Good Food and Views are Worth the Journey
The third visit of our April wine tour of Italy took us to Sicily where we dropped in on Cusumano's winery in Palermo and had a tour of the company's new vineyards on the slopes of Mt. Etna. The tasting introduced us to some fascinating new wines, including an extremely promising white wine, as well as some of Palermo's best "street" food. The vineyard visit gave us some amazing views on Etna.
Cusumano is a Palermo based company producing a variety of white and red wines, ranging...
We spent our free morning in Palermo, before going to our Cusamano winery visit, with a walk around the city's old town and a drive to the sea. The highlights for me were a visit to the opera house, the Cappella Palatino and despite the decay, the city's old town store fronts. Palermo is grungy - more third world in feel - but this makes for some interesting photos and if you're a Godfather movie buff, there are a number of familiar spots.
1. Teatro Massimo - Palermo's Opera...
Palermo was our first port of call in a wine visit to Sicily and our first night in the city yielded one of my favorite dinners at a casual neighborhood restaurant not far from the airport. Vitina Cucina & Pizza in the Cinisi area of Palermo specializes in seafood and pizza. Standouts for me included the grilled squid and shrimp and pistachio pasta while dessert, a ricotta cassatella was fantastic.
After a flight from Rome, dinner at Vitina was a great way to start our trip in...
We had an evening flight to Palermo from Rome so faced with the quandary of what to do for a few hours after leaving central Tuscany, we decided to drop in on Orvieto for lunch and its amazing cathedral. Orvieto is a well preserved hill town in southwestern Umbria located almost midway between Siena and Rome. Fiumicino (Leonardo da Vinci International Airport) is around a 90 minute drive from Orvieto.
Orvieto is perched on top of a "tufo" (huge lump of volcanic rock) and commands a...
There is a lot of good wine in Tuscany and I had a memorable visit to Carpineto winery this past April. The Montalcino and Montepulciano areas are home to the Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile Montepulciano, red wines that have gained prominence over the past decade. While a prior trip last year included visits to Brunello specialists Casanova di Neri and Poggio di Sotto, a visit to a large producer like Carpineto gave us a chance to try the winery's broader region products including a...