Pages of Italy Podcast: Episodes 6: Tuscany - Hills, Bread, and Patience / Episode 5:Venice — The Republic on the Water / Episode 4: Wolves, Birds, Volcanoes, and the Sea Turtles of Calabria

 

Hello, the 6th Episode of Pages of Italy Podcast is finally live! "In this sixth episode, we leave the water behind and climb into the hills of Tuscany, the landscape that quietly taught the Western world what a beautiful countryside is supposed to look like. We follow a road between dark cypress trees in the low, honeyed light of September, then step into Florence, where the Medici turned a banking fortune into the Renaissance and gave us Brunelleschi’s dome and Michelangelo’s David. We slow right down in the Val d’Orcia, a valley so lovely that UNESCO protected the whole thing, and wander its pale stone hill towns, from Pienza to Montalcino. Then we sit down to ribollita, salt-free bread, and a very rare bistecca alla Fiorentina, before asking what a place that lets its soup, its wine, and its masterpieces take all the time they need can still teach us about patience."

By the way, have you already listened to Episode 5?  Episode 5: Venice — The Republic on the Water. 

"In this fifth episode, we sail into Venice — the lagoon city that should not, by any reasonable measure, support a city at all — where a submerged forest of wooden stakes has held up palaces of pink and white marble for over a thousand years. We trace how a scattering of refugees fleeing the collapse of Rome built La Serenissima, an independent republic that answered to no king, no emperor, and no pope, and grew richer than almost any power in Europe through its command of the sea routes to Byzantium. We wander St Mark's Square and the Doge's Palace, cross the Rialto Bridge, and stop at a bacaro for an ombra and cicchetti — before asking what a city built on mud, and devotion, can still teach us about survival." 

And Episode 4: Wolves, Birds, Volcanoes, and the Sea Turtles of Calabria. "In this fourth episode, we step outside the cities and kitchens to meet the wild Italy that came before all of it — grey wolves moving along Apennine ridges at dawn, golden eagles riding thermals above the Dolomites, and the critically endangered Marsican brown bear holding on in the mountains of Abruzzo. We travel to the restless volcanic islands of Stromboli and Vulcano, and to Etna and Vesuvius on the mainland, before finding stillness in the Po Delta's flamingo-filled marshes. And on the beaches of Calabria, we meet the loggerhead sea turtles who have been returning to lay their eggs there for a hundred and twenty million years — long before there was a Rome to fall, or a Renaissance to rise.