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.

People who live on glass islands...

The changing face of Venice amid the acque alte

Just about every day I was in Venice, we had Acque Alte. That's when the lagoon backwashes into the city streets, starting with Piazza San Marco (the lowest point of Venice) and then filling in the low-lying calle around the Grand Canal.

The air raid sirens go off when the rising waters cause the first gondola moored at Piazzetta San Marco to start nudging over the embankment, usually somewhere around 5 a.m. Since this is an ancient and oft-repeated emergency, the Venetians are perennially prepared during the autumnal Acque Alte season.

Along key arteries of the city they string out a raised wood-plank walkway in long lines of picnic table–looking devices that allow pedestrians to glide over the surface of the water. Once the waters recede, these wide walkways on their stubby aluminum tube legs are stranded high and dry, dividing the streets down the middle, looking sort of like Venice is about to throw a huge outdoor feast for an army of dwarves.

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.

Pronto Soccorso

If you have to have a medical emergency, try not to have it in Palermo, Sicily

I think I shall revise my maxim about what one must see, beyond the sights, to really experience a country. Before it was just to eat the cuisine (naturally) and to watch some local TV. Recently, I've added shop in the local market and/or K-Mart equivalent.

However, I am increasingly of the opinion that to this list we must add one other activity without which no country experience is complete: a visit to the emergency room of the local hospital.

Now of course I don't mean a visit for drastic reasons requiring an ambulance and IV drip. I mean relatively minor yet still annoying ailments, such as Frances' flu on that rainy night in Rome, or the vicious Scottish germs I waged a bedridden battle against on Santorini.

Or, of course, Jay's recurrent sinusitis that's been worsening over the past few days ever since we spent that night atop the volcano (long story).

So after a lengthy walk through some of the more bombed-out sections of Palermo—I know of no other European city that still has whole blocks of broken and charred buildings destroyed in World War II still rotting in the very center of town—down city streets that have become dirt roads, back and forth and in spiraling circles as we got repeatedly lost, and then across several dusty, wind-swept squares, we finally stumbled across Palermo's Ospedale Civico.

No Room in the Inn at the Center of the World

Making do while shaking up in the myth-soaked Sicilian city of Enna

Enna is a city one can see in just 95 minutes—at least, that's how long it took Jay and I to do the major sights (not that most were major...).

Admittedly, we did skip the medieval Norman Torre di Frederico II and it's surrounding park, but the thing was way out on the other end of Enna in the new town (the city is kind of V-shaped, splayed out along two ridges) and is completely swathed in scaffolding (Ionic, from what we could tell) and closed anyway.

Although our train pulled in around 2:20pm, there wasn't a bus up to the town proper until 3:10pm. And, as it turns out, Enna's bus station is way the heck over in the new town, not the old town where all of the sights (and the only hotel) cluster.

A night atop the volcano

Climbing Stromboli, a violently active volcano and the last in the line of Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily

The mountain had been rumbling all day, but it wasn't until the setting sun sent sparking streamers across the azure Tyrrhenian Sea surrounding us that Stromboli's fireworks truly began.

With a primal roar and a boom that shook the entire island, the smaller of the cones inside the crater below us exploded in fire, spewing tons of molten lava hundreds of feet into the air. Jay and I were too dumbstruck even to grope for our cameras.

As the red glow faded and the magma spattered back to earth like fat raindrops, I turned to my friend and we could both think of only one reaction: "Wow."

Pyrotechnics over for at least the next 20 minutes or so, I looked around the rim of the ancient crater. We stood on the lip of a large bowl, in the bottom of which snuggled Stromboli's trio of active cones gurgling, hissing, steaming, and growling in between eruptions.

At regular intervals along the rim were foot-high curved walls of stacked pumice stone--some just a wind-blocking curl, others spiraled like a seashell. "Well," I said, gesturing to the walls. "Let's pick out a shelter for the night."

A distant view

The Gianicolo (Janiculum Hill) at night

Stand against the burnt red cat's-tongue stucco. Press your knees into the rough wall that encircles the crest of green rise called Gianicolo.

Let the breeze bite your face. Fill the linings of your nose with the bad cologne from the self-absorbed couple pressed against each other nearby, and the cloy of sleeping flowers in the park below.

Listen to the Fiats behind you creak as they sway with erotic love. Smile at the winking yellow man-stars from the low suburban slope across the valley, and the fluid car headlights that flow alongside the Tevere.

All of Rome belongs to you.