A Love Letter to Italy

Walking cobbled streets on a sun-soaked day, the sights, sounds, and scents of Italy will always pique the imagination. Writer Lee Marshall has lived here for almost four decades, and is still enchanted by this captivating country

Open on sun after rain, glistening on Roman cobblestones, as market traders set out crates of bell peppers, rocket, luscious strawberries. Zoom in on the writer, watching from the table of a small café, struck for the first time by how the curve of his go-to breakfast pastry exactly matches the flamboyant curves on the façade of the Baroque church across the piazza. Fade to a zigzag of cypresses lining a Tuscan white road, glimpsed from a vintage open-top Fiat.

I have resided in the bel paese for almost 40 years now, and still today I find myself living life as if it’s a movie in which I am sometimes the director, sometimes the protagonist, sometimes an extra observing all that widescreen cinematic beauty and drama. It’s an easy game to play, not because all Italians have flamboyant personalities, but because most of them share a special quality that I’ve learned to think of as “intensity” – a quality that is also found in the light, the food, and even the air of this Mediterranean peninsula.

Consider the first view of Milan as you emerge from the cavernous Stazione Centrale on a blue-sky day when the Alps seem just a heartbeat away. There, as always, is the great Pirelli building, once the tallest in Europe, surely one of the most elegant skyscrapers ever made. If you took a bunch of those lovely old wooden trams that still ply the roads of the city and stacked one on top of the other, you’d achieve something very like the tapered profile of this 1950s rationalist masterwork. Thus, in Italy, does the past inform the present and illuminate the future.

Milan’s future is there as soon as you venture into town. A process of urban renewal that began around the turn of the millennium was boosted by Expo 2015 and will be further consolidated when the city hosts the 2026 Winter Olympics, in partnership with Dolomites ski resort Cortina d’Ampezzo. New cultural spaces like the Fondazione Prada in the southeastern suburbs, an ever-evolving fashion and design offering, and Italy’s buzziest restaurant and aperitivo scene are just a few of the factors that will delight visitors who were last here decades back, when Milan mostly kept its head down and focused on work.

For the past 15 years, my home has been a small Umbrian town called Città della Pieve. It’s a typical central Italian walled hill town with a couple of medieval towers and awarren of narrow lanes. Its houses seem to have grown so organically that occasionally you’ll find that one of the buildings has thrown itself across the lane you’re walking along like the branch of a tree. The inhabitants of Città della Pieve tend to be serious, quiet, and reserved, like many in this green region with its humble, rural soul.

But you only have to attend the historical Palio dei Terzieri procession that takes place in this little Umbrian town each August to realize that, even here, performance is in the local DNA. On the third Sunday of the month, pretty much everyone dresses up in beautiful handmade costumes that hark back to the era of famous Renaissance artist Perugino,who was born here. Like Siena’s own more famous Palio,like Venice’s late-winter Carnevale or September Regatta Storica boat race, a communal ritual becomes a kind ofcivic theater – or, in the land of Federico Fellini and Paolo Sorrentino, civic cinema. In southern Italy, every city hasa similar celebration for its patron saint.

That combination of local pride and respect for tradition has another effect that first-time visitors immediately notice. Italy is a country that mostly resists the kind of globalization that leads to carbon-copy high streets and branded cafés. Sure, you can find a few of the latter, but even today, well into the third millennium, they’re the exceptions in a country where small, unique, often family run businesses are the norm. This can be frustrating if you’re someone who likes to stay in your comfort zone – heaven knows we all do from time to time. But I’ve always believed that one of the reasons this fascinating land casts such an enduring spell over generations of travelers is because it doesn’t readily adapt itself to our ways – it encourages us to learn its ways, to swap our homegrown comfort zone for an alternative Italian one.

Consider coffee culture. The Italian love affair with the roasted fruit of the Coffea plant began when Europe’s first coffeehouse opened in Venice in 1647. The country is so universally recognized as the caffeine motherland that words like “espresso” or “cappuccino” dominate international coffee parlance. But the veneer of familiarity this creates can be misleading. In Italy, where coffee is a religion, aberrations like orange-flavored mochaccino are considered heresy. As is drinking a cappuccino – or any coffee with the addition of milk – after a meal. (I have an American friend in Rome who knowingly breaks this rule, but she has learned to apologize to the waiter or barista.) Even the word “espresso” is only used in Italy by foreigners; locals will simply ask for un caffè, knowing that what they will get is a single, intense dark shot without milk.

