Vado in Italia ... questo maggio! (I'm Off to Italy...in May!)

Italy, Italy, Italy. Italian cooking. Italian music. Italian movies. Italian language. And, of course, Italian books. 

I'm all-things-Italian right now.

After two months of slowly making my way through Italian Days by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison and Italian Folktales collected by Italo Calvino, I finally closed the books. There couldn't be any better way to travel around Italy than to visit via a travel memoir of one writer's trip around Italy combined with a huge collection of old Italian stories from all over Italy selected by an Italian master writer. 

I'm cooking Italian, including lasagna (see my post here) and deep dish pizza (my post is here). I'm watching movies set in Italy. I'm listening to Italian music. I'm practicing Italian on the great app Duolingo; I'm happy to tell you that I am currently 34% fluent in Italian.

In a little more than two months, my husband, sister, brother-in-law, and I will be traveling to Italy to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary and the double retirement of my husband and me from our jobs. My sister has led us in the planning of a great adventure in Italy; she's helped us create stops in Rome, Florence, and, our family's hometown, Lucca. 

If the trip is a quarter as much fun as the preparation for the trip, we will have a lovely time.

Do you have any recommendations for wonderful books or movies set in Italy? Any places we must visit when we go?

What are you reading today?

What is the Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them,and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake....That's what happens at the Sunday Salon, except it's all virtual. Every Sunday the bloggers participating in that week's Salon get together--at their separate desks, in their own particular time zones--and read. And blog about their reading. And comment on one another's blogs. Think of it as an informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one's earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book. Click here to join the Salon.

The Sunday Post is a meme hosted by Kimba at Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It's a chance to share news and recap the past week.

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page. We share books that we found in our mailboxes last week. 

 It is now being hosted here.

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews in which you can share the books you've acquired.

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is where we share what we read this past week, what we hope to read this week…. and anything in between!  This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from! I love being a part of this and I hope you do too! It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is now being hosted at The Book Date.