Margaret Cowan

There you are standing in awe in a vineyard on a hillside in Piedmont's Barolo wine country in northwest Italy. Series of gentle green hills, covered in vineyards, hazelnut trees, forests and fields, some topped with little towns and medieval castles, fall at all angles as far as you can see. A magnificent, poetic landscape!

THE LAND

This fertile land with rich, clay soil gives us some of Italy's top red wines, Barolo and Barbaresco, as well as aromatic white truffles, delectable mushrooms, luscious cherries, peaches and peppers and hazelnuts.

Want to travel to Italy but nobody you know wants to go? Have specific dates for your holiday in Tuscany but none of your traveling friends can get away then?

You're not alone--you're part of the fast growing single traveler market. As a frequent single traveler in Italy for many years, here are my tips on companionship, safety, money matters, and quality of life for traveling solo in Italy.

On a late May morning on the hydrofoil in the Aeolian Islands off the northeast coast of Sicily, we were approaching the remote little island of Filicudi that looked like a rustic outpost with its tiny port. One street overlooking a stony beach ran between a high mountain and its foot hills on the right and a skinny peninsula with a lower hill on the left, all covered mainly in green Mediterranean scrub.

Researching and planning your trip to Italy can be a monumental, time consuming task, especially if you lead a busy life with never ending To Do lists.

An article I read said that lack of time to research and plan a trip prevents many people from traveling so they stay home.

Here are seven steps and tips on how to reduce your Italian trip research and planning time.

I fell in love with Florence's art, architecture and views as a backpacker in the early 70s, lived and fell in love with a Tuscan there in the late 70s and now revisit Florence every year.

Here are some of my recent old and new favourite experiences for lovers of wine, shoes and beauty in my favourite Italian city.

33 Years Of Amazing Shoes In The Salvatore Ferragamo Museum

When I arrive in Florence, one of my first pleasures is browsing the shoe store windows and occasionally buying a pair.

Today on vacations in Italy, travelers want to experience real, local life in a meaningful ways with families, to visit their homes, share pieces of their lives, learn new things and even make new friends.

Four ways to get to know locals are cooking with families in their homes, taking a course and renting a room in a local home, staying at a farm B & B, and dining with families in their homes through Home Food.

Many frugalista foodies and wise wine lovers are now taking advantage of cheaper airfares and traveling to Italy despite the strong Euro. They want to indulge this year in an Italian cooking school tour but at an affordable price.

How? Here are two tips.

1. Ask for what you want.

If you see a cooking school tour you like, but the price is wrong for you, ask the tour operator for what you want.

Most tourists go to the island of Stromboli, in the Aeolian Islands off Sicily's north east coast, to hike its paths and watch its incredible, live volcano hurl its fire into the night sky. They stay only one night or even worse, take a boat trip to see the volcano from the sea and return to their hotel on another island. A big mistake!

Stromboli offers much more than its flamboyant volcano and merits a longer stay.