dine•o•crat

Civitella in Val di Chiana is a small, picturesque comune in the hills of Arezzo in Tuscany with a grim war history. It has as its main attraction the ruins of a castle built in 1048. Civitella itself is a fortress town, built even before that castle, in the 7th century, as part of a series of fortresses around the territory. During World War II, 244 people, most from Civitella, along with dozens more from nearby towns of Cornia and San Pancrazio, were massacred by German forces for the death of two of their own soldiers. The castle itself was used by Germans as headquarters during the war and it was eventually bombed by Allied forces. If you walk around the town, you'll find stark reminders of that awful act from long ago. But nowadays, it's mostly a quaint and quiet community where nothing much happens. If you stay in the town's B&B, Antico Borgo , below is what you wake up to when you first open your windows. (Helpful traveler tip: if you plan on staying at the B...

We were lost, hopelessly, almost irretrievably lost. My friend from California had been driving us around for several hours, all three of us having gotten very little rest after our arrival in Rome. At that point, we had been up almost 48 hours with hardly a wink on the planes we took. We were searching for Civitella in Val di Chiana, a tiny little town in the hills above the Tuscan city of Arrezzo and it was a task more difficult than we thought. The directions we received were not very clear and it didn't help our cause that the signs around this area of Italy weren't very clear, either. Once you leave the city, the Tuscan towns pretty much all look the same. Pretty, but identical. And even when we stopped to ask for directions, the language barrier was worse than we had anticipated. Hours later, our Italian friend finally decided to meet us at a nearby hotel, easier to find than the bed and breakfast in which we were to stay. By the time we checked in to Antico Borgo—the B...

Salumeria Roscioli in Rome is a narrow restaurant in a chic area of the city, on the Via dei Giubbonari. After window shopping at the trendy boutiques along the street, we headed to the restaurant for our meal for the night. You enter through a deli/salumeria/wine bar with an amazing selection of products, and arrive in the back where there are small tables for dinner. There's also a downstairs, in the wine cave, with a few slightly bigger tables for larger parties. Flawlessly presented with deceptive simplicity, the food was quite good. There were, however, no surprises with the ingredients or preparations, though both were first-rate. What you will get, however, is a breathtakingly deep wine selection and incredible variety of salumi, as well as the precise but simple cooking of the chef. Prego? Below, two views of some of the the wines and liqueurs for sale in the vineria. If you have a table against the wall, most likely one of these monsters would be above your ...

The woman in the next table at Antico Arco was complaining about everything. "The cheese sauce is too salty," she whined. Poor thing: the "cheese" in cheese sauce should have been a clue. "The wine is too dry," she ventured to say about the red she and her boyfriend were having. Bring on the white zinfandel! "After this," I told my dining companion, "we need to walk around the area to remove the aura of the hippie backpacker who got lost in this nice restaurant." Fortunately, there was the warm air of the late Roman summer up in the hills of the city that could burn off anything. Trastevere, in the Janiculum Hill region near one of the famed Seven Hills of Rome, lights up at night with a mysterious and certainly more pleasant aura, one which must be unique to ancient cities. To walk around the area is to experience almost exactly the steps people took from hundreds of years ago, if those people heard a bunch of little minicars whizzi...

One of the surprises of the Italy trip, Antico Arco , is a restaurant in the Trastevere region, in an area called Janiculum Hill, which turned out not to be one of the seven hills of Rome as we were told, but close. Nonetheless, it affords views of the city if you decide to walk around and it's a great setting for a restaurant. If you're staying in the center of Rome, the only way to get here is via taxi (or car, as the rare touristic case may be). You wind through narrow streets, basically at the edge of a hill on, at least for me and my companion, an unexpectedly scenic drive. There are a few monuments, fountains and one of the oldest churches to explore here, something we didn't have too much time to do at night. At the restaurant, the staff was very welcoming and friendly, and the old exterior belied the tastefully modern interior we walked into. The meal was quite commendable: solid cooking with little twists to keep it a bit exciting, featuring first-grade ing...