Rick Steves's Blog, page 35

Video: The Guatemalan Goats’ Love Shack

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; give him a chance to take his goat to the love shack, and his family will have fresh milk forever more.

I’m in Guatemala, scouting for a new public television special about hunger, hope, and development. And I just found another example of an NGO making a big difference. Agros International uses a smart approach to development that results in healthy, self-sustaining communities — and by sharing know-how and capital here in the northwestern highland...

Video: A Hopeful Visit to a Thriving Family Farm in Guatemala

I’m in Guatemala, scouting for a new public television special about development aid. Looking for vivid, slice-of-life ways to illustrate the points I make in the script, I’ve visited many families. And today, I hit the script-writing jackpot. I was introduced to an industrious teacher and his wife, a hardworking farmer, by Agros International, an NGO that helps families attain economic self-sufficiency and own their land.

Join me on a little tour a household that has all the elements of a ni...

Meet Cesare the Coppersmith

Cesare, the coppersmith of the Tuscan hill town of Montepulciano, is a proud old artisan with a spirit as strong as the oak-tree root upon which his grandfather’s anvil sits. For Cesare, every day is show-and-tell, as steady streams of travelers with my Florence & Tuscany guidebook drop by to see him work, stroke his beautiful ego, and say hi. It is people-to-people moments like this that distinguish a good trip.

Cooking in Florence on a Rick Steves Tour

With so many travelers into food these days, food tours and cooking classes have become a big deal all over Europe. And a cooking class is a perfect example of how we, as part of our bus tours, encourage our travelers to roll up their sleeves and dig into the local culture through real experiences. I love to bump into our tours while in Europe doing my research. And just the other day I met one of our Venice/Florence/Rome tour groups and joined them for lunch. The catch? We had to cook it ourselves. Fun and enthusiastic Fabrizio (of the In Tavola Cooking School) had five mini-kitchens set up for our group where he and his staff led us through a marvelous 90 minutes of cooking fun. And, I swear, the food was as good as anything you might expect in a fine restaurant. Plus, knowing that we had made the bruschetta, pasta, sauce, chicken, and even the tiramisu ourselves, made it taste even better.  What favorite food-tour and cooking-class memories do you have from your European travels?

See photos from this cooking class on The Travelphile.

Eating in Florence

Bobo runs one of my favorite Florence restaurants, Antica Trattoria da Tito, with attitude. And sometimes that attitude puts off my readers. But once you embrace Bobo’s devil-may-care flair for fun and dining, you’ll enjoy an unforgettable meal.

 

This is Bobo and these are his rules. As you can see, don’t try to get your meat cooked well and forget about cappuccino after lunch or dinner.

 

With so many travelers into food these days, food tours and cooking classes have become a big deal all over Europe. And a cooking class is a perfect example of how we, as part of our bus tours, encourage our travelers to roll up their sleeves and dig into the local culture through real experiences. I love to bump into our tours while in Europe doing my research. And just the other day I met one of our Venice/Florence/Rome tour groups and joined them for lunch. But first, we had to cook the meal. Fun and enthusiastic Fabrizio (of the In Tavola cooking school) had five mini-kitchens set up for our group where he and his staff led us through a marvelous 90 minutes of cooking fun.

 

Of course, after cooking our meal, we got to eat it. And, I swear, the food was as good as anything you might expect in a fine restaurant. Plus, knowing that we had made the bruschetta, pasta, sauce, chicken, and even the tiramisu ourselves, made it taste even better.

See more photos from this cooking class on The Travelphile.

White Night in Florence

With my work, I rarely plan to be anywhere for a local festival. But when one hits, I make it a point to enjoy it. In Florence, the night before May Day is a huge blowout called White Night. All the museums are free and open late, all the places to eat and drink are ready to serve, and it seems everyone is out in the streets.

Rather than stay in your hotel room and complain about the noise, your best response is to get out in the streets and make them even noisier. What big-city, after-dark blowout festivals have you stumbled onto?

Just When I Thought My Future Was Set…

This high school prom portrait shows a young man destined to become a tuxedo-rental model just months before enjoying his first trip to Europe without parents — a trip that derailed what promised to be an exciting modeling career.

Florence Discoveries

I’ve noticed in Venice, Rome, and Florence that the traditional economy is being pushed out by the playground economy that comes with modern affluence. In old, historic city centers, as rents go up, longtime residents and families are pushed out. Recently, the Florentine government ended rent control and rental costs immediately spiked, driving artisans and shops catering to locals out of business — to be replaced by boutiques and trendy places to eat and drink.

 

In both Florence and Rome, if you cross the river (into neighborhoods that are the European equivalent of “the wrong side of the tracks”) you’re more likely to find small family businesses eking out an existence for another generation — like this cobbler’s shop.

 

When exploring Florence, remember to take a moment to look above the trays of neon-colored gelato and enjoy the cityscape. This is a city of noble and elegant facades.

 

You can diligently visit all the museums and eat at all the right restaurants, but if you don’t take a simply aimless stroll for a half-hour before crawling into bed, you’re missing an important dimension of a great city. After dark, thoughtful floodlighting, reflections on cobbles, lonely street musicians, and local lovers all bring charm to streets that are otherwise teeming with traffic and workaday crowds.

