The fact that we own a vacation house in Tuscany might simply look like a job to some people. To us, though, it’s often much more than that.

It’s a funny feeling, especially for me, but I guess for my husband Marcel too in a way. Casina di Rosa is the house where my great-grandparents raised their family, my grandfather Gino’s family, after actually building it with their own hands. My mother was born there (and I mean right there), and so was my uncle. I have grown up knowing that that was my greatgrandmother Rosa’s home for as long as she could live on her own. And now it is a holiday rental in Tuscany… but to me offering Casina di Rosa does not  equate selling accommodation, it’s actually like opening my family’s home’s doors to our guests.

We have tried to make it comfortable and pretty. But mostly, we hope we have managed to preserve the fact that it is a home.

For this reason, when we meet our guests on Saturdays, it’s always exciting and worrying at the same time. There is always a funny feeling inside of me that makes me worry about whether they are going to like it or not, or whether they will enjoy spending time in the village or if they will rather think we are a bunch of hilly-billies and how can people ever live like that!? For me, it’s like opening a door on who I am and on where I come from, on my life, my culture and my history.

I obviously love my village and our little home: it inevitably does get personal.

Most people, luckily, end up loving both the house and the village: and that is enough to make me happy, because it makes me proud. It is hard to explain.

And then, there are those special cases in which our guests really get to experience life in the village: they participate in local events, they mix and mingle with the locals, and contribute to the local community in many ways. When we are lucky enough to meet these people – and the first sign that that is the case is when others in the village ask about our guests and tell us that they “hanno fatto amicizia“, they made friends -  then I know my “heritage” is in very good hands!

When those guests leave, it’s like saying goodbye to friends, and you wish they will be back. I told you: it’s not a job. It’s getting to know people, opening the doors of your home and connecting.

And I think, recently, we have been very lucky.

Today, I went online to find out a bit more about this holiday, and I actually found out that July 4th is a day to celebrate even if you’re not from the States (damn Italians, every occasion is good to party!!)

Anyway, here are the 10 good excuses I found to have a day off even if we are in Tuscany, and not at all American.

1. We have to be sympathetic with our American friends, so we could still celebrate the 4th of July! In the end, this day is a celebration of independence and freedom, and who doesn’t like and need that? These are certainly values that we should remember and celebrate a bit more in Italy too, especially these days…
2. Being a 50% Canadian family, we could celebrate the 374th birthday of the city of Trois Rivières, founded on July 4th 1634. A way to celebrate new beginnings!
3. We could also celebrate progress in civil rights remembering the 183rd anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the State of New York (July 4, 1827).
4. We could celebrate our freedom to travel by remembering the 173rd anniversary of the first long-distance railway ever opened: the Great Junction Railway between Birmingham and Liverpool officially inaugurated on July 4th 1837. Or the 124th anniversary of the first scheduled Canadian transcontinental train that arrived in Port Moody (British Columbia) on July 4th 1886.
5. We could celebrate dreams come true and the anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (July 4th 1865) or of the NASA’s Pathfinder landing on the surface of Mars in 1997.
6. We could celebrate women’s rights: on July 4th 1903, Dorothy Levitt was the first woman to compete in a motor race.
7. We could celebrate the importance of culture and free speech by remembering the terrible massacre of Polish scientists and writers by the Nazi during the capture of the Polish city of Lwów in 1941 or the first first broadcast by Radio Free Europe in 1950.
8. We could celebrate moral integrity by remembering the anniversary of Samuel Richardson’s death (July 4th, 1761): who has ever explained better than him that “virtue is indeed rewarded” in hundreds of pages of epistolary novels?!
9. We could celebrate love, passion, nature and life, with all our vices and virtues, by remembering the controversial first publication of Walt Whitman’s book of poems Leaves of Grass in 1855.
   
10. We could celebrate spirit of community by remembering Garibaldi’s birthday: he was born on July 4th 1807. You see? I told you I would find the perfect excuse for Italians to celebrate!!

Happy 4th of July!!

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
W. Whitman – “America”

The tourism panel at ToscanaLab 2010 resulted in an interesting “manifesto” made up of 5 points. In order to make sure ToscanaLab was a useful experience, I think some “soul-searching 2.0” is in order. So I thought that, as people in the tourism business, we should probably ask ourselves what we do or should do to comply with the 5 points of the manifesto.

1. Changing perspective: from “me” and “you”, to “us”.

Travelers and people in the tourism businesses should stop working as two separate categories and instead they should work together to create a better tourist experience. Of course there are many different ways in which the different domains in the tourism sector can apply this first “recommendation”.

As far as we are concerned, we participate in online communities and social media so that we can interact with the travelers to our area. This has the double advantage of (hopefully) being helpful to people who want to visit the area, and of gaining a lot of useful information on what they expect and hope to find when they arrive. This way we can try to offer something that makes them happy, even if on occasion, we have to “adjust” their expectations to the reality of what they will find.

We also try to interact with our guests when they are here as much as possible. We like to get to know them both before they show up and after, so that when they finally arrive, it feels like those friends you haven’t seen for a long time are finally here. Unfortunately, work sometimes prevents us from dedicating as much time as we would like to our guests.

2. The web is a real space, not just a means

The web must not be just another advertising platform. The web is a real place where real life happens, where we meet our guests and colleagues, make friends, create relationships. We have been extending our lives from off-line to on-line for a few years now. I feel quite confident when I say that many of the people I have met online are indeed friends.

We do not just promote our properties, we promote our area, via this blog, via our presence in forums, via Twitter, and Facebook. And not just in the hope of getting more guests, but in the hope of making people discover where and how we live.

This comes from our belief that tourism is not just “being in a place” or “seeing a place”, it is experiencing a place, living it with its peculiarities, and with its good and bad sides. I do not believe that a territory should change to meet the demand. The demand should be created among those people who are interested in seeing what a territory is and what it offers (and not what they expect it to be and to offer), otherwise we become just a uniform brand with no individuality. I believe that, even thorugh all destinations can be sold to anybody, the truth is that not all destinations will make everybody equally happy.

