giara in Cefalù led me up to the roof terrace for a low-level panorama across the city. He made a sweeping gesture encompassing the rooftops and said proudly:

"You can see the entire history of Sicily right here in Cefalù."

"Up on the rocca," he jabs his finger toward the sheer headland that locals call "the fortress" and which shelters Cefalù's perfect little harbor. "You find prehistoric caves and an ancient Greek temple."

"Down here," his hand sweeps to present the narrow streets directly below us. "You can see the courtyards of old Saracen homes, and how the Arabs built the streets narrow as one man, so that if enemies tried to attack, they'd have to enter Cefalù in single file." He paused to grin devilishly. "That way it was easy for just a few men up here with arrows and some more down there with swords to dispatch them."

Strike!

Sciopero. It’s the most dreaded word to any traveler in Italy. If you hear or see the word sciopero (show-pair-oh), perk up your ears ‘cause there’s a labor strike a-coming, and it’ll probably affect your means of transportation.

Train workers, especially, tend to strike at the drop of a hat, although city transit systems are pretty prone to it as well.

The funny thing is, these aren’t unplanned affairs, and the strikes are announced days or even a month ahead of time. Strikes have a set hour at which they will begin, and a precise time when they’ll end.

This isn’t the American-style “walk out until management agrees with you” strike; in Italy they do it merely to make a point.

On occasion the sciopero is over contracts or work-related issues, but more often it’s used as a form of vague, general protest, and—although this isn’t journalistically verifiable—it’s hard not to suspect that sometimes, someone just want a day off.

Chasing Lorenzo around Rome

Palazzo Venezia, Julian Schanbel, and the effects of karma

The Northwest Airlines employee at the gate assured me, yet again, in a syrup voice that our 4:15pm flight would leave on time. This despite the fact that (a) Frances had just told me the NWA.com web site was showing a 20-minute delay and, (b) it was already 4:05pm and there was, as yet, no actual plane at the gate.

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a flight land, taxi, offload, get cleaned, switch out crews, load up again, taxi, and take off in ten minutes.

Right after the woman lied to me about my flight, I noticed a man hurrying down the terminal drop a plastic toploader folder out of his bag without noticing. I picked it up, caught him up, and returned his folder. This will become significant, in some small way, later on in the story of my day spent chasing Lorenzo de' Medici around Rome.

Entirely the Wrong Witch

La Befana, Babbo Natale, and the shifting focus of Christmas traditions in Italy

It is around 9pm on the last day of October, All Hallow's Eve. Back home, in America, it is Halloween, and everywhere kids are looking forward to the end of the school day when they can dress up and hit the streets to fill pillowcases with candy begged from the neighbors.

Here in Venice, it is simply October 31, the day before the Feast of All Saints. In Italy, the time to play dress-up isn't for another four months and the moveable feast of Carnevale, that Fat Tuesday of partying before Ash Wednesday ushers in the 40 austere days of Lent.

So why is it that the pizzeria I just left is packed with babbling kids, their faces smeared with makeup, pointy hats on their heads and gauzy or silky capes tied at their necks? Why did the marble fountainhead on Campo Santa Maria Formosa have a gaggle of costumed youths sitting upon it, laughing and eating candy?

What, in short, the Hell is Halloween doing in the very capital of Carnevale?

(Before you get confused: Yes, this story really is about Christmas; Halloween is just the setup.)

Requiem for A Currency

On arriving in Rome the day Europe switched over to the euro, and how I got rid of my remaining lire

1 January 2002, A Tuesday

I am quite the Eurotrash. Last year I rung in the New Year under the Eiffel Tower. This year I am doing it in Rome. Well, technically the annual odometer clicked over to 2002 somewhere over the Atlantic for me, and I was trapped in a plane (they didn’t even serve us champagne or anything), but when I landed, it was new Year’s Day, and it was Rome.

Of course, first thing I did was start looking for some Euros. As of yet, I have only been able to catch glimpses of the new notes clutched in the hands of bewildered or bemused Romans as they drift away from their bank machines, staring in wonder and slight trepidation at this new reality they're slipping into their wallets to snuggle alongside the lira notes, all those extraneous zeros of which about to be retired forever.

