Just enough news to enjoy with your cappuccino...

It seems that approval has been given for the construction of a new ticket office at the Carciano imbarcadero. If you have taken a ferry from the Carciano station, you know that it does not have a true ticket office, or a place to wait for the boats, but instead a small, one-person hut that is open only certain hours. The new ticket office rendering shows a traditional style building, which, according to Mayor Canio di Milia, is necessary to improve the look of this Carciano dock, which is of prime importance to Stresa and the many international tourists who visit there, either to take a boat or to ride the gondola up to the gardens or Mottarone.

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I should be packing. I really really must. I leave for Italy in just a few days and there is the Thanksgiving holiday before that, which will be wonderful and consuming. So, I really have to pack! But I'm not. Because in all my free time I've been reading a wonderful novel, True Vines, written by my friend Diana Strinati Baur. This is the first time that I personally know the author of a book. Diana, I hope you will take this as a compliment when I say that I very quickly forgot I was reading your book, the book of a friend, as I quickly became so completely engrossed in the story and the characters. I've read it in Starbucks... I've read it while waiting for friends at restaurants... and at home, when I should be packing!   (  continued...  )

True story: Italian coffee almost killed me. Okay, not really. I exaggerate. But what good true story doesn't make use of a slight exaggeration for some emphasis now and then? In any case, true story, Italian coffee made me very, very ill. Because my problem with Italian coffee, by which I mean those small cups filled with cappuccino, or espresso, or mokaccino, all of which I love as much as any card-carrying Italophile, is not cappuccino vs. espresso, or mokaccino vs. macchiato; my Problem no. 1 with caffe in Italy is this: I simply cannot get enough of it. And I mean that in the literal sense, not the figurative.

Yes, that's me.                              (   continued...   )