Michelin   The two crutches I travel with are the Michelin Green Guides (sights, also available for North American locations), and the Michelin Red Guides (hotels and resturants, Europe only), along with associated maps. I would never have found the hotel we had reserved in Milan (or anywhere else), without the Milan city map. Aside from the one ways, there are now so many pedestrian streets, and they are of course just where you want to be. We've used them for decades. Oh, they make tires, too.

Italian Food   Where do you get the best Italian food? It depends what you mean by Italian food. In North America, there are restaurants that serve contemporary, eclectic food, and then we have our ethnic restaurants. What you get in Italian restaurants there, is wonderful. There are all the standards, from lasagne to pasta dishes, to veal saltimbocca, and so on. But that's Italian-American food. What you usually get in contemporary Italy is contemporary Italian food. Italian food is just as contemporary and international as American food. At one restaurant they had a sushi appetizer. At another I had the Indonesian dish Nasi Goreng as a main course. Of course you'll find older-style Italian food once in a while, but usually if you find a place that serves a lot of these recognizable dishes, it's probably set up for tourists who expect "Italian food", like one place we ate at in Venice. And the same holds true for "German food", "Chinese food", "Mexican food", and all the other ethnic foods in US restaurants. So the answer to the question about the best older-style Italian food would tend to be--outside of Italy. Not entirely, but very much more than you think.

Autostrade   The autostrade are great. Except for in a few spots they are all toll roads. You pick up a ticket, and when paying, just hand in your credit card, they just slide it, give it back immediately, and you're on your way. Just like German Autobahnen, and unlike British Motorways or American roads, you're lucky if there are three lanes in each direction, because then you have the right lane for the trucks, the middle lane for normal people, and then there is the testosterone lane on the left.

I do about 130 kph, which is a very respectable 80 mph, and the testosterone drivers sometimes pass you so fast in the left lane that you feel pulled in by the suction. If you want to try that lane at normal speeds, NEVER do so without checking very carefully that that lane is clear behind you to the horizon, or otherwise you'll suddenly find a Mercedes with its lights flahing, shrieking at you to get out of its way.

Even in the other lanes, or on small country roads, if someone behind you feels you could be moving along at a better pace hewillpullupthisclose, at whatever speed you're going. You feel you have a visitor in your back seat, or that his car might have amorous intentions on your car.

Some of that testosterone is catching, though. In a town, a woman suddenly opened her car door into moving traffic. I found my right palm rising skyward and heard myself saying "La stupida!!!"

I think it rises out of the soil.

San Pellegrino   I like San Pellegrino water so much that I took a side trip up into the Alpine valley to the town where it's bottled. The town is attractive, with a lot of bridges over the Alpine stream it lies along, and we saw the bottling plant on the edge of town. Finding places connected with things I like is the type of thing I like to do.

Maggiore   Bev has always wanted to see the Italian Lakes (Map by Markus Bernet), so we drove along Lago di Garda, Lago di Como, Lago di Lugano, and Lago Maggiore (Photo by Alessandro Vecchi), here with the Alps. Most of Lake Lugano is in Switzerland, as is the city of Lugano, so for the first time we visited Italian Switzerland. Ticino is the only Italian-speaking Swiss canton. We drove into Campione, an Italian enclave entirely surrounded by Switzerland. They use Swiss francs in this Italian enclave.

I suspect that most people in Lake Como Resort in Florida don't know where their name comes from. Also, don't forget the late singer, Perry Como. We stayed in the town of Como.

I talked about half-translations last summer in California, where the original el Sur Grande was never fully translated into the Big South, but only half-translated into Big Sur. It's the same thing with Lago Maggiore. It's never referred to in English as Lake Major, but just semi-translated to Lake Maggiore. We had a nice surprise twice near Lake Maggiore. As we went up over high points in the road, all of a sudden we saw, just for a moment, a full panorama of a lot of high, snow-covered Swiss Alps. I hadn't thought we were that close.

Milano   In Milan we walked past the world-famous Ladder Theater, which is being renovated, so its operas are being done elsewhere for the time being. Now if you've never heard of the Ladder Theater, it's because I'm putting you on. It's a name that's never translated into other languages, making everyone unaware of what it means. You may have guessed it's the Teatro alla Scala, usually shortened to La Scala (Photo by o2ma), a word that means either "ladder" or "staircase". English Wikipedia only gave the fact that the opera house was named after the 1381 Gothic church that used to stand on the site, Santa Maria della Scala / Saint Mary of the Ladder, which really doesn't explain much, so I had to delve into Italian Wikipedia to find out that the church had been named in turn after its foundress, a member of the dynastic family in Verona whose name was della Scala (also Scaligeri). This was their coat of arms (Image by Xander). So the church was actually the Della Scala Saint Mary church, named after the foundress from the Della Scala family, but I have to hazard a guess that from the beginning the dual meanings were allowed to blend together and people over time understood the name to be the literal meaning of the word rather than the family's name. That's evident in that the opera house is not called the Teatro della Scala to evoke either the della Scala famlly or the church, but Teatro alla Scala. The word alla in Italian is like à la in French (also in English), meaning "in the style of", or "associated with", so that birra alla spina, literally "beer 'associated with' a tap", means "tap beer" (draft beer). Therefore, I think it's undeniable, the opera house known as the Teatro alla Scala is de facto the Ladder Theater.