I specify "Romans" because unfortunately the ATMs here seem only to be honoring Italian-issued bankcards today. I've seen (and joined) packs of panicked foreigners dashing from ATM to ATM trying desperately to milk some local cash out of them, to no avail. I even saw a young French couple get turned away from one, which struck me as odd since the whole point is that now there is officially no difference, in a fiduciary sense, between an Italian and a Frenchman.

Apparently, no one told the Italian ATMs that, and the poor French were turned away. It's nice to know the joyful snafus of European travel won't end, even as some of the old symbolic speed bumps between nations are getting smoothed over.

Three Kinds of Martyrdom in the Trentino

Of Martin Luther, the Council of Trent, 19th century Irredentiste heroes, and a saintly death by slipper in the Trentino Alto-Adige region of Italy

The year was 1545. It was late in November, and the German preacher, frozen to the bone, had barely made it over the last mountain pass on his journey south. He stopped at a crossroads, and before him he saw a pretty Tyrolean city called Trent nestled in the valley at his feet.

He stood there for a few moments, contemplating what the coming ecclesiastical conference might hold. He wondered if church officials from Rome might finally be willing to hear him out, perhaps even to revoke the label of heresy hovering over the radical ideas he had nailed to that church door. For seemingly the thousandth time on this journey, he started going over the words he planned to use in order to orate the members of the Papal envoy around to his point of view.

As Martin stood there, lost in his deep thoughts, a figure appeared toiling up the hill from the town. It was a farmer's wife, returning from a moderately successful day at the market. She still had some fruit in her basket, so the reformer asked politely if he might buy some, adding a casual comment about how Trent must be in a tizzy with preparations for the Great Council as she handed him an apple and he slipped her a silver coin.

"You got that right, sir." Said the woman in that odd, thick, medieval dialect of German the locals spoke, her eyes sparkling at the sight of the silver.

"All the church dignitaries already arrived I suppose." Martin asked offhandedly, biting into the apple.

"Oh, I don't know about all that." She replied, slipping the coin into a fold in her layers of clothes. "I'll tell you one thing though: that Martin Luther fellow isn't there yet, and he better not show up, neither. I poked my head into the church of Santa Maria this morning and saw that they were getting ready for him. They were building a big bonfire in the center of the aisle, and had a pot of oil boiling off to one side." She cackled with glee. "Oh, yes, if that German blasphemer is stupid enough to come down here, he'll get what's coming to him!"

Though Luther may have been deft with a quill and handy with a hammer—and dead certain he was the one to reform the Catholic Church—he didn't trust his personal rapport with God enough to assume he'd miraculously been made fireproof as well. He thanked the woman, who trundled off down the side trail to hide the silver under the big rock in her back yard.

Martin took one more look at the pretty little city spread in its valley below him, tossed the apple core into the bushes, and turned around. He clambered back up toward the mountain pass, hoping he'd make it back to the Austrian side of the Tyrol before the first big snow shut down the Alps for the winter.

The Heights of Monte Bianco, the Girth of Entrèves

A meal as enormous as Mont Blanc in the shadow of Europe's highest peak

An older British couple shared my four-seater gondola for the long, dangling ride back from Mont Blanc's Aiguille du Midi to Punta Helbrunner. This is the world's longest cable car without any supporting pilons. Instead, an impressive set of cables stretches horizontally between two rocky peaks about halfway along intersect the main cables and help keep us from plummeting to our deaths.

At one point, when we were hanging roughly three kilometers over the canyon-sized cracks in the Mer de Glace glacier, they nervously asked me whether there were any U.S. military bases in the area, a clear reference to the Aviano catastrophe a few years ago when a hot-dogging pilot clipped the line of a cable car over in northeastern Italy, killing all 29 people inside.

On the way back down, I spent half an hour relaxing and sunning in the scrabbly (but beautiful up close) botanical gardens half-way down the Italian side.

A never-ending dinner in Entrèves

Back down in Entrèves, I finished washing out my laundry in the sink and hung it on my wrap-around Alpine balcony to dry some during dinner. I strolled to the other end of the village and to the Maison de Fillipo and one of the most remarkable dinners I have ever had.

The Melandris & The Mud Angels

Dinner in a frescoed palazzo accompanied by stories of the '66 Florence flood

I had dinner tonight at the apartment of Massimo and Vittoria Melandri in Florence. Their place was beautiful, a 14th-century building restructured in the 19th century, which is when they frescoed all the ceilings and the walls.

