One of the many reasons we like coming to Tuscany, and especially the Val D'Orcia and Montalcino in spring, is that the rolling hills...

None of the tourist guides talk much about the east coast of Italy. Mostly you hear about the Amalfi Coast or Cinque Terre on the west...

In 2018 our olive orchard at Villa Palazzetta produced 100 liters of extra virgin gold. In 2019 Tuscany had an infestation of flies and...

This video is made from 39 still images selected from more than 500 cloud photos taken during our 14-day Covid self-quarantine at the...

Giada de Laurentiis, Bobby Flay and a big film crew spent a week filming an episode for their new series in September of 2019 (before...

Yes, there is life in Italy.

Our friends and neighbors at Locanda Demetra started their farm-to-table restaurant a few years back. It used to be easy to show up and...

This all started innocently enough. Lisa Jane's mom and dad, Linda and Mario, invited us to dinner at their house in Siena. Mario, or...

Now we have two chefs to indulge our pleasures at Villa Palazzetta. First is our adopted nonna, Chef Paola, who makes traditional...

If you've never eaten Bolognese tortellini in brodo you simply must add this experience to your culinary bucket list.

We bought Villa Palazzetta because of its incredible location only five minutes walk from the historic city center. We also bought it...

We arrived this spring on April 7th after visiting Matera, an ancient town in southern Italy that was just named one of the Cultural...

In March our first official guests visited Villa Palazzetta. The note they left in our guestbook says it all. But Maryellen, one of the...

If you been to an Italian hill town then you've seen Piaggios. After WWII Piaggio invented this small engine, three wheel vehicle as an...

Another fall means another olive oil harvest. Matteo Turchi our fantastic groundskeeper did a fabulous job with this year's olive crop....

In October several of took a lovely day trip on a 45 foot sailboat from Portiglioni to Elba. It was a perfect day. We left Montalcino at...

Caprese is what the Italians call a mozzarella and tomato salad. Sounds so simple, right? Well, not exactly. Suffice it to say that there...

When Lee and I went to Montalcino this last August, we had a job to do. We had to photograph our newly finished Villa Palazzetta for the...

When we restored Villa Palazzetta one of the things that was on the top of our list was a real wood-burning pizza oven. Fortunately our...

Last October we had our first olive harvest as the new owners of Villa Palazzetta. The harvest took place in late October. We harvested...