Travel tales, ancient stories, and virtual scenes
Don’t let Giambologna’s beautiful sculpture Hercules and the Centaur fool you. Hercules ultimately lost this fight. The centaur Nessus outwitted the hero and demigod, long after Hercules killed him. Myths and history converge at the Piazza della Signoria. This is the first of a series of ancient stories, as we travel virtually to Firenze, Italy.
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Take this 2-mile walk to Piazzale Michelangelo and Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte. Watch the sunset over sweeping views of the Florence skyline – the city of the Renaissance.
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Restaurants aren’t the only places you can satisfy your gustatory longing for Italian cuisine. Town markets are a prime location for great food finds. Rome, Florence, and Turin have the Central Market or Mercato Centrale where you can find lots of gastronomic surprises akin to discovering a town’s street food.
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Dining at a restaurant in Italy can be daunting when you are handed a long menu with several sections in Italian, like antipasti, primi piatti, secondi piatti, contorni, dolci. What to make of it? Here’s how to navigate the Italian restaurant menu.
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Thanks to Starbucks, Americans have been drinking Caffè Latte since 1984. But our coffee drinking practices do not translate well into the – er, snobbish – Italian coffee culture.
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The world-famous Italian cuisine is not about breakfast. Whether it’s breakfast in Rome, breakfast in Florence, or breakfast in Venice: the typical Italian breakfast is sweet, spare, or non-existent.
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Many Italians can speak English in the major Italian cities. But it pays to know the barest minimum Italian words and phrases to survive your trip. These essential words and phrases enable you to demonstrate some basic social courtesy, get help, or get an Italian to respond in English.
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In previous posts, we went on a quest to understand the origins of the mysterious Etruscans. The current thinking is that Etruscans came from nowhere else but Italy. And modern historians support the theory that prosperous Villanovans who occupied parts of Italy 3,200 years ago, are ancestral to Etruscans. But who are the Villanovans?
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Just where did the Etruscans come from? The Etruscans’ origin story is a problem for the ages, literally. A 2,500-year debate among ancient historians carries on to this day among modern scholars. Did they come from Turkey or Greece? Or were they aboriginal to Italy? The lack of Etruscan written materials deepens the mystery…..
Continue reading “Etruscan Fact #1: The Etruscan Origin Story is a Problem for the Ages, Literally”
Long before there were Romans in Italy, an ancient people, the Etruscans, wielded power across the land. This civilization was already well advanced and trading with Greeks and Phoenicians in the 8th century BCE when Romulus and Remus were just striplings playing bandit games, and Rome was nothing more than a collection of shepherd shacks.
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