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Two years ago today I was in Pitigliano Italy, site of one of the oldest Jewish towns in Italy – though of course not anymore. I blogged every day of our month-long stay in Italy and Pitigliano was particularly hard to write about. I thought about this post recently because when I wrote it I was still not very involved in twitter, my Facebook friends were all old high school friends or new real life friends, and believe it or not I had no idea if or why people read my blog. I wrote, I published and I didn’t care about what happened after that.
But, when I came back from Italy where I had been posting every single day – and still not looking at my stats! – I was shocked to see that my blog readership had exploded. I thought I was writing about our trip purely for my family and good friends, but it had been passed around and shared and so on. It was my first real lesson in how far my writing could go on the web if I kept consistently putting it out there. That’s when I discovered twitter too. It was Amy Oztan, selfishmom.com, who shoved me in to the twittersphere, but it was meeting Jennifer Perillo that made me stay.
Jennifer’s blog, In Jennie’s Kitchen is some of the best food and good old-fashioned writing you will find anywhere. An Italian girl from Brooklyn married to a nice Jewish boy (ok – man), Jennifer was looking for and writing about Italian Jewish food. I told her about the cookbook I wrote about in my Pitigliano post, which was the very one she was reading at the time – and then that spurred a full-out conversation about the Jews of Italy, my visit to Pitigliano and so much more. Jennifer linked to this post from her recipe on egg-free gnocchi. And so a friendship was born – of twitter, but thankfully into real life.
So, in a Travel Tuesday reprise – here’s my post about Pitigliano and the testimony to how our food culture endures and social media can keep the conversation going.
Pitigliano – It’s So Not (Jewish) Ghetto
With only a couple of days left we realized that there are still some restaurants that the owner’s of our villa recommended. I don’t know if I mentioned the amazing book that they left us filled with notes on towns worth visiting, cards from the best restaurants all over, maps of cities and parking tips and directions all over Umbria, Tuscany and Lazio. This book has been our bible while we’ve been here. It’s given us ideas, helped us plan itineraries and always shown us the best places to eat! (They also left an incredible array of tour books, history books and cooking magazines. Everything we could need to research and prepare for our various journeys this past month)
The last couple of days have been a paradigm of summer laziness. We’ve done nothing but hang out at the pool, eat, drink, read and for the girls, paint in the garden. This is it, our final week in Italy and so we seem to living it as low key as possible. Plus, the girls have basically boycotted getting into the car. They are so over any sort of excursions and sightseeing, though we may have to rouse them a couple more times just to feel like we’ve covered every inch of this slice of Italy.
Our last day in Paris was just as chock full as the first three. We had to check out our apartment early because the next family was arriving by 10. Actually, they arrived while we were still there, and poor them we made them wait outside until we were ready and the owner had arrived. We decided to check our two small suitcases at 
Thanks to a couple of great ipod applications we were able to add the public bus to our modes of transportation. The bus is my preferred mode of transport at home since I love being above ground and feeling like it’s a safe cheap way to get anywhere in the city at any time. Of course it’s not great if you are in a time crunch, or if you’re dealing with midtown traffic during the holiday season, but for the most part I never tire of watching the city go by while I’m on my way. The ipod app showed us the best route to get from our apartment to Trocadero via one bus line.
Our first full day in Paris was an experiment in family travel – specifically how to squeeze in what the adults want to do yet placate the kids. We hit a pretty good balance. We started out on the Metro with our 3-day passes and headed for the Louvre. Unfortunately the weather was unseasonably cool and threatening rain but better too cool than too hot I think. Besides, a legitimate reason to shop in Paris is always a good thing.
