Italy

My mother advised that I get a plain wedding ring. Diamonds, she said, interfere with a woman’s ability to knead dough. “But I don’t knead dough,” I protested. “You will when you’re married.” I guffawed. And yet there I was, four days into my marriage, in an Albanian chef’s Venetian home, being told in no uncertain terms that while my husband Nick could keep his ring on, mine would need to come off. We had arrived in Giudecca, an island in the Venetian lagoon, by water bus, having spent the day in Padova. There, we’d visited the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, home to first-class relics of the great saint — bones, lower jaw, incorrupt tongue and cartilage from his larynx.

Nestled in the Apennine Mountains due east of Rome is the region of Umbria, a hidden gem at the heart of Italy. It's characterized by lush green countryside, rolling hills carpeted in olive groves and picturesque medieval hilltop towns. The region has the beauty of Tuscany but without the mobs of tourists. Its food is the best Italy has to offer — fresh, traditional, high-quality and spectacularly tasty. The senses, then, are satisfied — but Umbria also harbors a rich religious legacy. Home to some of Catholicism’s most titanic saints — Francis and Clare of Assisi and Benedict of Nursia — and dotted with ancient and medieval churches of great beauty, it's as much a pilgrim’s paradise as it is a tourist’s Italian dream.

Turin at the end of August is pleasingly melancholic. The city has emptied after the feast of Ferragosto on August 15 and won’t fill up again till September. Solid bourgeois streets, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings now housing banks, are deserted save for the occasional confused tourist. What brings others to Turin in August I cannot say. For me, it was a wedding in Milan at the end of the week and the prospect of a little vacation ahead of it. Turin was a whim. I was meant to meet a college friend in Genoa on Monday, but my Sunday-night redeye from New York was canceled. Saturday was the only option, and so I was left at a loose end. Options abounded: I could stay overnight in Milan and head to Genoa with my friend the next day.

‘Isn’t Naples beautiful? I’ve always dreamt about it. I always wanted this city all for myself; I didn’t want to share it… I alone deserved it because of everything I lost and I would have done anything to get it.’ So says Ciro Di Marzio – nicknamed ‘the immortal’ because he has survived so much mafia bloodletting – in the hit TV crime drama Gomorrah.   He is not talking about the churches or castles, the arcades or theatres or museums. He may have been out on the bay at night when the words are uttered, but the Naples he knows, grew up in and by then controls is the Naples of Scampia and Secondigliano, places up on the ridgeline of the city: the Naples of high rises and concrete, the Naples of drugs and murder.