Ultimately, online we present ourselves, who we are, what we do, what we believe, in the hopes of finding like-minded people who enjoy what we enjoy and therefore to whom we can cater to the best of our abilities.

And here I think point 1 and 2 meet.

I hear people talk about the importance of instant booking. We will never, ever offer that.

We want to have contact with the people we welcome into our homes before we accept a booking. We want to make sure they know what they will get, and that the “us” will work. We need to know that they are the type of people who will be happy with what we are and what we offer and with the philosophy that forms the foundation of our work. To do this, we need to meet in this “Mid-Earth” called the Web and interact as in real life to see if we and you can really be us. If not, then we have never been afraid to say “sorry, we think you are looking for something we cannot offer“.

And here we move to the third point.

3. Internet helps extend the travel experience

Internet helps extend the travel experience because it includes the pre-trip stage, during which people gather information and build their holiday, the on-trip stage, when people use the web to enhance their experience through mobile devices, and the post-trip experience, when people tell their travel story.

I have already described what we do at the pre-trip stage. We also do another thing: we try to figure what people are interested in these days and look for aspects of our territory to satisfy those needs. In this sense I think we also comply with the importance to listen.

But I am not sure we are going all the way for the reasons I mentioned above.

We look into what the territory naturally has to offer; we might try to find ways to make those aspects more prominent but we do not advocate a change that follows the demand of the market, as we see that as a transformation that in the long term will make the territory something it is not.We listen and we try to find ways to respond, whenever possible.

At the post-trip stage we try to keep in touch, we ask our guests to send us photos, write reviews, reports, tell their story, help us provide other travelers with insights into what the area and our properties have to offer. This has proved the most valuable thing over the years: first, it helps us avoid autoreferentiality and second it gives us different points of views on the things we look at every day.

Who knows the tourist potential of an area if not the people who have discovered it as tourists?

We value our guests’ feedback above anything else, and through the years I have to say that they have taught us quite a few things. I have lived here all my life, and now I see my home area with completely different eyes. It is a very interesting exchage.

I have left the on-trip stage for last because this is the most difficult. First, the infrastructure is not ready. Or not always ready. In areas like the Maremma, it is sometimes impossible to get a cell phone signal, never mind 3G coverage. Mobile devices are not a viable option most of the time.We now offer internet access to our guests. We invite them to keep a blog or an online journal while they are vacationing in the area so that others can see what spending some time here means. Not many do that, of course, and rightly so… not everybody is a nerd like us! People have lives! They are probably on holiday to run away from their computers, so we cannot ask them to spend time at their desk when they are on holiday too!!! But we hope to work on this stage with those who will want to participate through a few ideas which we will try and implement as soon as we have time to put online the new websites… the old ones are disgraceful but time is limited…

4. The information gap between travelers and tourism professionals needs to be closed.

Traditionally, those who offered a service had all the information, hence the power. Now travelers have a wealth of resources and information and hence the power. Not sure what we should do here besides helping by adding to that information and becoming ourselves sources of information.

Ideas?

5. The traveler as a “channel”.

Travelers are looking for an experience and not just for objects to look at. They then become the best channel through which the good news about that experience is spread. We know that, we always have. And for this reason we have always tried to offer more than just accommodation in Tuscany, we have always tried to offer an experience into our way of life. And we have always asked people to tell other people about it. The good and the bad. And they have.

I think what I wrote above goes to explain how we treat this aspect too.

Taking a stock

So what is the result of my soul-searching 2.0? I am not sure.

I see large space for improvement in our practice as far as point 3 and the on-trip stage are concerned. I am not sure what to do differently with regards to the other points.

Have we been doing it wrong in the past? Have we always been doing what people are now noticing should have been done and we had no idea we were doing it?

I don’t know. Any ideas, or suggestions, recommendations, etc are more than welcome.

Maybe the reason we found the debate a bit less surprising than we would have hoped for is that we have been working like this for a long time. Ok, maybe  in an naive way, without the capabilities of the marketing professionals, or probably we do this in the wrong way, who knows…

Anyway, if the question is “did internet make your life better and how?” the answer is yes.

We have met an incredible number of great people and we have learnt to look at our home as a destination as well.

It’s a bit like being on vacation all the time.

Related articles

If you are interested in this kind of rumbling and mumbling, you might find the following of some interest:

• ToscanaLab 2010 Unplugged
• Elena Farinelli’s Blog - A summary of the points raised at ToscanaLab 2010 in the Tourism Panel (in Italian)
• BTO Educational – Internet Better Tourism Manifesto (in Italian)

I’d be glad to have other interesting links to add to this list. Please leave a comment (in Italian or English) with a link.

This is the fifth post of a guest series. We ask friends and colleagues to share with us what the expression to “feel at home” means to them. We believe that to truly enjoy a place, you need to really experience it, to make yourself at home. This means different things for different people, but it is an essential part of our lives, both as travelers and travel professionals. The idea came from a post I published in March and that you can read here.

Itchy feet and the call of home

Ever since I first travelled, a need for home has fought against an insatiable burning desire for something new, my thoughts swinging like a pendulum from one to the other. When I’ve been on the road too long, the lure of home is incredibly strong, whilst at home – boredom and lack of inspiration drive an insatiable urge to head away. Along the way I feel I’ve learnt about how to balance the desire for home and travel – but are the two needs simply irreconcilable?

Travelling at length for the first time, after 4 or 5 consecutive weeks on the road, I began to crave home, to crave the familiar, English pubs, friends, nesting. At its worst it could get to the state where mustering enthusiasm for even the greatest sites, places and cultures became a chore. I strongly remember sitting in a lovely hostel in Queenstown, unable to generate excitement at the prospect of sky diving the next day. After this experience, all future travels would combine time on the road with time settled in one place.

