Italy fever

For some reason, I've been in the grip of Italy fever lately. I'm liking Italian food, looking for places in Italy to visit, and last week I even started an intensive Italian language course.

I've always wanted to learn Italian just because I like the language, the culture, the place. It always seemed a bit impractical since I don't really need it for short visits and there's really not much prospect of ever living there for an extended period of time. Spanish always seemed more practical because it is so widespread in this country.

But what the heck. I'm not getting any younger and I might enjoy learning a new language just for the fun of it. The Italian Culture Institute in Bethesda offers an accelerated course for people who already speak another Romance language (French, Spanish or Portuguese). The class is small, the teacher is Italian, from Liguria, so it's a fairly ideal situation. We'll see whether I go beyond this initial course of 10 sessions once a week.

I've been to Italy often but it never seems to be enough. I went to Rome and Frascati for a week or so two or three times in my early trips to Europe as a Jesuit seminarian. I spent a couple days in Genoa waiting to board the Michelangelo for my voyage home after my Fulbright year. I traveled for business and pleasure when I moved back to Europe as a journalist, working on stories in Milan and Rome, visiting Venice and Florence. During my time at Institutional Investor, I went to Turin for a bank conference and had a spectacular dinner with white truffles; attended a three-day conference at the Villa d'Este on Lake Como with its glorious scenery and food; and most fun of all spent a few days with a Belgian banker at his villa outside Siena to write a story about his project of doing the ultimate guidebook on Tuscany. I spent a wonderful week over Christmas with American friends in Rome. Finally, to spend more time in Italy I rented a farmhouse outside Perugia for a month, taking day trips to Rome, Florence, Assisi, Spoleto, Ravenna and stopping in Venice and the Alto Adige on the way home. At Bloomberg, I headed the European team covering the G-7 summit in Naples. We stayed across the bay in Sorrento at the Grand Hotel and visited Pompeii. My last trip there was to Venice during my two-month stay in Munich working on a supplement for the Washington Times.

I've never been to the Amalfi coast or Capri, to Sicily or Bari, and I've spent too little time in Bologna and Emilia Romagna in general. But right now we are looking at a rental house in Umbria, this time near Todi. There is this great line in La Dolce Vita when Marcello drives outside Rome and stops at a country restaurant. The setting is so idyllic that as he's watching the waitress he exclaims, "You are like an Umbrian angel." Umbria does not have the best wine or cuisine in Italy, but it has wonderful scenery, Etruscan ruins, the incredible cultural richness that seeps out of Italy, and it's midway between Rome and Tuscany. We'll see.