One of our foreign correspondents, Harry from Steamboat Springs, saw these fine photos at our friend Riccardo Ripanti’s house and alerted us to them. Riccardo is a retired pilot and is back up in the air these days. He took these pictures and was nice enough to say we could share them with everyone. Enjoy! Thank you Riccardo!
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Counting the days till our July trip to Umbria and then daughter Wiley’s graduation from college in London. We are hoping she will be able to spend some more time studying in Italy now. Her Italian got crazy good with a few weeks of lessons in September and I think she wants to keep that momentum going.
By the way, speaking of Italy and England, did anyone see the USA Today with the chart showing where in Europe international travelers really want to go? They asked people who planned to travel within the next two years for their top destinations and what do you know? Italy was the very top with 25 percent. We knew that one! Followed by England at 20 percent and then it faded off to France at 18, Germany and Ireland at 16.
But. On the other hand: There was another chart. They love feeding us the tiny bits of information we can handle in charts at USA Today, don’t they? Notice I am not quoting any learned documents. Limited attention span? The other chart showed “Most useful second languages in business”. Spanish (where was Spain on the first chart, huh?) was 61 percent. That percentage of respondents thought Spanish was a most useful second language for business. Then 16 percent felt like Chinese. Way down in the doesn’t matter category was Italian at a positively recreational 2 percent. It might wreck everything if the reality of too much annoying commerce got in the way of all our holiday fun!
25 PERCENT SOLUTION. YET ANOTHER SUMMER GETAWAY STATISTIC
I had barely put down the USA Today when Midge showed me the latest Travel+Leisure Readers’ Poll. Visitors to their web site were asked to pick a favorite summer vacation. 32% said a kind of generic “Quiet beach anywhere” duh. But next was a more focused “Biking through Tuscany” at 25 percent. Italy always makes the charts.
Until next time,
See you in Italy,
Stew