One of my life ambitions is to retire early and live abroad and my wife and I often talk about how it can be done. Ideally we wouldn’t be stuck to one place for all time. We could spend a year or two here, a year or two there, feel at home in many places. Is this possible though? Does the impulse to travel, to experience the new, an addiction to change dash all hopes of ever calling a place home?

My first experience abroad was as a student studying on exchange in Australia – Despite being miles away from girlfriend and family for the first time, I felt instantly at home. I belonged to a community. I lived in a tight-nit college, played loads of sport, made good friends and explored Australia in our free time with fellow exchange students, unwilling to waste a single second of the experience. Undoubtedly being part of a community meant I felt more at home, but having a fixed time limit felt like I still had permanent bonds to my real home, and also meant I was motivated to make the most of my time.

Many years later my wife and I took a career break and travelled around the world for the best part of a year. We deliberately planned in 3 months staying put in Sydney. On paper it was perfect, we had a small flat in Manly, we surfed every day and I taught sailing in the harbour. The opportunity was there to live like a Sydney local. But ultimately we didn’t enjoy it that much, we didn’t feel at home – and I think it was because we didn’t become part of a community, we were isolated within what is essentially a very international city. I’ve always thought in hind-site we would have been better working on an outback farm. The experience would have been newer, and we would have become part, however fleetingly, of a small community of sorts. Ironically we had felt more at home when months earlier in Sri Lanka we were welcomed into the home and life of a Sri Lankan family for all of a day or two.

Surprisingly, ever since we had children we have found feeling at home when away so much easier. The crazy, mad rush of colour, stuff, mess and noise that is our travelling family of three girls under 5 means that wherever we go it is pretty easy to feel at home. Of course, we have found coping mechanisms, the girls have their teddy-bears and we always have some little travel speakers and an ipod stocked with our favorites, but ultimately the secret is that we have less time to feel home-sick and to our delight other people, be they travellers or locals, stop more and want to talk to us – children are a great introducer!

Our last trip abroad was a house swap to Savannah, Georgia USA. We swapped with a family with two small girls of similar age to ours for 6 weeks. It was perhaps the perfect expression of feeling at home away from home. For 6 weeks we benefited from a real house stocked full of the normal accompaniments to home life – toys, books, films, a garden, an office to work from when necessary even a large family van to get us around. We had the benefit of our swappers tips on where to eat and more importantly which beaches to visit, and most incredibly we pretty much dropped right into our hosting families’ circle of friends. We were invited to dinner parties, bbqs and play dates. We managed to satisfy all our homing instincts whilst exploring what is a fantastically different place – arguably the most strikingly different anglo culture I have encountered. We even established favourite haunts – revelling in the crass Americana of the wonderful creek-side Crab Shack where we dined on seafood before the kids insisted we go check out the alligator pool again…

So when we are lucky enough to be able to abandon work and live at leisure where will we stand, what have we learnt so far?

• We should stay in places for at least a year or two. Unless we have hit lucky, then 2-3 months hasn’t been long enough to feel a part of a community. On the other hand, having some kind of fixed time limit does mean we feel less itchy footed and make more of our time.
• We should make sure the places we visit are compellingly different to home – after all the excitement of the new keeps us going.
• We should plan on working or joining-in in some way, maybe teach English abroad, who knows.
• We should intersperse spells abroad with time at home. We need to feed the homing instinct so it doesn’t become a monster and over-rule our better judgement.

Will this be enough? I suspect that in reality unless we go suburban and attempt to live happily in one place for eternity (which trust me, will never, ever happen) we won’t ever feel completely at home in any community – we will always be temporary visitors. I guess this is the price we have to pay for loving travel, loving change and having exceedingly itchy feet!

This week’s guest writer

This post was written by Ben Colclough, founder of Adventure holidays specialist Tourdust.com. Tourdust is an online travel agent specialising in cultural & adventure travel for independent travellers. All the experiences on the site are operated by specialist local suppliers. Ben writes the Tourdust adventure travel blog and can be followed on Twitter @Tourdust.

So we went to Florence and attended this morning’s parallel session on Internet Better Tourism at ToscanaLab 2010, a meeting dedicated to the web, social media and online communication, organized by Fondazione Sistema Toscana. The heat of the first real summer day in Tuscany has killed my batteries, so I’ll just say what we liked and what we didn’t like about the whole thing. I will get back to the content at another time and I will try to figure out if we are “good web-users” or “new social media-dinosaurs”.

What we did not like

Dulcis in fundo… so we start with the “bittersweet” part:

• the marketing speak with no real examples: there are times when this marketing talk about the need to listen, to act as a system, to be a “we” rather than an “I”, etc. puts me to sleep and gives me the impression of being at some Scientology meeting or some motivational training… I would like to hear about ways in which people put these nice principles into practice rather than the same stuff over and over. Unless somebody shows me how things are (sometimes) done – and how they are different from what we do – these only sound like buzzwords. I know that the theory is that everybody has to find their own way to put this stuff into practice, but unless the theorists start talking in practical terms to the practitioners, there is no room for complaining about small hotels not innovating. If the experts want to see a generalized change, they have to start teaching rather than preaching. I understand that there is no ready made solution, but some case-studies might help people understand what to do.
• old issues presented as new ideas. I appreciated very much what Robert Piattelli said in Grosseto at the meeting Il Futuro della Maremma. He said that nothing has changed. And indeed nothing has, at least in substance. The form has, but the content hasn’t. The various moments of the tourist experience are a well known fact in sociological literature as well as in tourism studies (see Dann’s The Language of Tourism published well over 10 years ago). The need to localize rather than translate web content, especially in the tourism field, has been advocated for a while (a few articles about web translation from the linguist’s perspective were published at least 3 years ago). The need to interact has been addressed for years through forums, communities, and, in the distant distant past, even penfriends and reading groups performed that very same function. The fact that people want an experience rather than a product… well Goethe already knew that when he wrote his Italian Travel Journals and so did all those before him who came to Italy for the Grand Tour… The traveler vs. tourist debate has been one of the liveliest for a long time. If people hadn’t noticed all of that up until now, well, that’s the real problem. The future generations of tourism professionals will need to be formed to be competent in a large range of areas or we’ll keep speaking different languages and looking at a very small and fragmented picture and we’ll forget the bigger picture. Tech-people need to understand marketing people, who need to understand linguists, who need to understand copywriters, who need to understand how the small businesses work everyday and how “Everyman” travels.
• Autoreferentiality: this is a problem that is widespread and often makes me wonder. Today I wish I had seen many more people from the non-digital world: people from public institutions, my students, operators who are not social media experts. Instead, and this is something that always worries me when I tweet for instance, we often preach to the choir. I am under the impression that most of the followers or Facebook friends of tourism businesses are themselves people who are in the business in one way or another.
• Numbers, numbers, numbers: what about conversion rates? It’s great to know that the Google searches for Tuscany-related terms are booming, that people have hundreds of friends in online communities, that people’s blogs are popular. But how much of that popularity becomes actual reservations? In my experience as a vacation rental owner, last year’s season (and this year’s especially) was a disaster. There is nobody around, except in the major centers, which will always be visited no matter what. And yet my websites have never been more popular… could it be that people “travel online” when they don’t have the money to travel for real? I hope not, but these matters are worth looking into.
• Internet not working… come on guys!!! “Internet Better Life” and we couldn’t get online to save our lives?! The wi-fi system should have been impeccable. That’s it. Vodafone did its poor part as usual… we didn’t even have 3G.

What we liked:

• We found the presentations about Google Data, about sociological trends and about the Bologna social media teaching experience extremely interesting and well explained. Bravo. (I apologize but I didn’t write down the names of the speakers and I will have to ask for them.)
• ToscanaLab was a great opportunity to meet interesting people like Roberta Milano, the Social Media Team (Alexandra – @TuscanyArt, Oriana – @Tuscanycious, Erica – @Tuscanytunes in particular are really nice girls and web communicators), Laura De Benedetto, president of ToscanaIn. They are doing terrific work, in concrete terms. I wish I had had more of a chance to interact with them. (And I promise… I did not mean it as a bad thing when I wrote that the Clubs In are a Loggia P2.0!! I was joking! It’s a great idea.)
• I was extremely happy about the fact that the Maremma APT Director, Dr. Francesco Tapinassi, was there. That is what I want to see: the sectors that traditionally stay away from a computer need to get involved and he is doing well in that sense. I hope he will bring social media into the mix.
• The venue: the Gipsoteca is quite impressive.
• The very relaxed atmosphere: everybody was very friendly and truly seemed to enjoy the event. Which is in itself a great merit.

All in all we were very glad we went. I hope events like this really help us non-experts progress.

This is the first post of a guest series. We ask friends and colleagues to share with us what the expression to “feel at home” means to them. We believe that to truly enjoy a place, you need to really experience it, to make yourself at home. This means different things for different people, but it is an essential part of our lives, both as travelers and travel professionals.  The idea came from a post I published in March and that you can read here.

Home

Ever since I can remember, I have sought after a feeling of home. To be honest, I haven’t made it easy on myself, having moved 13 times through three countries in 28 years.  Almost all of the moves were job related, and each required its own set of adjustments.  New curtains were a given – I am certain that there is a law of nature stating that no two residences will ever have the same sized windows.  Furniture got put in storage and pulled out.  Washers and driers were always an issue – some places came with them and some didn’t- leading to buying and selling expensive appliances continuously and annoyingly.  Things broke.  Things got lost.

If it sounds negative, it wasn’t. It was mostly positive. I have seen this world more deeply than I ever could have done by traveling alone.  Living in different places and on different continents forced me to stay open, pliable, accepting of opinions different from my own.  Making new acquaintances from divergent backgrounds added richness to my life in ways that I could not begin to recount here.  I grew – professionally, personally, emotionally.  I learned things that I never could have learned had I stayed in my hometown.

But the one thing this lifestyle never gave me was a sense of home. As hard as we tried, and try we did, there was never one place that we stayed long enough to develop roots, to be part of the community, to plant a garden and watch it mature fully, to attend family events marking special occasions.  These are the things we left on the side of the road in pursuing a lifestyle of change and growth. And as I grew older, as the moves started to add up, it was these thoughts that started to wear on my mind and soul, more and more.

The last move we made, the most significant by far, was by our own choice – not through decisions made in a boardroom.  Giving up the corporate life and buying an abandoned farm in Piemonte, Italy, to turn into a bed and breakfast was a statement of sorts. It would require harnessing every skill we ever learned, every ounce of commitment we ever could muster up, and a good deal of guts to scratch out a living and make this project work.  After all, we were non-technically inclined city folk and the cluster of buildings we had just bought were four hundred years old and had been abandoned for almost half a century.

Where would we start? How would the B&B end up looking and functioning?  We had no experience in hospitality.  In fact, before we started anything at all, we would have to figure out the answer to the biggest question:  what did we want the project to be?

The original house

That was easy for me to answer.  I wanted to offer a few people a sense of home when they visited Italy. The difference, however, between answering the question and actually accomplishing the goal turned out to be a much larger challenge than I could have imagined.  Because you cannot give what you do not have yourself.  And I knew from experience that simply moving to a place does not make it home.  Not by a long shot.

