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To travel is to learn, to grow, to appreciate. Travel is the quest for a connective experience to our earth, our fellow humans and our inner souls, helping us make sense of the world and our place within it.

But there are two places I call home.

Firenze (view from Piazzale Michelangelo)

I know well the eyes filled with tears and the lumps in the throat everyone who’s far away from his hometown has. And because of that, every Florentine that’s far away form his hometown seeing you going to Florence will tell you softly:

“Bring a big kiss to Florence, because it’s been a long time that I haven’t been there. Do you believe it? I do not live there anymore. Bring a kiss to Florence, because I can’t wait to go back there.”

Our town, pretty and beautiful, has got so many years, but it never gets older
Bring the big kisses to Florence from each Florentine you meet.

Translation from Carlo Buti “La porti un bacione a Firenze.”

New York (view from our Bleecker Street apartment)

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable.

Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.

Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company. E.B.White