Michelin found us a nice rooftop open-terrace restaurant for dinner, directly opposite the white, illuminated pinnacles of the Duomo, the Milan Cathedral (Photo by MarkusMark). There were three large tables nearby of people chatting in Russian. After I had enough wine, I said hello in Russian. A woman chatted away, of which I understood maybe 2%. But I got that they're from "Sankt Peterburg", were staying just "tri dnya" and it was a group of "biznizmeny". I told her it's a new world: Russians in Italy. Actually, the tourist and local mix is astounding. There are a lot of Asian and African faces in the local Italian population, and the tourist busses pull in from Eastern Europe as well as from anywhere else. And the Japanese tour groups! Again and again and again.

San Marino   We went into a new country for us. San Marino is an enclave in central Italy and has been a democracy since the fourth century. We drove up to the capital (same name) on top of a mountain.

Tuscany   We were looking forward to coming back to Tuscany, for which Michelin publishes a special regional guidebook. While planning this trip I had one of those flashes of "Why didn't I figure that out before?". The Etruscans, who lived north of Rome, were conquered by the Romans, so their (related) language died out and is found only in traces on art works and pottery. It occurred to me I didn't know just where the Etruscans lived, until it struck me: apparently the word Etruscan shortened itself slightly to Tuscan.

The Handicapped Tag   We went to Assisi (pronounce the middle syllable like "seize") and I found out the extent that the cities, most notably small medieval cities, are closing off their centers to cars and making them pedestrian zones. But when I asked the cop at the city gate, he said as long as we had the handicapped tag, we could go anywhere. There was a sign outside of Assisi, the city of Saint Francis, that it was twinned, appropriately, with San Francisco, California. Assisi has, oddly, two basilicas, one literally on top of the other. You can't imagine it unless you see it yourself. You may recall that the upper one was seriously damaged in the 1997 earthquake, with the ceiling of the nave collapsing and killing four people, and damaging priceless frescoes. Michelin said it wasn't reopened yet at the time of printing, but indeed it was. The roof of the upper basilica is repaired, but you can still see the extensive damage to the frescoes, which are being restored, at least to some extent.

Villa Cora   Michelin found us a former mansion on the south side of the Arno in Florence, in the hills, the Villa Cora. We look out onto trees, but between the trees, we have maybe a 5% view of Florence, but of nothing important. We got a nice room, but the next day we looked around and found out how nice. Floors 3 and 4 look like regular hotel rooms. I suppose they were made from converted servants quarters. The ground floor is astounding. Its used for meetings and as a conference center. The rooms have maybe 25-foot high ceilings, one dining room seats two dozen at a table, the other 20, there's a grand ballroom, and so on. We're on floor one. Wheelchair upgrade! This floor must have been the family's bedrooms. The walls have padded fabric on them. If you press on the wall, it's like pressing on a couch. Under a maybe 20-foot ceiling, two 18-foot high French doors go out onto a shallow stone balcony. Last night (Sunday), when we got in, there was a function going on down below on the terrace and in the garden. There was a string quartet below our window, four women in black gowns playing, among other things, "Moon River" and Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer". I could get used to this. Maybe I already have.

L'ambulanza!   Yesterday we drove down to Siena. Michelin reminded you to remember "burnt Sienna" from paintboxes and crayons. The tag let us drive among the pedestrians in the old city. I had to leave Bev in the car for a few moments, and that has worked just fine again and again.

I've always believed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If you want to hold a door open for the wheelchair, it's appreciated, but don't go overboard. Sometimes when I'm driving, Bev gets a little bored and she rests her chin on her chest and dozes. She must have done that for the few moments I was away and some do-good-nik passerby decided to call the cops. When I got to the car they had the driver's door open and told me l'ambulanza was on the way. Well, I used more Italian then than I thought I knew. Dormiva! She was sleeping! The medic wanted to take her to the ospedale, just to make sure everything was OK. Well, he ended up sitting in the driver's seat and taking her pulse and blood pressure. He decided: È normale. He asked who had called them (the cops had already left). I said I didn't know, but I certainly hadn't. I signed some release form and we were on our way.

San Gimignano   We went on to San Gimignano (Photo by Basilio Speziani), the small medieval town with all the tall towers. A sign said it's on the Unesco World Heritage list. We enjoyed the movie "Tea With Mussolini" a couple of years ago with Joan Plowright, Judy Dench, and Cher, about a group of women who save the towers in WW2. On two occasions, here and in San Marino, we had occasion while walking to go up a steep slope. Doing that uphill with a wheelchair just involves a lot of huffing and puffing, but I was concerned about going back downhill. I've developed this technique. We go down back-to-back with me in front. The chair just pushes me along and I can control it going downhill.

Tuscan Hills   I'd always heard of the countryside around Florence in the Tuscan hills. We had gone down to Siena through the hills of il Chianti, where the wine has been made since the 13th Century. After San Gimignano, Michelin found us a country restaurant off a road, off a road, off a road, where we ended the day with a nice country dinner in a garden in the Tuscan Hills, accompanied by a wonderful bottle of Vernaccia di San Gimignano, an ancient white wine that is new to us.