I would never be able to act as if I had lived here all my life and knew everything about Italian life while I was still in the throes of adjusting.  So I took a different tactic.  We turned this project into a work in progress. We threw out the window the idea of finishing it completely at the outset and instead took on small piece by small piece.  Two rooms for the guests; a tiny apartment for us.  We built a website.  We visited a few vineyards, got to know a few local restaurants.  We shared with our first guests what we knew.  I got out my paints, I had high-tension electrical wiring installed for my kiln, and I started making plates and art and cups and mosaics.  Micha learned the art of the chainsaw from our neighbor Franco, who spent hours with us, chopping down old, dry trees and clearing the property.  We planted potatoes.  We planted so many that we learned we don’t like planting potatoes at all, if you consider the potato bugs and all the work watering.  But we didn’t mind a few tomatoes, and some sunflowers.  We learned. As the years progressed we took on renovation as we saw fit:  a pool, a washing machine room, a new gourmet kitchen. We fretted over the impending collapse of a roof.  We argued with the Commune over permit issues.  We laughed with guests and worried about there being enough hot water.  We found new wineries. We build a new room, a wine cellar.  New restaurants made it on our list.  We changed the colors of the rooms and I tried new things at breakfast.  We exhausted ourselves with garden work and murdered hundreds of hornets.  We got invited for Christmas by the neighbors, we had friends get ill and die and we went to funerals.  In short, we became part of the landscape in our small valley. We started to understand the heart and soul, the inside and out, the yin and the yang of Piemontese life.  The natural rhythm of the seasons, the harshness and the beauty of old stone houses, the consequences of choosing a life heavy on chores and low on nonsense.

Diana's beautiful home now

All the time, we have had guests who have come and gone, and many have come back again. They have watched it grow, our work in progress.  They have marveled at the changes and have felt part of it all.

And it is through THEIR eyes, that I have realized that this place has become home to my nomad soul – a home fought for and loved into reality.

We have done this project at a time when there is no certainty in the economy and even less in the future. But it’s the only time we have, and we have grabbed it with both hands.  In all of the tribulations and hurdles of making this life work, there is not a day when we do not look around, taken with the simple beauty by which we are surrounded.

Piemonte is stunning. It is abundant with goodness.  It makes you love it actively, with your hands in the soil and your face toward the sun.  The people are kind, and if you listen to them with humility, you can learn things that you never thought you could have learned.  Important, simple things.  Things that matter.  Truths.  How to build a fence, for example, or how to help a friend with his harvest.  Which wood burns the slowest and hottest.  The best stuffing for agnolotti.

The view from the house

It is in all of those small truths that we have come to realize the essence of the last seven years of our lives.  We have been given the chance, the privilege to be able to say that today, here, we have found home, a beautiful, simple, meaningful home.  And with that, we are able to accomplish the goal for which we had originally set out:  to give our guests from far away a sense of home, right here in Italy.

And that, I must say, makes me very happy.

This week’s guest writer

Diana Strinati Baur is the owner of the beautiful Baur B&B in Aqui Terme, in Piedmont. She is also a gifted and fine artist and a very interesting blogger. You can read about her life in Northern Italy on her blog, Creative Structures – One Woman’s Journey. She is also on Twitter as @dianabaur. Most importantly, Diana is a friend, first met online and then in real life, although not as often as we would have liked. To her goes our gratitude for this beautiful post!

Today it’s the first day of spring, even though it’s quite grey out there. But the birds are singing, so that’s a good sign: no rain in the immediate future!

Over the last few days, I’ve had many interesting opportunities to think about the eternal struggle between what’s local and what’s global, interested promotion or objective commentary, etc. ;o)

I have joined the Local Travel Movement (and I need to thank Ethan Gelber of the incredible WHL Group), “a platform promoting the local way of travel – getting in touch with the local people, seeing a place like a local”, or at least as much as this is possible (there would be much to say about this as well).

Then this morning, I have had an interesting exchange (actually it was still going on now while I was writing, and I was loving it!) with the Lara Dunston and Terence Carter on their Gran Tourismo Project world tour, which I find pure genius (both on their part and on Home Away Holiday Rental group’s part).

They have Puglia (Apulia) on their list of places to go to, and they have chosen as their home base away from home a trullo, I guess in the area of Alberobello, but I might be wrong. I read this in one of their tweets, so I replied (all via Twitter) that I thought that that’s a very nice choice but a bit touristy. They disagreed of course and they replied that

what’s one person’s ‘hidden gem’ is another’s ‘local’.

My point was though, that of all the hidden gems for foreigners, they had chosen the least hidden and the type of accommodation that I am quite sure is the least popular among the locals (although I might be talking nonsense and for this we’ll have to wait for their certainly fabulous blog posts) and the most popular among the yet relatively few foreign travelers. The locals (meaning Italians)  that I know (but there will be many others that I don’t know and who can disproof my words) would probably go to a hotel on the beach, foreigners will probably like the trullo more.

Whenever I read about Apulia (and over the years I have seen innumerable “new Tuscany” type of slogans, ads and articles), I always see this exact area mentioned. That’s all. Since the main thing on their blog is that “they’ll be travelling slowly, living like locals” and that their mission is “to explore more enriching and authentic ways of travelling, and make travel more meaningful and more memorable”, it just seemed the least felicitous choice, since trulli were progressively abandoned by the locals and are now mostly holiday accommodations.

They replied by asking “if Apulia is touristy then what is Tuscany?”. The numbers of both tourists visiting Tuscany and the number of accommodation facilities present in the region are enormously higher than the Apulia numbers. And they also pointed out that renting a trullo was like renting a countryside villa in Tuscany. And I totally agree. And that was also exactly my point (it was probably the “non-said” we were not quite agreeing on).

Tuscany is enormously popular. Yet in a tiny fraction of its territory, and there are many areas that are just “outside the Tuscan sun“, because the industry keeps pushing the usual popular spots. And again, my criticism was not in the choice of the Apulia region, but of the location or even the type of accommodation in Apulia.

I feel that if one wants to truly have the local experience, one should probably chose a less popular destination in Apulia (or Tuscany).

We exchanged a few numbers after I said that choosing Alberobello in Apulia was essentially like choosing Chianti in Tuscany, and they said that there was no comparison between the 256 properties in Chianti and the 41 properties in Apulia. But in fact there is: 5% of the total in both cases.

