Category Archives: Daily Life

Festa Testarolo Pride in Pontremoli

Posted on by September 14, 2019

Pesto is one of those sauces that brings back vivid memories for me. The first time I had pesto was on my first trip to Italy in 1978. As a foreign exchange student in Switzerland (German part), I ended up almost by accident in Vernazza near the end of my year, and the memories of pesto and focaccia stayed with me all my life. Many of my US friends had pesto for the very first time at my dining table (I do make a mean pesto if I say so myself). When I realized that I was to live in a location that is quite literally at the border of Emilia-Romagna (a foodie haven), Tuscany and Liguria, it was almost heaven.

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Pranzo di Ferragosto

Posted on by September 14, 2019

Today is Ferragosto. Ferragosto is a national holiday in Italy and many cities empty out to go to the beach, or the mountains. In days gone by, foreign tourists were faced with many closed stores and ghosts towns/cities for much of the month of August. These days you will still be confronted with much quieter tourist locations, but many locales will cater specifically to those natives who opted to avoid the crowds . . .

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Lost in Translation . . . but the Party Continues

Posted on by September 14, 2019

My husband is a Scots-Italian. Did you know that even was a thing? I didn’t until I met him 23 years ago. But interestingly, there is a LARGE community of Scots-Italians. My husband’s family was part of a substantial migration of Italians who left Italy for Britain in the early 1900s. Both sets of his grandparents headed to the “Big Island” of sorts to raise their children. The Italians who left Italy for Britain frequently became businessmen, and in Scotland, they gravitated towards Ice Cream and Fish and Chips. There was a time when it was stereotypically accurate to assume that the “chipper” was an Italian.

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La Festa della Bomba? – well, not exactly….

Posted on by July 2, 2018

Our town loves a good festival. Honestly, from May until October there is something going on every single week. This weekend we were looking forward to a 3X3 Basketball Tournament that was to run from Thursday through Sunday. Sunday turned into a “maybe”, because today, Sunday, the Army was removing a WWII bomb from the river near the railway bridge coming into our town. It was discovered in March. Some folks ask me why it took 2-1/2 months to finalize the removal. The bomb had been there 74 years, and if undisturbed would pose no immediate threat, so it was decided that a calm and well planned evacuation of the town was in order! So today, almost the entire town (5000 of the town’s 7000 inhabitants) was evacuated for the procedure. The final day of the basketball festival would be at the mercy of the removal efforts of the army.

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Danita’s Guide to acquiring the Carta di Soggiorno (Residence Card)

Posted on by July 2, 2018

My husband Joe and I have been living in Italy off and on since May, 2016.  For the first 14 months, it was more off than on.  For those first 14 months, we were here in Italy for a total of 219 days.  Only once in that time did we come “close” to hitting the 90 in 180 days rule, and when we flew out through Germany on the 89th day the German immigration officer perused my passport for a good 3 minutes before letting me through!  It felt like 30!

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