During October Northwest in Motion traveled to Italy to meet with our retail suppliers and do some sightseeing.
Our retail manager Francesca Carmichael was born and raised in Cremona. It was awesome to have a local guide.
Read Francesca’s Italy train travel tips.
Ravenna is known for Christian mosaics and monuments constructed as early as the 5th and 6th centuries. This was the one place on our adventure we paid to get in to see the sights.
Eight of Ravenna’s buildings comprise the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna.” Ravenna’s mosaics demonstrate great artistic skill, and blend Christian iconography, and oriental and Western styles. The mosaics were absolutely stunning, and completely different in character compared to the paintings and frescoes in the other cathedrals we visited.
(Trying a new image format: To view the full captions, click on the three dots below each image.)
One of my requests to Francesca as our tour guide was to eat local specialties as much as possible. Indeed, we hit the jackpot almost everywhere we visited.
To the list of outstanding meals, we recommend Ca’ de Vèn in Ravenna which serves regional Romagna dishes and authentic “Piadina” flatbread.
En route from Ravenna to Venice, we visited Stamperia Bertozzi to pick out some of their latest hand-stamped linens. Bertozzi is a family-owned business that has been in operation for three generations. Patriarch Paolo took us on a tour of the wood block stamp library, which I equated to an old school version of a graphics database. Their “bici” towels are among our best sellers.
Read about the other parts of the trip:
> Cremona
> Pescia
> Florence
> Tuscan Hills: Il Bigallo/Poggibonsi/San Gimignano
> Venice/Castelfranco Veneto