No surprise either: obviously people invest in renovating properties where there is a larger demand (or like in our case with Casina di Rosa because they are just plain crazy and it was my great-grandparents home, and it is my pension plan! LOL ).

They pointed out that theirs is, in the end, a marketing/PR exercise for Home Away, and that one of the major factors that determined their choice was that they had to find a place with internet access, which is vital for their project. I understand this all, of course. In fact, it was the fact that it totally shows that made me leave the first tweet. I would have never thought that a tiny comment like that would have started such an interesting exchange though! And I hope that Lara and Terence take it the way it is: just as as minor criticism (but I wouldn’t even call it like that) on a tiny part of their project.

And mostly some good food for thought for me.

This brings back the usual dualism of local and global, sustainability and promotion, etc. It is truly difficult to avoid a conflict of interests (for all of us working in tourism and living in a tourist area).

I had read with great interest the blog post Gran Tourismo: where to draw the line between travel journalism and PR on the Going Local Travel site. I always follow their blog posts and their tweets and I love them.

My question was essentially: I know they need to find accommodation among the options advertised in Home Away, but why a trullo, which is, in my very personal opinion, the least authentic way to experience Apulia, and why choose something in the most popular area in Apulia? Why not a vacation apartment in the Taranto area, or in the Foggia area, or anywhere else that is not one of the few parts of Apulia that is actually known to foreigners already?

And here there is the usual vicious circle: the area is the most popular because it’s the most beautiful. The accommodation was the most suitable because the owners had good reasons to give internet access and fix it up properly because they had a good demand. This type of accommodation is quite popular because it’s the most out-of-the-ordinary. It’s in Home Away because the area is of tourist interest already. And there we go again.

So the problem here is what is the local experience we want to look for while traveling and we want to offer to travelers?

Does it mean that they should have chosen a less nice place because more authentic? Probably not, but there were certainly less popular areas in Apulia and less out-of-the-ordinary types of accommodation that they could have chosen.

I am sure that as usual they will find good local things to do even in a relatively popular area, and they will write amazing posts as usual that will prompt us all to travel to anywhere they will choose to go.

Personally, I would have chosen either somewhere near Taranto or on the western coast of Apulia, or a completely different destination that really deserves being discovered and is still off-the-beaten-path like the Marches (getting there), or Abruzzo and Molise or Basilicata,  or even Valle d’Aosta in Northern Italy, so as to stick to both the marketing/PR intent and the local travel promotion one.

They are right in comparing it with what happens in Tuscany (I can only really talk about the reality I know well). But if we are really to promote local travel, beside our promotional (or marketing/PR) exercise, then we should point out that there aren’t just countryside villas with swimming pool in Tuscany or trulli in Apulia. And actually few of the locals have access to either one of those… You can always rent a nicely done rental apartment in a village with real locals as you neighbours and go to the local public pool with them as it happens with the rentals at Casa Gigliola in Monticiano.

The internet access problem. That’s a bad one. You can always look for a local solution, though, for instance by asking the locals. In Italy, for instance, you can buy an internet usb keydrive with 30 hours of internet access for 10 euros or 40 hours for 9 euros. Of course 3G coverage is not always good. But, sorry to say, that’s what locals have to deal with.

A reality check for all of us, I guess.

Related articles

• “Gentle Travel” is the way to go.
• Words matter: on “local travel” and other catchphrases
• Luxury travel and local communities
• The place you call a destination, for some people is home

I have been meaning to write this for a couple of days. Then I got lazy and I preferred to enjoy the first couple of spring days rather than sitting inside and writing my blog!

Last week was kind of weird. I was in my home village, Civitella, until Monday. Then, on Monday evening, we left to go to Pisa where we work. Tuesday and Wednesday were the “unexpected  snow days” in Tuscany. Some of you might have heard this: the was a big snowfall in central and western Tuscany and my village got 30cm of snow, which never ever happens anymore.

Of course, we were in Pisa, where it didn’t snow at all: we heard the stories of those who were here at home and saw the pictures published by friends and family on Facebook. By Thursday it was practically all gone, and on Friday when we came back all that was left was a few small piles in some shaded fields and on the higher hills. It was as if it had never happened, except for the large amount of broken branches left on the ground and a couple of imploded shelters in a parking lot. I was sorry I had missed such a remarkable event for the village.

For the past 15 years I have spent half my time in Pisa, and I still couldn’t wait to get out of there and “come back home“. Even more so when on Thursday my mother told me that my dad’s aunt Onelia, my beloved grandfather’s sister, had passed. She was 94, so it was supposed to happen sooner rather than later, but still, the idea that, yet again, I was stuck in Pisa and I couldn’t be with my family on this occasion made me sad and restless.

The funeral was on Friday at 3pm and we had guests arriving at our Pisa vacation rental apartment at 12pm. Just enough time left to drive back to the village and join the rest of the family in their goodbye to aunt Onelia. Too bad our guests’ flight was canceled and we didn’t hear this from them until much later, so we had no idea when they would arrive or how. Luckily, a friend who lives in Pisa was kind enough to take care of them, and to pick them up for us and check them in so that we could get out of Pisa in time for the funeral.

In all of this, I have realized what I have always known: no matter how much time I spend elsewhere, my village is still home.

I know this is kind of weird to understand for many. I suppose expats like my husband and his family, or many of our friends have chosen a different place than their birth place as their home. I have been thinking about the reasons that make this my home.

Isn’t there some saying that says that “home is where the heart is” or something? Well, I have learnt to live in Pisa and enjoy it,  but that is by no means my home. My home is where my family is. This is what I have realized looking around me at my aunt’s funeral.

Most of my relatives still live in the village, which is in itself an unusual turn of events. In a way, my roots were bound to go this deep: both my parents are from the village, my 4 grandparents were all from the village (my grandma is still alive and kicking: she’s only 73 so she’ll hopefully still be around for a long time!), 7 of my 8 great-grandparents were from the village, and I guess I could go back in time and find that most of my ancestors were from here as well. I have been lucky enough to have young parents and grandparents, so that my parents’ aunts and uncles have been my aunts and uncles, and their cousins have been my cousins too. Some of them were in fact closer in age to me than to them. I have known 3 of my great-grandparents, who passed well after I was 10 (the last one as late as 1994, and I have written a post about her for the Velvet Escape Blog, The Rebel).

