Are we going to write about how beautiful and how genuine Italy is? Not this time.
This is not going to be a long elegy of Italy. Italy means good food, conviviality, art, culture, but you have already heard of it. Just for one moment, we want to give you a different perspective. As we know, big cities are full of beautiful churches, landmark buildings, celebrated museums, and modern restaurants that definitely deserve to be visited.
But what about Italian typical food? What about real Italian life style? The truth is that Italian big cities have become metropolitan, bustling areas like in any other country in the world. As a result, it is more difficult and expensive to find genuine Italian products, and to experience slow life style. You can certainly obtain them, but you will have to strive a bit, since industrialization and globalization are ever-evolving, worldwide processes.
What is the solution? Visiting Italian small villages. The only way to fully discover (o rediscover) Italian authentic soul is approaching the countryside, and the mountains. You must visit local producers and shops to find out real Italian delicacies. You must wander the streets of a typical Borgo in order to slow down life, to savor steadily a real espresso, to taste real Italian ice-cream made with genuine milk, as well as traditional cakes, and authentic dishes. This is what means to retrieve traditional, forgotten tastes and ingredients.
For how concerns art and culture, small villages offer the same number of churches and monuments as big cities. However, some of them are still hidden, or less frequented by tourists, offering an intimate bestowal of knowledge to those who dare to explore them. Therefore, roam in the countryside, visit a village each day, lose yourself in small streets, and you will find out that not only every region has its own gastronomical, artistic, and cultural tradition, but that every village hides jealously its precious secrets. They are willing to reveal them only to those who are curious and brave enough to leave the busy, main road.
Eventually, we are not here to write a tirade against big cities. They are magnificent, full of life, and they provide all the comforts, but they have also forgotten all those little precious things, which can be found in another parallel dimension.
In other words, the dimension of Italian provincial life or Italian slow living, which is made of small churches, dusty courtyards, reddish bricks, rolling hills, crystalline lakes, luscious woods, enchanted mountains, boundless fields, small shops where the owner calls you by name, small trattoria, kids playing football along the streets, elderly people gathered around a bar bestowing advice, barbers willing to chat all day with clients, and finally by earnest, convivial people, who are ready to welcome you in this heavenly part of Italy.