Master the above, and you’ve passed the first stage of the Italian coffee proficiency test. The advanced level covers regional variations. In Turin, the elegant capital of Piedmont, famed for its chocolates, you can order a delicious cream-topped coffee and chocolate concoction called a bicerin. In Venice and Veneto, the macchiatone was my breakfast beverage of choice for many years – it’s simply a cappuccino with less milk. But perhaps my favorite local twist on the formula is the Neapolitan tradition of the caffè sospeso. This isn’t a drink so much as an act of charity. When paying for the caffè you’ve just consumed or are just about to, you pay for two, the other one being literally a “suspended espresso,” or espresso on credit. This can then be claimed by the next hard-up person who puts their head around the door of the bar and asks: “Is there a caffè sospeso for me?” Neapolitans don’t even consider this to be a big gesture. For them, coffee is a basic human necessity, like air or water.

Pompeii is a unique example of a Roman town preserved at one moment in time. It’s also an ongoing archaeological dig that never fails to surprise.

Leave plenty of time to explore the more far-flung corners of the site, such as the Villa dei Misteri, a villa complex with a vivid series of wall paintings, or the Terme Stabiane, Pompeii’s best preserved baths complex.

One of the challenges with this ancient site has always been getting there, but a new high-speed train from Roma Termini station on Sunday mornings, returning the same evening, has cut the journey time to under two hours. Find more information at trenitalia.com.

As with coffee, so with every aspect of the visitor experience. There is a baseline italianità, formed in more than 150 years of nation building plus many more of cultural cohesion, and there is a constantly moving fresco of proud local variants, some of them so granular they change from street to street.

The salty fishing port of Cetara on the Amalfi Coast is the sole bastion of an anchovy sauce called colatura di alici that is a descendant of the Ancient Roman condiment garum.

Many people know the Tuscan variant of the sweet dessert wine Vin Santo – and very delicious it is, too, at the end of a meal, served with cantucci almond biscuits from Prato for dunking. But few have ever sampled Vino Santo Trentino, which a handful of dedicated producers still make by laying out Nosiola grapes to dry for five months in lofts oriented to channel the southerly Ora wind that blows from Lake Garda toward the Dolomites. It’s a labor of love that results in a total of just 15,000 bottles a year, each one a liquid symphony of spicy, citrusy notes.

In a no-frills, all-female bakery on a corner of Rome’s Jewish Quarter, you can sample a calorific ricotta and wild cherry cake that is made nowhere else – at least not to the same secret recipe as this marvel, which I used to make ridiculous detours to incorporate into my cycle rides across the city. I would also somehow find myself parking my bike by a birreria near the Trevi Fountain, where you can eat pasta with chickpeas – a classic Roman comfort food – standing up at the counter, or the gelateria in the northern suburbs, near Zaha Hadid’s visionary MAXXI Museum, that uses dark chocolate by legendary Tuscan producer Amadei in its chocolate chip flavor.

Rome is a loose collection of urban villages, each one refreshingly distinct from its neighbor, each one harboring a road map of taste sensations. Don’t get me started on the carry-out pizza made by gentle giant Gabriele Bonci at Pizzarium near the Vatican Museum. I tear up just thinking of the spiced eggplant and mozzarella version.

It’s not just food and wine, of course, that makes Italy such a wonderful location for your own personal rom-com, art movie, or adventure story. It’s the way food, wine, people, dialects, landscape, artistic riches, and architectural heritage coalesce into something uniquely rich. From the Greek temples of Sicily, Puglia’s beehive trulli dwellings, and the misty vine-covered, truffle-rich hills of Piedmont to Tuscany’s great aristocratic estates and village chapels, Capri’s oh-so-chic café-lined Piazzetta, and the indulgently decadent hot springs of Ischia, every corner invites you to linger a little longer.

So, let me close with a Florentine movie sequence of my own. After a visit to an artisanal silk factory with a working loom built to a design by Leonardo da Vinci, my wife and I have strolled up to Piazzale Michelangelo (you can’t get away from great artists in this town) to catch the sunset view over the Centro Storico. As the camera picks up the golden light shimmering on the Arno River and rises to take in Brunelleschi’s majestic cathedral dome, a young operatic busker launches into a Puccini aria. She’s good. What could have been a cliché suddenly becomes unexpectedly moving as the crystalline notes soar up into the rose-tinted sky. This is Italy all over: constantly surprising, constantly fresh, constantly turning “seen it all before” into seeing it for the very first time.