We’ve been renting homes to travelers for over a  year now, and I’ve noticed two distinct groups of people: ‘Italy first-timers’ and ‘Italian culture chasers’.  In all honesty, some, albeit very few, of the first-timers truly resemble the culture chasers. 

The ‘first-timers’ are the people that have finally made it to Italy for the first time.  They have been dreaming about it for years, and have seen ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’  a few times, having decided that enough was enough… they are going!

While dreaming of that ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ experience, most of them have no hope whatsoever of actually experiencing anything of what that movie (or better, the book) is about.   They can’t help it.  They have the sights of Italy working against them.

What I mean to say is that on that first trip to Italy, most people have an overwhelming need to frame their trip with famous postcards.  After all, can you go to Italy and not see The Coliseum at least once ?  Can you skip the Vatican?  What about Venice, the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii, The Leaning Tower, the galleries of Florence? 

For the love of God, how can you be in Italy and not see these things?  I understand… I really do!  If I were to visit Agra, India, no matter what wonders you might have in store for me, I will have to at least see the Taj Mahal in person once.  Could I go to Egypt without seeing the Pyramids?  Of course not. 

However, you can’t have it all unless you are spending a month or twenty in Italy. All of the postcard sights are engulfed in and surrounded by a multi-billion dollar tourist industry that consumes their surroundings, having long since snuffed out the ‘Tuscan Sun’ we see in the movies.

So the ‘first-timers’ get to Italy and want to see it all and do it all. The problem is that there is just so much. They try to cram in as much in as possible and wind up rushing everywhere… never having the time to really soak the place in.  You really can’t have ‘La Dolce Vita’ while standing in line to visit monuments.

It’s OK, though.   After that first trip, you get it all out of your system and had a great time doing it. You are now free and clear to come back to Italy and actually experience the ‘Tuscan Sun’…  which brings me to the second group.
The ‘Italian culture chasers’ have been here before.  They saw the Coliseum, so it is behind them.  They fall into two sub-groups of their own:  ‘Second Timers’ and ‘Regulars’.

The ‘Second Timers’ made a decision the first time they were here.  Between places on their checklists, they kept noting how they want to come back and see this or that.  By the end of their trip, they felt as though they desperately needed more time to take it more slowly and take the culture in.  While they had a great time, they realized that they really missed out on something special.  So they come back and really experience the Italian culture for the first time.  Now that they have all of the monuments in their past, they can really understand what makes this place so truly amazing. They are seeing Italy for the first time.

‘The Regulars’ are third-timers and up.  This is really pretty easy, since once you have had the ‘Second Timer’ experience;  you are more or less hooked.  It should be classified as a drug.

I speak from experience, because while I rent homes and organize tours, I didn’t start doing so until roughly my 40th trip to Italy.  I have collectively spent roughly 5 years of my life in Italy, and the list of amazing things I have not seen or experienced is still significantly larger than those that I have seen or experienced.  It is truly an amazing place.

My point is, for those of you that have only been once, come back for a first time and take it slow.  You will almost certainly find yourself hooked.

I’ve been back in Los Angeles for a week now, and last night we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner for the first time since I got back.  This may not seem like a big deal, but for us it is always a tragedy.

The restaurant was Pomodoro in Woodland Hills.  I don’t want to say it is a bad place by American standards.  Actually, it is one of the better chains.  It is just that I was in Italy having the real thing a week ago, and by those standards, even the best place in the states simply stinks.

To give you an example of what I mean, let me go back about a month.  I was having a mega craving for roasted chicken and roasted potatoes.  In the states, we would generally call it Tuscan chicken, since it is generally a central Italian thing.  In Soriano, there is a place that makes roasted chicken and potatoes that are to die for, and this craving I was having needed to be addressed.

We decided to go to a place called Rosti in Westlake Village.  It is a tiny chain of just 4 restaurants.  We had been there in the past many times, and it had always been good.  In fact, it has always been the closest thing to real central Italian food we had ever eaten in the states.  The problem was that I was craving the real thing, not the ‘closest thing’.  I had the memory of Italy in my head, not the memory of a cheap imitation of Italy.

So we go to Rosti and order Caprese, followed by roasted chicken and potatoes.

The Caprese was a disaster.  But t wasn’t their fault… it was ours.  We had the memory of the real thing.  Caprese is pretty simple… it is hard to mess up.  I mean, Mozzarella, Tomato, basil, and oil… How hard can it be?  The problem is that the tomatoes we get here in L.A. taste like water, not tomatoes.  The mozzarella is never fresh, and even at best, it has absolutely no flavor. So in the end, you get something that looks like Caprese, but tastes like nothing.

