Renting a villa in Tuscany gives you a unique opportunity to see lots of medieval reinactments as well as food festivals called sagre, the plural of sagra. Who doesn't enjoy eating fresh local food expertly prepared all'aperto (outside) in the summer?

Gloria over at At Home in Tuscany has been accumulating information on all the big festivals in Tuscany, so there's a few pages you might want to bookmark: July Medieval Festivals & July Sagre in Tuscany.

The mouth waters...

Live out in the country long enough in Italy and you'll come across garishly colored signs announcing various food festivals called Sagre. These represent your chances to eat well and cheaply during the summer season, without having to get the kitchen all heated up.

Every weekend thousands of these things are held across Italy. You can join in easily. The hardest part at the good ones is to find a parking place. In the country we just leave our cars anywhere. Your mileage and tolerance for breaking the law may vary.

In any case you'll be herded toward a table with a list of all the foods on offer. Just pick the dishes that sound good to you, pay up and head to a table while they take care of your order.

A village in our vicinity in northern Tuscany recently held a sagra as a benefit for their sports teams. In the picture is a plate of meat we bought for €7, cooked over a wood fire and emerging mighty delicious. There's a sausage, three ribs, and a pork chop.

Buon appetito.

I've spent the week thinking of those out of the way places I love in Italy. Take for example Tuscany's Maremma. It's probably the least known area of Tuscany. Last year we spent part of it on the wild coast of Monte Argentario, at the spectacularly isolated La Trappola. The area is full of the things you come to Italy for. There are spectacular hill towns like Pitigliano, great wine and a very tasty cuisine. Summer festivals are culture rich--or sometimes just rich. The Bugatti International Meeting is being held on the last weekend of May this year in Massa Maritimma in the Maremma.

I also think of Puglia, always on the list to take from Tuscany the prize of "best place to visit in Italy." I did a long archaeological survey there, and found the culture fascinating. Yet Puglia is just too far down the boot for most people who have short vacations. It's a shame.

Then there's Lazio. You land in Rome, see the Forum, Pantheon, and the Colosseum, then you take off for Florence or Venice. Well, what about the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia? What about the spectacular summer food and wine in the Castelli Romani, just south of Rome? What about the porchetta for crying out loud? And there's Ostia Antica, a real port city, where you can see the well-preserved ruins of ancient apartments and small take-away food stands instead of one rich person's villa after another, like you do at the famous resort towns of Pompeii or Herculaneum.

This year we'll explore some of these out of the way places, which are best explored from a rental villa, where you'll have quiet nights. You'll need them with all the excitement of seeing places your friends didn't have a clue about.

After a cold Tuscan winter, we've returned to our house in the Lunigiana. It was chilly last night. We turned on the heat, which heats the water in the taps and also provides warm water for the radiators.

Nothing happened. When I turned the knob to get pressure into the system like you always have to do upon returning, water poured out onto the floor.

What follows, although a true Italian miracle, is the reason our returns are so tense until we know everything is working. Try to find an Italian plumber at 5 pm on a Friday! You might was well start counting the number of days (or weeks) you'll have to shell out for a hotel before one is likely to make an appearance. It's chilly at night here, and the thought of cold showers wouldn't entice us to stay at any cost.

Luckily, our neighbor Francesca knows everyone. One phone call and some pleading was all it took to get a plumber to agree to take a look.

He had a fine look. He mumbled something about needing a technical expert. Then, then minutes later, he got the thing to work.

You can't always count on miracles. But it's safe to say that your vacation rental will be better maintained than a house that stands empty half the year.

So, where indeed does God vacation? Of course you know. Italy. At least according to Jerry Springer, tabloid talk show host and once mayor of Cincinnati who was born in the East Finchley tube station in London.

So where does Jerry Springer vacation in God's country?

Every summer we go to Italy. We love the Tuscany area, Capri, Portofino, the Amalfi Coast. We love England and Cape Town in South Africa. We've been to Italy maybe 20 times. It's probably where God vacations—the people, the scenery, the food, the opera—to go and see Italian opera in Italy outdoors is really nice. ~ 'Where God vacations,' Italy never gets old

You can see opera in Verona "all'aperto", meaning outdtoors in the open air, and in this case in the Roman Arena. Many of the ancient monuments of Italy are given over to modern performances. I've even seen "Our Town" performed in Italian in a roman theater in Sardinia. God probably got more of the Italian than I did though.

