Italian Culture 101
Europe's kinky over-the-knee boot has it all: popes, painters, polenta, paramours, poets, political puerility and potentates. Its three millennia of history, culture and cuisine seduces just about everyone. In Italy you can visit Roman ruins, gawk at Renaissance art, stay in tiny medieval hill towns, go skiing in the Alps, explore the canals of Venice and see more beautiful churches than you imagined could exist in one country. Naturally you can also indulge in the more elementary pleasures of enjoying good food and wine, improving your wardrobe and seeking out la dolce vita.

Travel Tip of the Day
Iif you are traveling in overnight trains, especally across the Swiss and French borders, be aware that there are gangs that have keys to the compartments. They enter and use chemicals to knock you out while they rob you blind. There's not much you can do to stop that, except place all the luggage you can find in front of the door so it makes an infernal racket when it's opened (but you'll find this is not practical if you're in a couchette with strangers who use the toilets often....). One trick we've tried successfully is to place our money and jewelry in our socks and wear them. You can slip your passport under the rear side of the mattress - but don't forget it in the morning!

Educated Eating
For those of us who spend our lives trying to eat like Italians, Faith Heller Willinger wrote Eating in Italy, a gastro-maniacal Baedeker. In it she describes — with plenty of peperoncino — the culinary wonders of Northern Italy, where to sniff each one out, and how to savor it like a native. In the ten years since this book first appeared, Willinger has put many of these bakers, distillers, and pasta rollers on the map. Our only problem with Eating in Italy was its lap-size proportions.

Well, the second edition has just arrived — renewed and reformatted for glove compartment or backpack — and even more jampacked with sweet and savory sources. Of course, Willinger slipped Epicurious users some of the book's new finds in her weekly Letter from Italy, but given some 1,600 leads, who's counting?

Willinger lives with her Italian husband, Massimo, in Florence. She knows Italy inside out, but Tuscany is home. So it's most fitting that we celebrate our renewed Faith by presenting her primer on authentic, gloriously Tuscan foods, paired with an introduction to the region's wines, and her Rolodex of direct sources.