Leaving town and coming home

I do feel extremely fortunate to live in such a beautiful place. I have found an appreciation for nature and its rhythms as well as its unpredictability and have come to have a need for greens, blues and life around me. We live outside of Levanto in the middle of the countryside, the sea 3 kilometers from our front door. We have woods above our house and trout streams 20 minutes away. I can forage mushrooms, asparagus, myrtle berries, wild figs, apples, wild grapes, chives, persimmons, pomegranates, and much more by just taking the dogs for a walk. 

 

As much as I love the serenity and splendour of the countryside and the sea, I appreciate it all the more when I leave town and then return. In late fall and winter especially, when the tourists have left and the land is starting to go into hibernation, it’s nice to visit contrasting places.

I love to travel- in fact for that reason I’m a horrible traveller. I get too involved in one spot and then don’t particularly feel like travelling further (case in point, I arrived in Italy 20 years ago). Living in an isolated spot however fuels the necessity for escapes. We are very lucky to live near Pisa which an airport served by a number of low-cost airlines and we therefore have easy and cheap access to many European (and more distant) cities. Levanto also has its own highway exit so northern Italy is easily within reach. The trains are also frequent and relatively economical.

This fall I was able to get to Torino for a wine show, to Palermo for the day of the dead and to Milano for the New Zealand/Italy rugby game.

The best part though of travelling.... is coming home.

Little Paradiso

Well finally I was able to figure out how to redirect my domain name to my blog page. It only took me 5 months to do but -yay!- for now I have an interim website.
As usual, I have been very sporadic (ok, absent) about posting. That was due to an extremely busy summer, which led in to a crazy fall, both professionally and personally.
Every single client I had the pleasure to work with this year was fabulous; interesting, curious, energetic and up for anything. I had 2 sets of newlyweds, photographers, hikers, food and wine professionals as well as many other wonderful guests who became new friends.  It's always so much fun to take people off the beaten paths (literally here in the Cinque Terre) and show them 'my' world and help them catch a glimpse of the real 5T.
I was very fortunate to be able to work on a project in the Cinque Terre with Pamela Sheldon Johns (www.foodartisans.com) in which we were featured in the August 2009 issue of Cooking Light magazine. It is always a wonderful learning experience to be able to work with Pamela as well as a whole lot of fun!


2009 was also the year that the Slow Food (www.slowfood.com) organization which is based in Italy hosted its biennial food fairs Slowfish (which centers around education regarding sustainable fishing and fish-eating practices) in April and Cheese! (which is a celebration of cheeses, mainly artisan,  from around the world) in October. I attended both with clients and they were both a blast. 2010 will be the year of Slow Food's Salone del Gusto. It will be in October and I highly recommend going.

So now I'm back on the computer and will be here 'til March when things pick up again. I'll try and become a bit more regular about posting.... We'll see.