Buona Sera from Italia! After a full four weeks of non-stop travel, Steve and I have arrived in Cortona, an amazing medieval town in southern Tuscany (Made famous by the book, Under the Tuscan Sun). In the next post, I will tell you about our stay here, but I wanted to share a bit about our first week in Italy, a five day stay in the city of Bolzano-Bozen. Our week in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy will be remembered mainly for three things; a fabulous wine-drenched party with our friends from Dublin, a grumble of pugs, and a dead man named Otzi.

As an introduction, it's important to know that Bolzano is in a region that once belonged to the Austro-Hungarians, and is, therefore, VERY German. Everything, and I mean everything, is in both Italian and German. This includes menus and signage, and even the name of the city is both (Bolzano is Italian, and Bozen, German). Many people speak both languages, (along with a spattering of English), although, sadly, we found the food to be heavy on the Bavarian, (sausage, sauerkraut, and birra), and light on the Italian (pasta and excellent wine). We did find a fairly good wine from this region called Lagrein which was widely available for 3-4 euros a glass, a great value.

And now on to the three aforementioned memorable items. First the party! Up to this point in our travels, much of our anticipation was focused on meeting Josh O'Shea and Betty Lacey (Margaret Lacey's sister) and their Dublin friends (Anne, Helen, Fiona & Shay) in Bolzano for Betty's 60th Birthday celebration. The old city center of Bolzano was a great place for a party, as it is a small walkable area with few cars, and many bars, cafes, and shops. The climate is mild and the surrounding Dolomite mountains, stunning.

We met up with Betty and Josh outside of their gaff (that's Irish for pad), the swanky Stadt Hotel Citta on Walther Platz. We had drinks, followed by a distinctly German meal. Next day, we headed up the cablecar to Renon, a devastatingly charming Austrian village. Here, we hiked for several hours, partly on the Sigmund Freud Promenade. SF spent some time in this area in 1916 and they celebrate him with a stroll in his honor. See photos, We had another evening out, including another German meal (arrgh). Thursday, Steve and I took a day trip to Merano, which was also very picturesque. See photos,

Thursday night, the rest of the Dublin contingent arrived. Whoa! It was a blur for the next 60 hours, but I do know there was quite a bit of singing, hugging, laughing, dancing and maybe, a wee bit of drinking, Happiest of Birthdays to one hell of a fabulous polyglot from Dublino!

A shout out to the lovely grumble of pugs we met up with (several times) in Bolzano. Grumble is the word used for a group of pugs. On our first evening in Bolzano, prior to meeting up with Josh and Betty, we ran into what we thought was one pug, when three others arrived! Yes, I screamed, One of these pugs was named Audrey Hepburn. Fabulous.

And now for the dead man. Bolzano features a memorable archeology museum dedicated to a 5300 year old mummy found in 1991. The poor fellow was murdered, left upon a glacier, and then nature preserved his body for future generations. Over 5000 years later, the receding ice cap (think climate change), and the serendipitous finding by two hikers has given science a veritable gold mine. Scientists have extracted Otzi's DNA and know his birthplace, his blood type, and learned that while his maternal line died out, his paternal descendants live on in Sardinia. They even know what he had to eat before he was "offed" an hour later.

And he was there! We saw him….on ice...in a freezer. It was fantastico!

Ciao for now, Kimberly and Steve