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<\/a><\/span><\/div>\nI<\/span> keep seeing these bucket lists. Nothing wrong with any of that, I suppose. But that’s Italy reveals itself differently. Not when you grasp Are you ready for Italy? Or are you only ready for the So here are five experiences for your surrender list. <\/p>\n 1. Get deliberately lost in a southern hill town. Inland Turn off your GPS. Don’t make a restaurant Follow the smell of wild herbs floating down from the You won’t find this at the Spanish Steps. You have to <\/p>\n 2. Find your morning coffee bar in Venice or Rome. Not Step 100 meters away from San Marco and you’ll find I learned this returning to Italy in 2023 after a Walk down the road, take a right, then a left. Find The real Italy exists behind the heavily touristed <\/p>\n 3. Choose Ercolano over Pompeii. An Umbrian hermitage I lived in a trailer outside Assisi in 1977 for three Sacred geography reveals itself in solitude, not in St. Peter’s used to be a place where you could park Go where the waiting isn’t necessary. Go where silence <\/p>\n 4. Get your hands dirty. Harvest olives. Pick grapes. I arrived in a hilltop town called Bucita in Calabria Years later, I spent days picking olives in Or maybe you end up sitting in someone’s home at You understand terroir through your body, not your <\/p>\n 5. Find a no-menu trattoria. Or better yet, end up at I had one of these experiences in the hilltop town of Baby goat intestines on oregano branches. Fava bean “This is the poorest of cuisines,” my friend Throw away food. Or throw it down food, which is what If I served this meal to some friends back home, they The same goes for wine. Skip the trophy bottles. Order <\/p>\n Before You Go<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n These experiences share one requirement: you have to You might not get the photo. The directions you But if you’re ready for Italy\u2014truly ready\u2014that won’t Italy isn’t a checklist. It’s not a conquest. It’s a Get lost. Sit still. Work. Eat what appears. Trust Let Italy be Italy. And let it change you in ways you Going to Italy<\/span>\u2014<\/span>that’s a good fortune most people never
\nItaly bucket lists. Five things, ten things, twenty things you must do before
\nyou die. And they’re all the same: the Amalfi Coast, a Tuscan villa with an
\ninfinity pool, dinner at some Michelin-starred place in Rome where you need a
\nreservation six months out and a credit card that doesn’t flinch.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nnot the Italy that’s stayed with me for fifty-some years. The Italy that
\nchanged me wasn’t the one I planned. It was the one I stumbled into when I got
\nlost, when I let go, when I trusted a stranger’s gesture instead of a
\nguidebook.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nat it, but when you open your hands.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nItaly you’ve already decided on?<\/span><\/p>\n
\nUnderstand this: these aren’t things to collect. They’re ways to fail by
\ntourist standards\u2014and succeed by Italy’s.<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\nWANDERING: Surrender Your Need for Destination<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
\nCalabria. Inner Sicily. The hinterlands of Basilicata. Places where tourists
\ndon’t go because there’s “nothing to see.”<\/span><\/p>\n
\nreservation. Walk.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nhills. Trust a sound, a stranger’s direction, the way light falls on a
\nparticular alley. The confusion is the experience, the lostness is the point.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ngo where the road ends and trust that something will lead you somewhere worth
\nbeing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\nDISCOVERING: Surrender Your Fear of Missing Out<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
\nthe best one. Not the one with reviews. YOUR bar. Go back every morning until
\nthe barista knows your order.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthe quiet, almost deserted village that makes Venice bearable. The locals
\ntolerate tourists in their typical Venetian manner\u2014which is to say, they live
\nhere, we don’t. We will leave, they will stay. It will always be their Venice,
\nnot ours. As it should be.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nfour-year absence. I found a quirky little wine bar near my hotel, Ozio,
\nspecializing in natural wine. I sipped a Sicilian white\u2014Catarratto-Zibibbo, a
\nskin-contact orange\u2014instead of the ubiquitous Spritz. Simple, dry,
\nlegitimate\u2014everything the Spritz isn’t.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nsomething no one knows about except the locals. You won’t starve. And you might
\nrun into something better than all those pages of recommendations. Use your
\ngut, listen to your heart.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nfa\u00e7ade. But you have to be willing to miss the “must-see” to find it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\nPILGRIMAGING: Surrender Your Hunger for Spectacle<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
\nover Assisi’s basilica. A Renaissance-era olive orchard on a Calabrian
\nescarpment where a Scandinavian importer once asked to be left alone for hours,
\njust to sit among trees that have never seen Florence or Venice or the Vatican.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nweeks, five dollars a day. A short walk led to what was once a stall where they
\ncooked food\u2014local, healthy, humble. No crowds, no queues, just the simple
\nItalian table. Until the New York Times “discovered” it decades
\nlater.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nlines. You won’t get the photo (or the “selfie”) everyone else has.
