by Joseph Harris Orvieto does not sit on a hill. It sits on a single block of volcanic tufa that rises three hundred feet straight out of the valley floor, with cliffs on every side, and from a distance the town looks less like a place people built than like a place that was already there and people moved into. The Etruscans thought so, they called it Velzna and made it one of the twelve cities of their league. When Rome finally took it in the third century before Christ, the

Bologna La Dotta, la Grassa, la Rossa Tuesday, September 1 Bologna has three names and uses all of them. La Dotta, the learned, for the oldest university in the world. La Grassa, the fat, for the table. La Rossa, the red, for the brick and for the politics. Cities collect nicknames the way people do, by being talked about, and any city that can carry three adjectives for nine hundred years and still argue about which one comes first is a city worth a Tuesday. Tonight is the c

by Joseph Harris In April we went to Liguria and stopped, as everyone stops, in Genoa. That was Beppe's night, the pesto, the marble mortar, the memory of a grandmother's kitchen above the Ligurian Sea. Tonight, we return to the same region and drive the other way, west along the narrowing coast toward France, to the end of Italy. Except that calling it the end of Italy assumes the border means something. Here, it never has. Begin at the end. In 1923, Mussolini took two tow

The first Abruzzo chapter in this book opens at a festival in Rimini, at a long table full of Alpini, with a salt-baked branzino that made us friends for an evening. But I have already told that story. Something else happened at that festival, out in the street, between the beer gardens, and it is the beginning of this chapter. The streets of that town were full of smoke, and the smoke was full of lamb. Everywhere the Alpini gathered, there were long narrow iron troughs glo

by Joseph Harris Kathleen books our trips, and she books them the way other people compose music. The Italy trip was the smoothest I have ever taken, trains that met us, hotels that expected us, and regions that unfolded in the right order. Woven through all that competence were her surprises, which she plants like landmines of delight and detonates without warning. There were two on that trip. The second went off later, in Rimini, when our hotel turned out to be Fellini's Gr

by Joseph Harris Every cook I've known has a blind spot on the map, and for most of my life mine sat in the top right corner of Italy. I could tell you what they eat in every region from the Alps to the toe, I've now cooked my way through nearly all of them on Tuesday nights in this dining room, but Friuli stayed a rumor. Then I started reading, and I found the oldest reversal in the country, Friuli is not some outpost of Venice. Friuli is Venice's mother. Aquileia, on the Fr

by Joseph Harris There is a joke in Italy, and it has been running for twenty years without losing a step: Il Molise non esiste. Molise does not exist. It is on the t-shirts, in the memes, in a mock documentary that treated the region the way other films treat the moon landing. The premise is always the same. No one has ever met anyone from Molise. The photographs are staged. The maps print a shape between Abruzzo and Puglia to keep the coastline from looking broken. It is th

by Joseph Harris Nine thousand years ago, somebody dug a home into the soft rock above a ravine in the instep of the Italian boot, and people have been living there ever since. Matera is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe and one of the oldest on earth, older than Rome by most of recorded time, older than Jerusalem. Its two cave districts, the Sassi, climb the walls of the gravina like a honeycomb stood on end: houses carved into the rock and built out of it, on

by Joseph Harris Italy has a spine. The Apennines run down the middle of the peninsula from the Alps nearly to Sicily, and every region along the way is having its own relationship with those mountains. In the north the relationship is about snow and dumplings. In the south it is about stone and scarcity and peppers drying on strings. The climate changes, the dialect changes, the story changes, but it is always the mountains doing the talking. If you want to understand Italia