Is it hard to drive in Italy? Really? You’ve probably heard the stereotype — wild Italian drivers speeding around hairpin turns like it’s a race track. But come on, that can’t be true everywhere in Italy, right? As an American used to wide highways and automatic cars, I had the same worries before my trip….
So you’re thinking about renting a car in Italy—bravo! You’re about to unlock medieval hill towns, lakefront drives, and villages so small they don’t even have a bus stop. But here’s the catch: most of the cars on those twisty Italian roads are manual transmission. If driving a stick shift in the old country is…
Dreaming of walking the same cobblestone streets your ancestors once did? Wondering what ancestry tours in Italy actually involve? I just returned from my own roots trip to the Bergamo province, where I spent two unforgettable days with a local genealogist exploring the parishes and villages of my great-grandparents. We visited churches, cemeteries, and the…
The Story of Angela Grassi and Giuseppe Forelli, and the American Family They Never Meant to Create They were born just 30 miles apart in the misty valleys of Bergamo province, but they came from entirely different worlds. She was the daughter of a family in Schilpario — a literate, proud Alpine village with its…
Waking up in the middle of the night, heart pounding. Staring off into the distance during the day. Is this early onset menopause? No! It’s trip anxiety, or in my case, ancestry trip anxiety. My emotions before my ancestry trip to Italy is like being on a rollercoaster. Almost a year ago, I decided to…
Are you traveling for a month in Italy and starting to freak out about packing? Same. I’ve been planning my ancestry trip for a year and suddenly it’s two weeks away and I’m not ready. How does that even happen? This trip is different from any I’ve taken before. I’ll be based in one apartment…