Then came the main course.  The plate looked awesome!  There were my potatoes and my roasted chicken… Yummmmm!!!  That is, until my knife hit the chicken.  It didn’t feel right.  When I tasted it, I suddenly frowned and wondered how they got the chicken flavor out of the chicken.  Then I tried the potatoes, and I could feel the effects of the microwave used to heat them in my mouth.  I was devastated.  It was like craving an In n’ Out burger and settling for a Big Mac.  The problem was that this is as good as it gets.  The only way to satisfy the craving was 8.000 miles away.  Why can’t we make decent Italian food here?

Actually, it is our own fault.  We live in a move ‘em in and move ‘em out country. It starts with the farmers and ends with your meal.  The farmers mass produce everything, having to make a bigger tomato that gets to the market faster so they can grow more tomatoes.  Technology gets us bigger and cheaper tomatoes faster than ever. The price of this is flavor.  The chicken ranchers are replaced by chicken ‘mills’ that pump them full of hormones, giving us bigger chickens than ever.  They are big and cheap, so who will notice that they don’t actually taste like chickens?  

As we walk into restaurants they take our orders as soon as possible and deliver us our food as quickly as possible.  We mistake this for good and fast service, but it isn’t that at all.  In fact, they want us in and out quickly so they can get reuse your table as many times as possible that evening.  But food just doesn’t cook that fast, now does it?  So they have to precook as much as possible.  They can’t waste the time and energy to make things from scratch, so they buy the majority of what you eat in frozen form from a huge distributor.  Food is prepped quickly and reheated so that they can use fewer people in the kitchen with higher efficiency, all the while getting your order to you in lightning speed. 

The process is beautiful, and the only thing you lose along the way is flavor.   But even that is ok, since we are preconditioned to think that is the way it is supposed to be.

Then we wonder why the Italian food is so much better in Italy.  Go figure!

Some people travel to Italy, see the sights, eat the food, and go home thinking they experienced Italian culture.  In reality, the vast majority of these people only experienced a tiny fraction of the amazing culture that Italy offers.  You cannot experience the true Italy from a traditional tour, or by visiting the standard tourist destinations like Rome, Tuscany, Venice, etc. 

To really experience Italian culture and beauty, you have to get off the beaten path, away from all of the tourist traps.

The problem for most people is that they either don’t know how or where to go, or that the adventure of getting in a car and just driving is just too overwhelming.  CultureDiscovery.com provides the adventure , while helping remove all of the unknown for you. 

Soriano nel Cimino is a stunning small medieval Italian village of roughly 8,000 people that is largely undiscovered, while being strategically located within a short drive to the best Italy has to offer.  In ancient times, its castle was the summer Vatican.

When you are traveling, sometimes you can just feel it. You go to pay for something, and you just know that if you were a local, you would have paid a much lower price. You are an ‘unsuspecting tourist’, and they will take you for what you’ve got. Here is a link to a New York Times article on this subject so that you really get the point.

So how can you avoid this? Here are some steps you can take:

It generally only happens in the tourist traps

It is really interesting to see the difference between a place that is full of tourists, and one that has limited tourism. Where you find streets full of tourists, the locals tend to bite the hand that feeds them. In places where tourism hasn’t quite caught on yet, the locals welcome the tourists as guests. I’ve seen tourists in Rome or Tuscany get ’special’ menus with inflated prices, and I have seen tourists in Soriano nel Cimino get special menus with lower prices than the locals get!

Food: It is all about the menu

You may walk into a restaurant and be handed a menu in English. What a convenience, you may think. But consider that if the place has an English-only menu, they also have a menu for Italians. There is a chance that the prices are different. Also, if the place does not have prices on the menus, beware, as they can give you any price they want.

I remember once I was in Pompeii with some other Americans that didn’t speak Italian. We went to a restaurant, and as they heard us speaking English, they handed us English menus. I glanced at it, and considering that I was accustomed to ordering in Italian, I asked (in Italian) for the Italian menu. The waiter was caught off guard, excused himself and gave me the Italian menu. It took about 30 seconds before I noticed the prices were much lower on my Italian menu than they were on the English menu.

Must you really eat 100 feet from the Spanish Steps?

