All you have to do, really, is close your eyes, and you’re there. Your specific there might be the Val d’Orcia, where cypresses march in rows across low, undulating hills. Or it might be the vertiginous cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, where pastel-hued villages cascade down to pebble beaches and secret coves. Or perhaps it’s the plains of Puglia, with their thousand-year-old olive trees and frothy Baroque cathedrals.
Italy is a land made up of signifiers that the whole world recognizes and loves. Perhaps more than any European country, it informs our idea of the holiday; take, for example, the traveler in whose mind those brushstroke cypresses are indelibly imprinted — but who has never even set foot in Tuscany.