The Italian city of Lucca faced accusations of "culinary racism" on Tuesday after it banned new foreign eateries from opening in its historic center. The city council recently voted to deny new licenses to any bar or restaurant whose style of cooking was non-Italian within the Renaissance-era walls encircling the city center. ~ Reuters

Well, ok, that's good for us tourists who are appauled every time some corporate house of food horrors sets down in a medieval center. The story doesn't mention if residents feel deprived of alternative cuisines, but the Tuscany regional government put out a warning against 'gastronomic or culinary' racism.

"The defense of quality is one thing, discrimination is another," Paolo Cocchi, the regional councilor for commerce, said on the region's website.

I have news for Paolo. Defense of quality is discrimination. After all, discriminating taste is seldom considered a bad attribute.

Italy has raised up its cuisine by discriminating against crap food. We haven't done enough of that in the US.

Ok, so you're a student and what you'd really like is some cheap crap food. No problem, the four kebab shops already gracing the center of Lucca can continue operating.

Usually, I wouldn't call doner kebabs crap food. I actually like them. But they're salt and fat bombs. A study in London found:

The worst offending kebabs managed 1,990 calories before salad and sauces were added and almost 350 percent of a woman's saturated fat intake. ~ Rueters

So, um, even if you're near penniless, maybe a little gastronomic discrimination is in order.

But I did my part at our own neighborhood Festa di San Silvestro. Yes, we gathered for a communal meal. I made the traditional cotechino with lentils, a dish meant symbolize the dream of increased wealth, combining the "coin-like" appearance of the lentils with the "richness" of the pork sausage.

Well, it tasted darned good, so I'm just going to blurt out, "2009 is gonna be a heck of a year!"

I hope you're going to travel. It's important to get out into the world before someone figures out an easy way to ruin it (for profit or for religion). We need to make some friends out there, wherever "there" is.

So head over to the Lunigiana, my neck of the woods in northern Tuscany, for some panigacci. Heck, have a huge Fiorentina, a beefsteak bigger than the plate. There's lots to discover out there. I've spent lots of time in the Lunigiana and haven't even seen all of that, much less all of Italy.

Airlines are dropping their idiotic "fuel surcharges" and maybe that'll convince you to rent a villa with some of your friends (one of whom is a great cook) to explore Italy together. Life doesn't get much better.

You can quote me on that.

Italia Oggi has just released its ranking of Italian provinces for quality of life. This year, Siena topped the list, rising from 6th last year.

So, if you're thinking of a long term stay in Italy, you can do worse. Then again, top quality-of-life often tracks with price-of-food-in-a-restaurant.

Ravenna rose from 8th to 5th. Ravenna is often overlooked by travelers, but if you haven't seen the mosaics, you should.

The biggest rise was Rome, which zomed from 58th to 29th position on the hit charts.

Falling hard was Bologna, which remains one of my favorite cities to visit, which went from 4th to 21st.

Source: Siena tops quality-of-life charts

Take olives for example. They're quite bitter right off the tree. You wouldn't want to eat one unless you're a glutton for gastronomic punishment. Over the years, many ways to deal with that bitterness have been developed.

You can use lye to cure olives. Lye was a common ingredient in soap for many hundreds of years, so you would have some around. Lower grade lye can be used as a drain cleaner. Funny what ends up in our food, isn't it?

But the easiest way to cure olives, leaving a slight bite of bitterness behind, is to just salt cure them. On the Tuscan coast, you just mix your fresh olives with lots of sale grosso or coarse salt and leave them in a warm place until they pucker up like in the picture.

Funny how simple things are sometimes, eh? We've just forgotten how to work with many ingredients, and let factories churn out inferior versions of the stuff we cram in our mouths. That's a pity.

Two groups make up the interesting parts of Pitigilano's history: the Etruscans who left interesting cuts in the soft tuff or tufa in the woods around Pitigliano, and the Jews, who were trying to escape the brutality of the Papal State to the south and who left a legacy underground.

You can visit the caverns cut underground near the Synagogue, which was restored in 1995, which includes cisterns, baking ovens, wine cellars and narrow, ancient passageways.

You can also take a drive in the country and see the strange "roads" called "Vie Cave" on the signs (although they're almost certainly not roads) that are cut through the soft rock by Etruscans. These aren't far from Pitigliano.

You'll also want to taste the wine of the region, especially the Bianco di Pitigliano, a dry white and one of my favorites in Italy. It goes quite well with fish.

Take a look at the picture above. Doesn't it make you want to be there right now? It was taken in November.