What is exceptional too is that, despite the inevitable difficult times and – I have to say seldom – arguments over the years, we were all there at my aunt’s funeral, at least 4 generations, of two different families. My mother’s relatives were also there, because of course in a community of 350 people, the concept of family, friend and neighbour are all blurred!

I have been lucky enough to be born and raised in such a small community and a harmonious family, where people help each other in times of grief and make fun of each other in times where a good reprimand would be in order, so as not to upset anybody and still give their own piece of advice.

Some of the people who were there, the younger generations essentially, have been forced to move outside the village to find work, like me. We rarely see each other, but we have always all gathered for the main events in each other’s lives or to honour traditions like the village festival. I know they are there even when I have forgotten they are.

I looked around, and I felt I knew who I was, and where I came from. That is what feeling at home means to me. Now I know.

March 8 is Women’s Day in Italy, here called “Festa della Donna” even if the official name would be “Giornata internazionale della Donna”. This “holiday” is controversial: according to some people there should be no reason to have a special day dedicated just to women as if they were “endangered” creatures; others believe that women’s achievements should be celebrated and the difficult conditions in which many women still live throughout the world should never be forgotten.

Personally, I think it’s a nice thing to remember the important women in our lives and that it is also important to be aware that, for women, things are not always as easy as they are for men, not even in societies in which there is apparent sexual equality. However, I do not think that women should have any special celebration just for being women, and they should find the time to go out and have fun with their girlfriends more than just one day a year, as if that was the only time when their “lords and masters” let them out for their prison-yard time. If they can babysit/iron/take care of them on March 8, well, they can certainly do it any other day of the year.

Here is a Wikipedia article about International Women’s Day.

In Italy, the symbol of Women’s Day are mimosa flowers, which are in bloom in this period. I would therefore like to take advantage of this occasion to “celebrate” some of my favourite women on the web (and some in real life too!) with a virtual branch of mimosa!

Over the year, I have met many incredible women who, besides being interesting, funny and smart, are also great professionals and share more than one passion with me. Over time, they have encouraged me, supported me, entertained me, inspired me and, I have to say, in some cases, fed me too!

My virtual bunch of mimosa goes to:

Letizia (@MadonnaDP), the owner and great hostess of the beautiful Agriturismo Alla Madonna del Piatto near Assisi, in Umbria. She is the person who manages to bring friends together in the warmth of her home and puts up with the crazy stuff! She is an excellent cook, renowned for her authentic cooking lessons and for her great food blog.

Giulia (@vallenuova), the most ecological inn-keeper you will find in the Marches and beyond (believe me!!!)! She has a great agritourism on a working farm near Urbino, Valle Nuova,  and she is working really hard to make tourism greener and more sustainable and authentic.

Rebecca (@brigolante) has three lovely guest apartments in her agriturismo Brigolante near Assisi, in Umbria. She is a funny, witty, beautiful woman. As soon as her webmaster finisher her blog, you’ll see what she can do! LOL In the meanwhile, enjoy Rebecca’s Ruminations!

Monica (@monicacesarato), THE multitask woman! She lives in the city of the world famous “Ponte dei Sospiri”, where she runs the Faronhof B&B, she teaches Italian as a Foreign Language in Venice and traditional Italian and Venetian cooking! We are real wonderwomen, so now we have better find a way to meet in person!!!

Diana (@DianaBaur) who runs a fine B&B in Aqui Terme in Pedmont,  She is also a creative lady, a real artist, and a graceful host, but most importantly, a graceful woman.

Megan (@bellavitaitalia), another beautiful, smart and resourceful women I have trouble to keep up with! She lives in pretty Lerici, in Liguria, not far from the Cinque Terre and has something new on her plate every time we speak!!! You can read about the stuff she does on her Bella Vita Italia website!

Eleanor and Maureen, the creators and managers of an independent publishing house based in Tuscany called Pari Publishing, in a small medieval village called Pari. Small communities survive because there are resourceful women like them. One of their latest books, would be the perfect gift for Women’s Day: Unveiling the Breath: One Woman’s Journey into Understanding Islam and Gender Equality.

Lorella (@boutique_events) is a gifted flower designer based in Tuscany, Fiori e Dintorni, and my partner in our wedding and event planning business, Boutique Events. She is a real artist and a great friends!

Kim (@kimmer999) and Pauline (@PaulineK): they are the heart and soul of the Slow Travel great website and of its community Slow Talk. Without them, I wouldn’t have probably met most of the great people mentioned in this post, so thank you ladies!

Donna (@MaremmaGuide) is the publisher of a great website about my home area, the Maremma. Incredibly enough, we haven’t found the perfect time to meet yet, but we absolutely have to. It’s a great thing that there is finally someone else in the area as passionate as me about it and certainly determined to make people see how beautiful and pleasant the Maremma is.

Robin (@MyMelange) is a talented photographer and publisher of a great blog about travelling to France and Italy. She has recently started her own travel consulting business and she is already very appreciated!

“Girasoli“  – I know she doesn’t like having her name published online – (@girasoli), whom I had the pleasure of meeting for lunch in Pisa, after many years of chatting online on forums and twitter! She has an interesting blog called Shave Ice and Gelato.

Sheila (@italytutto) has a great website that gathers all the major blogs about Italy. A great resource. I’ve recently had the pleasure of meeting her in Pisa over lunch and I think this might be the beginning of a friendship! She divides her time between England and the Lunigiana, in Tuscany.

Judy (@divinacucina): one of the most renowned and appreciated teachers of traditional Tuscan cuisine and a real prodigy in the kitchen! She has recently published a fabulous book and she has a very interesting website called Divina Cucina.