Gorgeous.

What happened to the frescoes

The ceiling paintings in the main salon where we dined were a bit obscured by soot, since (as explained mamma, Massmimo's 86-year-old mother, who lives on the top floor of the building and who joined us for dinner) two families were living in that small space during World War II, and as the electricity and gas were cut off, they cooked by building little fires in the middle of the room.

Massimo can't clean them up properly since they aren't technically frescoes but rather paintings on the dry plaster, so to remove the soot would also remove the paint.

Massimo had managed, however, to clean the 20th-century whitewash off the walls, which are (buon) frescoed with tromp l'oeil architectural elements.

However, the surface of the plaster is microscopically pocked and flaking, so the frescoes are milky and faded looking.

"They need to be wet to see them properly," said Massimo, and walked over from his chair to swipe a patch of wall with a damp rag. Suddenly, the colors burst off the wall in all their 19th-century splendor, only to fade slowly again as the plaster dried.

The Madonna of Tears

Modern miracles and ancient myths in Siracusa, Sicily

This is the story of the Madonna della Lacrime, the Madonna of Tears. A Siracusan family buys a little factory-made plaster plaque-relief of the Madonna back in 1953. They hang it on the wall.

The next morning the husband goes off to work, after which the gypsum Madonna image starts crying, at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Wife calls husband. He comes home. They marvel at the thing, a bit scared, and try to figure out what to do.

Relatives they call start coming over to see it and confer.

Then neighbors start arriving to see the miraculous Madonna (that'll teach them to reveal secrets to nosy Sicilian relatives).

Then strangers start showing up at the door.

You can see where this is heading.

Sweet, Sweet Heaven

Lecce is one of the loveliest, liveliest towns in Southern Italy, but some of its best secrets hide in the unlikeliest of places

I was walking up the street in Lecce near Santa Croce church when someone across at the edge of my peripheral vision started calling out to me in English "Hey! Hello! Excuse me, hello!"

As usual — as with the hotel touts at train stations, the man at the postcard stand today, and the guy playing his guitar (badly) yesterday in a doorway — when strangers on the street in Italy start talking to me in "American," I ignore them completely. Not to be rude, but because 9.99 times out of ten they want to sell me something I don't want or need, and they're out to fleece me to boot.

So I kept walking ahead. Then the voice said "Eh, uhm... Frommer's! Frommer's, hello!"

Wait a minute. This guy knows who I am.

Brindisi, Waiting Room of the Aegean

I spend a day scaring up the best there is to see in the Apulian port city of Brindisi

Brindisi is, and always has been, a ferry port. From the days when the Romans extended the Via Appia here from Rome through medieval knights leaving for the Crusades to modern sun-seekers on their way to the Greek Isles, Brindisi has been where you step off the end of the road and onto the high seas.

Brindisi is the only Italian town where more road signs point to "Greece" than to anywhere in Italy. The passeggiata here is less an evening stroll than a backpacker parade of ferry-bound tourists killing time until their 10pm departure by restlessly marching up and down the main drag, their eyes sparkling with visions of Greek islands, their faces grimacing as they bite into what very well may be the worst pizza-by-the-slice this side of Naples.

There is little to see in Brindisi, but I was determined to find something to put in the guidebook I was writing at the time, anything to amuse the legions of folks who are stuck here daily, waiting to board the slow boat to Greece.

Babes in the Woods

In which the Boy Scouts of Troop 236 battle wild boars (sort of) on a camping trip in the Italian Appennine mountains

When I was 13 and living in Rome, I was a Boy Scout in Troop 236. Now, a lot of the boys in the troop were diplomat brats, or the children of wealthy folks, and other groups who carry more clout than painting professors—though Dad did have mucho clout when it came to the troop, since he was Scoutmaster.

Through the connection of some boy's father, we got permission to go camping one weekend in a national park/nature preserve in the Abruzzi Mountains, a preserve that was normally severly off-limits to the general public.

We had a grand ol' time, hiking in the forest, learning to make spaghetti alla carbonara with pancetta bacon brought by an Italian boy and powdered egg brought by a military brat, then setting up our tents on the soft carpet of needles that lay thick beneath the pines of the forest.

Noises in the Dark

At some point in the middle of the night, we were awakened by this horrible crashing noise and throaty grunting sounds coming from the inky blackness of the forest.