 

I don’t build my itineraries around festivals. But I’m constantly happening upon fun events filling the streets and squares. Standard operating procedure for any good traveler: when checking into your hotel, be sure to ask, “What’s happening tonight?” I imagine half the tourists in Florence were in their hotel rooms on the last night of April when the streets were jammed for White Night Florence — a nightlong  celebration of Florentine good living when venerable facades became just backdrops to free concerts, dancing, dining, and street performances.

 

Lorenzo the Magnificent is just one of the many busts that greet visitors entering Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, home to the best collection of paintings in Italy. Lorenzo must have been a big personality with Mick Jagger-sized energy and charisma.

 

While Lorenzo had nice hair and chiseled features, others in the family were not quite so well assembled. When you study how inbred Europe’s aristocratic elites became over the ages, you stumble upon some of the physical downsides of tight families. This Medici, like many of Europe’s royals, had a pretty distracting underbite.

Tripe in Florence’s Central Market (warning: graphic scenes and bloody private parts)

One of the great sights in Florence, along with all the must-see museums, is the Mercato Centrale. The Central Market is thriving with traditional market stalls and competitive little eateries. At this tripe shop, it was easy to see that locals eat just about every bit of the cow…and some bits unique to the bull, too. In order to get to all these parts in a 90-second video clip, I had to talk over my charming guide. She reminded me that you know a restaurant is dedicated to locals (and not just tourists) if it offers dishes using these non-tourist-friendly cuts.

 

Roman Discoveries

Crowds are a huge, huge thing at many major sights, including here at Rome’s Vatican Museums. Emerging economies in large parts of our world are creating big middle-class populations with enough money to finally see the Europe of their dreams.

In the Vatican Museums’ Raphael Rooms, visitors are packed in shoulder-to-shoulder. With booming tourism from populous countries such as China and India adding to the sightseeing demand, it makes having a careful plan for avoiding crowds even more important.

 

These days the Vatican Museums are jammed with heads — in the case of this photo — both ancient and contemporary. It always amazes me how the vast majority of people just line up for these sights, wasting literally hours to get in. On the other hand, those following the advice of good guidebooks learn how to avoid crowds and get in with almost no wait. But once inside, we’re all just part of one big mosh pit of art love. Even with the intercontinental BO, it’s a great experience.

 

The Vatican Museums are housed in what was essentially the pope’s palace. In it an entire hallway is dedicated to maps. Here’s an excerpt from the Rome guidebook:

The 16th-century maps on the walls show the regions of Italy. Popes could take visitors on a tour of Italy, from the toe (entrance end) to the Alps (far end), with east Italy on the right wall, west on the left. They actually functioned as the official maps from 1582, when they were painted, until the 19th century…. The windows give you your best look at the tiny country of Vatican City, officially established as an independent nation in 1929. It has its own radio station, as you see from the tower on the hill. (Pope Francis lives in the residence just in front of that radio tower — with the three green shutters. He can be seen strolling on his rooftop terrace on nice afternoons.)…. Near the end (on the left) is Liguria, where you can actually see the five little towns of the Cinque Terre circa 1582, and a chariot captained by Neptune himself taking Columbus to the New World.

You’ll have to come here yourself to see Columbus and Pope Francis. But here in this photo is a tiny bit of the map showing the five villages of the Cinque Terre — amazing to think they showed up on a map in 1582 about like they do today.

 

Vatican Coach Museum: Just beyond the cafeteria, near where you enter the Vatican Museums, is a delightful garden open to the public (that’s usually filled with tour groups getting their Sistine Chapel briefing by guides who are not allowed to talk in the chapel). And just beyond that, steps lead into the Padiglione delle Carrozze, a newly opened, peaceful exhibit showing off centuries of papal carriages, cars, and “popemobiles” — including the vehicle that Pope (now Saint) John Paul II was riding in when he was shot in 1981 (with video clips of the pope later meeting his would-be assassin to offer him forgiveness).

 

When making TV shows I love to get a “high wide shot” of whatever we’re shooting. Many people visiting Rome see Piazza Navona, but very few ever get a good high wide. This photo is taken from the third floor of the Museum of Rome. The museum is only worth visiting for its views down to Piazza Navona, and its galleries of Romantic art depicting Rome in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

The Museum of Rome (in Palazzo Braschi) is a lost opportunity. It doesn’t seem to care — or try — and almost no one goes there. But I enjoy it for its Romantic paintings of great sights, showing what they looked like in past centuries. Many of Rome’s medieval churches are medieval on the inside, but few are medieval on the outside. In the Baroque Age, the Church here was determined to amp up the public presence of its places of worship, and most were given Baroque facelifts. This is how Santa Maria Maggiore (one of Rome’s four great Vatican churches, independent of Italy) looked before.

 

With so many restaurants to review in just four nights in Rome, I didn’t have time to dine with my best friends in the city. So I did something that was a first for me: I hosted a dinner party at my favorite restaurant, Il Gabriello. Among those joining me in this photo are Tom Rankin (a professor and architect who established Scala Reale, which became the highly respected tour company Context; his latest project is “Tevereterno” — revitalizing the Tiber River in Rome), Stefano Loreti (who runs Hotel Oceania, one of my longtime favorites, and really knows his grappa), Francesca Caruso (the guide who takes most of our Rome groups on such inspirational tours of the ancient sights), and Claudio Conti (my favorite restaurateur in Rome, who runs Il Gabriello restaurant). Each has joined me for great little bits in past TV shows on Rome and are examples of how the people-to-people, thoughtful travel we love is accessible to American travelers…and worth striving for.