\nYou might not even understand what you experienced until years later. But
\nthat’s pilgrimage\u2014walking toward something you can’t quite name, letting it
\nchange you without fanfare.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nyour car, have a picnic lunch on the steps, take your time. Now it’s all
\nrestricting and queuing up. “Move on, hurry up, no pictures, people are
\nwaiting.”<\/span><\/p>\n
\nstill exists. Walk up the hill to Parioli and find a Rome for Romans and other
\nwanderers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\nWORKING: Surrender Your Role as Consumer<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
\nHelp prep a village sagra. Work a fishing boat for a morning.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nin 1977, following the smell of wild herbs and figs baked in their leaves
\nfloating down from the hills. A storm threatened. The family needed hands in
\nthe fields for harvest. Like goats we swarmed the vineyards, competing with the
\nbees for the nectar. The elements dominated everything\u2014sun, rain, lightning,
\nthunder\u2014earth, alive and moving.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nTuscany\u2014900 pounds over several days, thinking about Italian work songs,
\ndodging wasps. Tedious, physical, real.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nnight, drinking their wine. Below you in the basement, thousands of crushed
\ngrapes fermenting. Above, a bare bulb lighting the room. The elders talking
\ninto the early hours of the morning. That’s where I learned wine\u2014not in books
\nor at fancy tastings, but in rooms like that, with people who made it.<\/span><\/p>\n
\npalate. You earn your place at the table differently when you’ve worked for it.
\nYour muscles ache. Your hands smell like earth or oil or fish. And the meal
\nthat follows tastes like nothing you’ve ever paid for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\nFOOD AND WINE: Surrender Your Expectations<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
\nsomeone’s table where you eat what you’re given.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nCir\u00f2 in Calabria. L’Aquila d’oro<\/a>\u2014four tables for maybe eighteen people, a
\n“truck stop” most would drive right by. The wife cooks. The husband
\nand son serve. What followed was three hours, eighteen courses of throw-away
\nfood becoming revelation.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nskins\u2014tough, stringy things normally discarded for the prize inside. Ricotta
\nthat was milk in the creature yesterday morning. Not Saveur-magazine perfect.
\nNot pretty. But memorable in ways no Michelin meal has ever been.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nPaolo reminded me. “Made from things nobody in the city hungers for. Wild
\nonions, herbs, parts of animals that get discarded, skins of plants no one
\nwould think were edible.”<\/span><\/p>\n
\nwe did.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nmight ask, “When are we going to start getting the Italian food?” But
\nothers would get it. They would understand they were in the kitchen of a woman
\nfrom Calabria, tasting something out of this world that comforts and nourishes
\nand is so delicious.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthe vino della casa. That house wine in many Italian trattorie is better than
\nmost wines you can buy in American supermarkets. Simple, fresh, for the moment.
\nGo straight for it. You’ll seldom be disappointed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\nbe ready to fail by bucket-list standards.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nfollowed might lead nowhere.The winemaker might be out in the fields. You might
\nsit on that bench for an hour and feel like you wasted time.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nmatter.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ncountry made up of people with feelings and emotions, with a culture that
\ndoesn’t perform for tourists. Step off the trail everyone else is on.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthe locals over the algorithm.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n
\ndidn’t plan.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nhave. Don’t waste it on checklists. This is one of the most intimate, beautiful
\nplaces humans have created. Slow down enough, and it will let you in. That gift
\nis worth more than any bucket list could promise.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n