So you’re planning your first trip to Italy and looking for the top tourist mistakes in Italy to avoid them effectively. Friend, we’ve got you covered. Italy is a fantastic country to visit, and it’s filled with art, culture, and delicious food. However, missing out on some of the best experiences can be easy if …
You walk into a Spanish bakery, or a pharmacy, or the deli counter at the market, and it can look at first like pure chaos. There is no line, no rope, no orderly single file, just a loose scatter of people standing around, leaning on the wall, browsing the shelves, chatting to one another. To …
On Idealista, Spain’s biggest property site, a stone house in a Teruel village can be had for €8,000, about $8,600. It will be a ruin. For €19,000, roughly $20,500, you can find one with walls that still stand true and a roof that has not entirely given up. Either way you are buying into one …
If you asked a Portuguese person to name the soup that tastes most like home, the answer would almost certainly be caldo verde. This is Portugal’s national soup, a humble bowl of potato and finely shredded greens that turns up everywhere from grand hotel dining rooms to village festivals to the ordinary weeknight table, and …
Everyone thinks they know schnitzel, a breaded, fried cutlet, so how hard could it possibly be. But the true Wiener schnitzel, the great pride of Vienna and the national dish of all Austria, is a far more particular and more wonderful thing than the generic fried cutlet most people picture, and getting it right comes …
It might be the oldest piece of diet advice there is, the one your grandmother probably gave you and every weight-loss program has repeated for decades: drink a big glass of water before you eat, and you will fill up and eat less. It costs absolutely nothing, it could not possibly be simpler, and it …
There is a way the French serve pumpkin soup in October that turns a humble bowl of vegetables into the centerpiece of the whole table. Instead of ladling it out of a pot, they hollow out a whole pumpkin, fill it with a silky, creamy soup made from its own flesh, and carry the entire …
Granada can make a modest retirement feel calmer, but only when the savings account is treated like a guardrail, not the engine. At 59, the move looked reckless from the outside. A couple with $185,000 in savings does not sound like the obvious candidate for a European retirement. Not to Americans trained to believe retirement …
The American steps into the spa at a Portuguese hotel or a Lisbon wellness center expecting the familiar routine, the swimsuit, the modest American spa etiquette, the quiet separateness, and encounters instead a set of customs that gives them pause, the different relationship to the body, the rules about what to wear and not wear, …
Not every Italian woman does all nine every day, and not every American skips them all. Spend enough time in Italian homes, bathrooms, pharmacies, and supermarkets, though, and a pattern appears fast. Americans usually notice Italian hygiene culture in the wrong place first. They notice the bidet. That is fair. The bidet is sitting right …
There are two types of Americans renting cars in Europe. The first type is relaxed. They booked something small, they’re excited, they’ve got a vague plan, and they assume it will work like it does at home. The second type is sweating in a fluorescent rental office, being asked if they want “extra protection,” watching …
Limoncello is one of the simplest things you can make in a kitchen, and one of the hardest to rush. It has only four ingredients, lemons, alcohol, sugar, and water, and not one of them is difficult to find. What it asks for instead is time. The bright yellow liqueur they serve ice cold after …