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Under impossibly blue skies and with remarkably few tourists (for Venice), we wandered the city, walking from Rialto to San Marco on both sides of the Grand Canal. Staying at the new Aman on the Grand Canal – enviably positioned on the more local side of the main thoroughfare and away from the summer’s madding crowd – in five minutes you are at the Rialto market and in a smart 15 or 20 at Quadri. Not that you even need to leave the property with its two huge gardens and the scores of treasures that Palazzo Papadopoli holds – Tiepolos, cuir de Cordoba walls, stucco, libraries, and those remarkable views onto the heart of the city.
Segugio and Annie
It is a region of Italy that reveals itself slowly but not grudgingly. Puglia and Basilicata are hardscrabble neighbors, sandwiched between two seas, anchored in sandstone and limestone, used and abused as a gateway to and from other lands.
Perhaps it is because they have needed to keep a low profile, to concentrate on keeping body and soul together, that they have eschewed the snobbery, the flash, the pretension, even, of other more northerly regions. And, because necessity is the mother of invention, these life-hardened agriculturalists have developed cultural life ways that make them special: their cooking, their architecture, their desire for privacy reflect centuries of making life work.
Today, this region of Italy is on the cusp of becoming the darling of travelers who bemoan the trafficked towns and country roads of Tuscany. "This is the new Tuscany, " they say, but they are wrong. This is not Tuscany at all. This is something - a place and a people - that is completely different.
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