Evelyn (@Journeywoman) is the woman traveler par excellence. She is the CEO of Journeywoman, the largest online travel resource for women.

Alexandra (@arttrav) is an art history professor living in Florence and she publishes an incredible online magazine called ArtTrav. She is also the mind behind @tuscanyart and @TuscanyActive, of the Voglio Vivere Così social media team of the Regione Toscana (Tuscany).

Other incredible ladies I’ve met online are Kathy (@dreamofitaly, editor of the award-winning subscription travel newsletter Dream of Italy), Nancy (@ItalyTravelista, owner of a tour company and publisher of the great ItalyTravelista Blog), Julie (@TravelwithJulie, publisher of a fabulous blog about travelling in Italy), Jessica (@italylogue, a BootsnAll’s resident Italophile with a lovely blog and website – Why go Italy), Laura (@FacingTheStreet, a freelance travel writer specializing in ways travellers can live like locals on the road – you can read it all on her Facing the Street blog), Melanie (@italofileblog, publisher of the interesting Italophile blog), Roz (@miabellavita, an Italian from a long lineage of fine cooks now living in the States – check her La Bella Vita), Robbin (@robbin_g, how do you get from being a recording engineer to being an international wine expert? She did it! Check her Vineyard Adventures! I haven’t forgot we had decided to meet while you are in Tuscany lady!!!), Lisa (@wanderlustwomen – a spirited travel journalist who publishes on this interesting website Wanderlust Women Travel), Molly (@amalari – freelance journalist and owner of these beautiful vacation rentals in Lucca), Catalina (@catascraft – a very talented artist creating beautiful illustrations and taking great photos, check her blog), Nazzarena (@NazzarenaArman – we have an agreement that I will not talk about pizza with her… ooops, I’ve done it again! She’s a talented wedding coordinator living in the UK), Erica, Barbara and Oriana (@TuscanyNova, @TuscanyTunes, @TuscanyTrends, @TuscanyTips, @ShopInTuscany, @tuscanyfit… yes, essentially the Voglio Vivere Così Social Media Team!), Karen (@toptraveleurope, editor of the great sites Europe Top Travel Content and Europe à la Carte), Laura (@lauradebe – a tech girl and social media addict, she says. I suspect she’s the mastermind behind @ToscanaIN – I haven’t forgotten about our lunch in Florence, don’t worry!), Kathy (@kathygori, an eclectic, interesting woman: screenwriter and a lover of Indian cooking with a blog that I adore, The Colors of Indian Cooking), Lulu (@Calabrisella - not sure why she wants to leave Toronto to go to Calabria, but we will find out by following her great blog Calabrisella Mia! LOL), Franca (@FrancaPorter, owner of my next dream holiday destination, the beautiful Au Belle Fleur B&B in France) and Janice (@solotraveler – the most adventurous woman out there, who’s not afraid of flying alone! Check her blog Solo Traveler!)

Who did I forget? If you want to add some virtual mimosa love below, please go ahead!

I grew up in a small village in Tuscany with corner stores and family-run grocery stores. My grandfather was a farmer, and my father has always helped out in the countryside, even though, until recently, that was not his real job. When I am in Civitella I know where my food comes from. I know where the meat sold at the butcher’s is produced and butchered. I know the person who makes the bread and the person who makes the flour. I know the people who provide vegetables and fruit to the greengrocer’s shop. My father has hens and chickens, lots of fruit trees, a large vegetable garden, vineyards and olive trees, so I know where our meat, eggs, fruit and vegetables, wine and olive oil come from. We really buy very little.

When we are in Pisa, on the other hand, we buy meat at the supermarket, and I am never very impressed. I still remember the first time I bought chicken… I was 19 and with one bite I was left with a bare bone in my hand. I promise real chicken is not supposed to be like that. And it definitely doesn’t taste like that. I am always shocked when chicken meat or pork releases water when you put it in the pan… That tells me that those animals were fed very unhealthy stuff, and now we are eating it.

I think more and more people are starting to notice these things are becoming more and more aware of what they eat. I have recently come across a “new old habit“: “la latteria“, the milk shop.

Up to the late ’80s, the village had a milk shop. A lady would sell you fresh milk delivered to the shop that very morning by local producers. You had to bring your own bottle. Over time, the milk shops closed, fresh milk was sold in milk cartons, and long-life milk became more and more popular. I always use it, but it’s nothing like the milk I used to drink when I was a kid.

The good news is that the “latteria“ is coming back, even though it has a much more “industrial” face. Milk producers throughout Italy have created an association which has opened shops throughout the country where you can go with your own glass bottle and get your raw milk from large taps. From the cow to the table, they say. This is known as “filiera corta”, literally the “short spinneret”, or as prodotti a km 0, literally products that are produced less than 1km away, all catch phrases for local products, what was once known as dal produttore al consumatore (from producer to consumer). You might find this phrase in restaurant menus more and more often.

Here is the website where you can find the closest latteria: buy milk from the producer in Italy.

The advantages? Well, the milk is 40% cheaper (you can save 40 to 60 cents per liter) and it’s fresh. The milk that is not sold on the day it is delivered goes back to the dairy and is used to make ricotta and other types of cheese. The milk is not treated, so it contains more vitamins and proteins than pasteurized milk, and it tastes better.You know who the producer is, and if you want, you can go check how the cows are kept, what they eat, how they live, etc.

The disadvantages? The milk is raw, and even if it is scrupulously controlled to ensure that it’s healthy and that none of the major pathogens are present, it might still be more difficult to digest than pasteurized milk for some people. What’s more, it has a very short life: it should not be kept for more than 24 hours, unless you boil it of course.

Another huge advantage of bringing latterie back to life is that buying milk directly from the producer with your own glass bottle is an environmentally wise choice. Every family uses an average of 365 milk cartons or plastic bottles per year. By using your own glass bottle, you have a double advantage: you help your wallet and the environment.