Isn’t falling in love with Italy something each of us should experience? When my talented assistant, Michelle, returned from her first trip to this magical country, there were stars in her eyes — and then stars in mine when she started showing me her photographs. How could I resist…

A picture is indeed worth a thousand words so we have chosen only to add a single appropriate quote for each image. But it is the quotes themselves, and their source, that make this post special in a way that honors Italy.  At the Michelin starred restaurant Il Comandante, in Naples, each departing diner is gifted with a small box of cookies accompanied by a book of quotes (Michelle was one of those fortunate diners). This alone captures such an Italian gesture of hospitality.

In Michelle’s words…Having never been to Europe before, the only understanding I had was from the perception of my family and friends. Now that I have traveled there, I am looking forward to sharing with you my delightful journey of a place I’d like to think of as my second home. Traveling through Italy, from North to South,  was truly an astonishing experience filled with all different types of beauty and wonder, making me so aware of its countless admirable qualities.

“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” -Kahlil Gibran

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” -Mark Twain

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vatican Museum, Vatican City, Rome, Italy

Vatican Museum, Vatican City, Rome, Italy

“One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.” -Paul Bourget

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust

“Travel is a kind of door through which we leave reality.” -Guy De Maupassant

“But travel does not merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.” -Bruce Chatwin

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” -Albert Einstein

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” -Gabriel García Marquez

“The worst wasted of all days is that during which one has not laughed.” -Nicolas de Chamfort

Have you fallen in love yet?