A meal at Podere Terreno in the Chianti

“The best compliment I ever got,” said Roberto Melosi, passing around the homemade lasagne and Chianina steaks from his seat at the head of the communal dinner table. “Was when I asked some American guests whether it was a bother to keep driving back and forth to Florence every day.”

He paused to top off the glasses around him with more of his farm’s peppery but light Chianti Classico

“The Americans said ‘No, because when we drive back at the end of the day, it’s not like we’re taking an hour to reach our hotel. It’s like we’re driving home.’” Roberto chuckled. “And then they asked if they could stay two weeks next year.”

An elderly German gentleman, sitting at the other end of the table near Roberto’s Paris-born wife, Marie-Sylvie Haniez, nodded gravely. He had been returning to the agriturismo Podere Terreno every summer for twenty years and was in the midst of a record-setting stay: 35 days straight.

Bologna the Fat

A walk through the culinary side of Bologna—street markets, specialty food shops, pasta boutiques—plus cooking classes and a killer recipe for traditional tagliatelle al bolognese

Coils of tagliatelle, tagliolini, fettucine, and other freshly made pasta Every Italian region is justifiably proud of its own cuisine—considers it in fact to be the best in the whole world. But ask any Italian to name just one region, one region in all of Italy, that's known above all for its culinary prowess and he'll admit: it's Emilia-Romagna.

In Modena they make the world's best balsamic vinegar; in Parma the best aged sheep's cheese (parmigiano) and cured ham (prosciutto di Parma). And the regional capital? Ah, you must mean Bologna the Fat.

Bologna is the birthplace of tortellini—little rings of pasta stuffed with savory meats and gooey cheeses. This is the land that invented the ragu sauce atop tagliatelle alla Bolognese. The local cured meat named mortadella remains so wildly popular the world over (particularly in school lunches) that most culture call it simply "bologna"—or, if you prefer, "baloney."

Enzo and his Hot Love Liqueur

The tragedy of the best trattoria owner in the Sicilian resort town of Taormina

U Bossu, a great trattoria at Via Bagnoli Croci 50 (Tel. 0942-23-311) in Taormina, Sicily, Italy. In 1998, I had a fantastic dinner at U Bossu, and accordingly gave this seven-table restaurant on a forgotten Taormina side-street a star rating in the Frommer's guide I was researching at the time.

The proprietor, Enzo Alberelli, was gregarious, friendly, jocular, and overall a genuine impresario for his little trattoria—and the food was excellent, especially for a moderately cheap joint.

At the end of that meal, he poured me (and everyone else in the place) a shot of a fiery pepperoncino liqueur of his own invention—on the house, he insisted. I love spicy things, and I love sugar, and Enzo's homemade hooch was a perfect marriage of the two tastes. Also, it packed an alcoholic wallop.

So I left with nice, warm feelings about Enzo and his little trattoria tucked away from the crush of Taormina tourists. These sorts of overcrowded resort towns are plagued by a surfeit of perfectly passable but uninspired eatiers (along with, usually, one or two excellent but overreaching restaurants where the chefs garnish their dishes with Michelin stars, the tables are booked by celebrities and riche gourmands, and the appetizers along cost more than a full meal elsewhere in town).

That's why I'm doubly happy to find just a good, hard-working, local joint like U Bossu that I can look forward to returning to on future research trips.

Seven years later...

Fast forward to last night. For years, Frommer's had been hiring other people to update my coverage of Rome and the south in their Italy book while I rewrote and updated the Central and Northern Italy material. I hadn't been back to Taormina since.

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.

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.