Italia

It's almost a week into January and I have finally replaced my 2008 kitchen calendar with a 2009 one. I didn't really want to (even though I like my new calendar), for one simple reason: 2008 featured breathtaking photographs of Tuscany, the location of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever witnessed with my own eyes.photo from Tuscany 2008 Calendar, published by Graphique de France

Twice in the false millennium year, I traveled to Florence, where my oldest brother lived and wrote while a visiting professor at Harvard's Villa i Tatti. With others in my family on the first trip and by myself on the second, I reveled in the unfolding vignettes of farm, ancient buildings and stone piazzas, olive groves and undulating hills, golden villas and purpling horizons.

At times, I find myself -- without reason -- revisiting Siena's glorious cathedral where cats lay on marble floors and where a fabulous grocery featured huge wheels of varieities of panforte in the front window. Other times, I am walking aimlessly through narrow streets spiraling around Florence's Duomo; chancing upon a small bookbindery and a pietra dure artist's studio and gallery; sitting on the terrace at the Villa Papiniana, drinking hot tea, eating McVitie's Digestive Biscuits with Nutella and clementines, and staring at Florence below with villas dotting the hillsides between.

I may, perhaps, never be able to return to Tuscany, but I will always hold it in my mind's eye and in the calendars I have kept.