Perhaps it is the steep rent they have to pay, or perhaps it is due to the steady flow of tourists that think the Euro is play money, but the closer you are to a major tourist attraction, the more you are going to pay for just about anything.

I use the Spanish Steps in the title because long ago Paola and I were hungry, and we happened to be there. We went to the first place we could find, and had a cinnamon toast and a cup of tea. In today’s value, we paid the equivalent of about $40.00 for 2 cups of tea and a slice of toast.

Stand up!

When you go to a caffe and want to order your espresso, you may have the option of being served at a table, or standing up at the bar. There is often a huge surcharge for sitting at the tables. Again, the closer you are to Tourist Central, the worse this will be.

Shopping

If you have to ask how much something costs, and you are in a touristy area, you a re probably about to be ripped off.

Paola and I were walking in Rome once, and we spotted an Espresso machine that was so ugly, so cheap looking, that as a joke, I walked into the store and pretended to be an American that was interested in it. You have to understand that this thing was horrid, and couldn’t have been worth more than $25. It was the Yugo of Espresso machines. At the time, $150 was extremely expensive for a home Espresso machine. When I asked how much it was, I was quoted $250 , which was, at the time, like saying $1,000 now.

Keep it short

In a loud and crowded environment, if you stick to very few, easy to pronounce words, and you are not dressed with a straw hat and camera hanging on your neck (and that 6 carat diamond on your finger), you might not be recognized as a tourist right away. For example, if you don’t stick out visually, and you walk up to a bar and quickly say in a low voice ‘un caffe’ , instead of the Learn Italian in 7 days version that would be something like ‘Vorrei un caffe’ per favore‘, you probably won’t be noticed until you start fumbling though the Euro change to figure out which coin is which. But by that time, you have your price, and probably were not ripped off.

Off the beaten path

I said this at the beginning, and will say it again. When you get away from the major tourist spots, and find yourself on the road less traveled, these problems just don’t happen. The people are not bombarded by thousands of tourists a day, so you are more of a welcome guest than a quick buck. Italians are extremely hospitable people.

On my last trip to Italy, I was hoping to attend an Italian NFL football game. Actually, it was the ‘Silverbowl’. Unfortunately, Paola wasn’t feeling well, so we ended up skipping it. Still, while browsing one of the sites, I followed a few links. One of them brought me to the Italian Baseball League. I discovered that there was a game on July 1st ina town not too far from where I am (Actually, it ended up being about 80 miles away).

The Grosseto Baseball Stadium

So I figured, what the hell! It is important to note that the Italians have 3 major sports: Soccer, Soccer and Soccer. Well, to be perfectly fair, they also follow Soccer. So, the fact that I discovered a baseball league was something I couldn’t pass up. So I made the trek to Grosseto, home of the ‘Grosseto Prink Orioles’, the team that just won the European World Cup of Baseball, as well as the Italian Championships last year. They are in the Italian version of the majors (Series A1). What I discovered when I arrived at the ballpark was awesome!! The ‘stadium’ was much larger than I had anticipated. I would say that it could stand against many minor league fields in the US. More impressive was the crowd… THEY HAD ONE! Remember, if you ask 1,000 Italians, maybe ONE can tell you the difference between a strike and a ball. OK, so there is probably curiosity factor. Still, it is a crowd.

The game is about to start, and Mickey Mouse (really) throws the first pitch. The game starts, and I very quickly realize that these fans (around 1500 – 2000 of them) are real fans. They know the game, and are there for their team. No curiosity factor here.

The game moves on scoreless… inning after inning. The players were pretty good. I wouldn’t say any were good enough for U.S. Minors, but pretty close.

Grosseto Baseball Stadium

All the while, I am there with a local friend of mine, to whom I am teaching the ins and outs of baseball. As the top of the 7th is about to end, I tell him about a tradition we call the 7th inning stretch. While I am still explaining it, the batter strikes out and all of the sudden they start playing ‘Take me out to the ball game’ over the loudspeakers as the announcer announces the 7th inning stretch. Too cool!

After the song, the announcer mentions the presence of some Americans from Boston at the game. Apparently that was somewhat akin to mentioning the presence of a few rock stars

I ended up meeting the Americans, as well as the announcer (Ciao Guido), and he ends up announcing yet another American from Los Angeles… Wow! I’m famous now!

In any case, we get to the bottom of the 9th, still scoreless and go into extra innings. The game finally ends at around midnight at the bottom of the 12th, the home team victorious.

Believe it or not, it was more fun than any Dodgers game I have ever been to!