Roma, The Eternal City
You can travel for months all over the European countries, you can visit all the main capitol cities, you can spend time understanding their different languages, their cultures and history. You can More »
The Colorful Joy Of The Indian Weddings
We recently had the pleasure and the honor to partecipate to a true Indian wedding, in Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal. A friend of ours, met during my 2 months stay in Bangalore this More »
Paris, la ville de l’amour
Travelling is a state of mind. It’s letting yourself loose, free from the daily routine of preoccupation and responsibilities. It’s getting lost in others’ conversations in front of a cup of coffee More »
Route de la Lavande, Provence
It’s probably one of the reasons the Provence is known for in the World. The lavender fields are located in the heart of the south of France and they are absolutely worth More »
How to Make a Long Distance Relationship Work
Do things together. Defy the distance. As a long distance couple, it’s important to do other things together besides the usual phone call. In a long distance relationship, interaction over the phone can become dull in the long run. Incorporating other forms of interaction are important. Just think… People in short-distance relationships do not spend the majority of their time talking, but rather doing things with each other. Try to replicate this by finding things to do together such as watching a TV show or movie simultaneously. Here’s a free list of 100+ things you can do with your long distance partner.
This article fits perfectly with our current situation. We are already doing as in some of these points, but we should try with the others too .
Best Paris Stories
For those who love reading and/or have also a Kindle, we would like to suggest you this book. “Best Paris Stories” is a collection of the winning short stories contest of 2011 and its Kindle Edition is available for FREE, only for today !!
If you don’t have Kindle you can download it anyway and use the Kindle app to read it.
One of the short stories in the book is written by our landlady 
.
8 Tips To Take Better Travel Pictures
If you are a photographer, or just an amateur (like me). Check this out. Great suggestions !
The gift that changes everything
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
This quote resonates so deeply with me because this journey that we are on, this road to living our dreams, is an act of faith. We have faith that if we do this thing that speaks to our soul, even if we aren’t quite sure how to do it or what it means to do it, that the next step will appear.
And so far the next step has always appeared. Maybe not in the way we expect it to appear, or at the time we want it to appear, or even in the place we hope it will appear, but it has always appeared nonetheless.
This is one of the main reasons we love traveling, Sarah and I. Because you always find incredible people who can completely change your life, with just a simple thought. And you find yourself suddenly changed in depth, in a way that you would never expect.
Follow us on Twitter
We could not miss out Twitter, of course ! So here it is, our official new account to stay up to date not only with our posts, but also for discovering all the interesting links we may find out there related to traveling, travelers, stories, technologies and trends, tips and tricks, etc . Following us means reading interesting and fascinating human stories, opening your mind and take a look at the future of traveling (do not forget that one of us is actually a kind of insider 
).
Traveling blogs
There’s a universe about traveling and travelers out there. Everyday I find new blogs, new Twitter accounts, new Google+ pages, new magazines, etc . I don’t have so much time to follow everyone, but in the last days I found new interesting sources that are really worth reading. Since I’m using Google Reader as personal RSS reading tool, I’ve just created a “bundle” called, try to guess .. yep, “Traveling“, to share with you these links: CLICK HERE !
Hope it’s usefull !
Roma, The Eternal City
You can travel for months all over the European countries, you can visit all the main capitol cities, you can spend time understanding their different languages, their cultures and history. You can go to Paris, Barcelona, London, Vienna, Monaco. But like for India, where if you miss the Taj Mahal you have completely missed that country, here is the same: you cannot say you have been in Europe, if you miss Roma.
Once in the Caput Mundi (capitol of the world) what happens is that you start connecting the points. There is an ancient proverb in Italy saying “Tutte le strade portano a Roma” (All roads lead to Rome), coming from the fact that Rome has been the political, artistic and military center of most of the part of the ancient known world for almost six centuries. All the main roads built during the Empire all over the Europe, from Spain to Greece, from England to Mesopotamia through France and Germany, lead to Rome. 80000 Km of connections with most of the part of what is now the European Union. Roads that have been used for centuries and most of which are currently been used.
Visiting Rome thinking about its huge influence to almost everything we still do know and use, from the economic and political systems to the idea of democracy, the concept of Consul, the Senate, the Assembly, the taxation, the Arts, the growth of the Christianity … well, it gives you goosebumps.
Everything has started here, more than two thousands years ago.
If you think about that while wandering from the magnificence of the Colosseum through via dei Fori Imperiali to the Altare della Patria (the national monument to Victor Emanuel II), passing beside the Domus Aurea, the Foro Romano (Roman Forum) and the Mercati Traianei (Trajan’s Markets) is like walking through the History, and you feel like being in the center of an immense open-air museum.
A museum perfectly set in the urban city, harmoniously interlaced together in a continuum space-time in which the ancient and the new go along as if the time has never passed, they grow together and what has been built centuries ago has never dead: just born again and again.
The Eternal City.
We stayed in Rome for five days, and we didn’t manage to follow the plan. I didn’t consider we could spend almost an entire day only for the Saint Peter’s Basilica. You can be a believer or not, but when you are just in front of it you cannot explain your feelings, you are just able to take your camera and wordlessly take pictures.
Inside it’s even worse. The “wow” sequence begins turning your head to the right: the Michelangelo’s Pietà. Twenty meters ahead the John Paul II’s tomb, in the middle of the nave the Bernini’s baldachin, etc .. I would need a post only for the Basilica.
To keep ourselves in the Vatican’s atmosphere, we had the fortune to be in Rome just in time to visit a great exhibition, Lux in Arcana. The opportunity to see some documents coming from the Vatican Secret Archives.
Here the Flickr album.
Thank You
With this post we would like to thank you all ! The number of subscribers to our RSS, as well as the followers of our Google+ and Facebook pages is imcreasing every day ! Thank You !!
We are very sorry it’s being long time now without any update, but during the last months a lot of things have changed and we were just setting up our 2012 trips calendar ! So, some anticipations ……… the next two trip are going to be in two of the most beautiful capitol cities in the World, completely different to each other, two opposite cultures: Rome, Italy (end of March) and Tokyo, Japan (end of June and, hopefully, also end of the year).
So, stay tuned. And Thank You all, also for your patience
2011: One Year In Photos
Almost 30 new cities in 5 different countries in 2 different continents: this 2011 has been really one of the best years of our life. Hoping in the coming 2012 we will have again so many occasions to travel.
Hereafter the summary of this 2011.
##UPDATE: click on each photo to go to its related Flickr album.
February
Moyenne Corniche: Eze and its extraordinary panorama
Mandelieu: a village completely surrounded with mimosa trees. Try to imagine the sweet smell all around ...
Carnival in Nice, one of the major carnival events in France.
- Montecarlo: our first official photo together
March
Napoléon à Golfe-Juan: every year, a huge re-enactment of the landing takes place with old rigging, actors, Napoleonic troops, weapons and campaign equipment.
April
Toulon
Saint Tropez
May
London. Piccadilly Circus.
Cambridge. The King's College Chapel.
Bengaluru, India. A rickshaw from inside.
Goa, India
June
Mumbai. The Gateway of India.
Delhi. The Red Fort, One of the most important complex in India, used as the residence of the Imperial Family of India. UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Agra. The Taj Mahal.
Varanasi. One of the holiest places of India. Here people bathing in the Ganges river.
Kolkata (Calcutta). Sarah with some Indian tailors.
Mysore, India. The Mysore Palace.
July
Provence. Sarah in the lavender fields.
September
Nimes.
Avignon. Le Pont d'Avignon (The bridge of Avignon).
October
Paris.
November
Barcelona, Spain. Paella and sangria.
Monaco. The Oceanographic Museum.
Dicembre
Kolkata (Calcutta), India. Indian wedding.
The Colorful Joy Of The Indian Weddings
We recently had the pleasure and the honor to partecipate to a true Indian wedding, in Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal.
A friend of ours, met during my 2 months stay in Bangalore this year, has kindly invited us to join him and his friends and parents in this joyful and important moment. Accordingly with our commitments, we have taken 5 days off at work, organized everything (flights, hotel, etc ..) and managed to get the visa in less than one week. Actually, for some unknown reasons, it seems that being Italian is good for the Indian visa and the Indian consulate can manage to make you have it very quickly. Good relationship between the two countries? Or is it simply that we are very lucky? - for my business visa I had to wait only 2 days to have it .. Anyway ..
India is a huge country composed of several internal states and Kolkata is the capital of the state of West Bengal, and because of that the weddings there are known as “Bengali weddings” . This event normally lasts four-five days and in our case it’s been a four days wedding.Well, what to say: it’s been amazing. A wedding in general, all over the World, is an occasion when all the aspects of the local culture and its traditions come up and are heavily showed off. In Italy for example a wedding (it of course depends on the region, but still) is the best occasion to see all the most famous italian stereotypes: everybody talking loudly, shouting, joking, the ceremony in the Church, and we spend the entire day eating.
In the case of India, a wedding means flowers, bright colors everywhere (white and black are normally forbidden in a wedding, they’re colors used in funerals so not well seen to bring good luck), and all the people either men and women dressed up with all their best typical Indian dresses (kurta for the men, and saree for the women). They are simply fantastic! The ritual itself is quite long and of course quite difficult to understand in depth. Luckily during the ceremony we have been helped in that by the other wedding attendants (we were actually the only two not-Indian persons among all, more or less 800 people invited) who have been every time so 
kind and happy to make us understand what was happening in almost every moment. And this is one of the things I like the most in the Indian culture, and it is also quite funny: the Indians love talking about their traditions ! Try to ask someone about even a small aspect of their culture and you will be overwhelmed with words and stories for endless minutes. So, the best guide you could find to discover India is not the Lonely Planet, but the Indians themselves (even though the former is absolutely a must-have ).
Both the bride and the groom were dressed up with amazing dresses, as you can see in these small images (but there is of course the entire photo set with the big-sized pics which link is just in the bottom of this post). I was of 
course impressed by the bride, she was so beautiful and her face was completely and impressively made-up. Her dress seemed to be more complex than the groom’s one (even though talking with him he spent more than an hour to get dressed up) and she had so many golden jewels .. She was really beautiful ! The groom was lightly made-up in his face and overall he has that strange milk-white head covering, that looked to be not really comfortable, but he looked great anyway. Both of them had flower garlands and they were sitting all the time on those golden throne.
In all the building there were carpets everywhere. The ambience in general was amazing ! It was like being in a dream looking at what here in Europe we could easily consider a royal wedding.
Of course the buffet was entirely composed of typical bengali foods and we happily discovered an interesting thing: the bengali food is not that spicy !! In comparison with what we have tasted in Bangalore or in other zones of India (when I was sweating all the time eating), it was really a very pleased discovery ..
Of course we could not go there dressed up like profane foreigners, so we bought some typical Indian dresses. We were so scared because of course we didn’t know if they were proper for a wedding, but instead we were perfectly mixed with the other attendants. Here the result:
An Indian wedding is not an occasion for tourists, and so we were so glad for the invitation and so happy to partecipate: it is definitely a thing not opened to everyone and something that can be seen only one or at most few times in a life (at least for Europeans). Our life so far is being really amazing and we thank God for that.
We wish all the best for our newlywed friends !
As usual, here the link to the Flickr album.
