Travel Italy: Vacation Packages, Tips, Tours of Italy

The mountain town of Norcia, Umbria, is hosting its annual Black Truffle Fair.
The truffles found in the Norcia’s area, are black, considered inferior to the white variety, but delicious nonetheless. They usually are grated and sprinkled over pasta, but they can also be applied to fish or roast meat.

This small mountain town, is also well-known for its production of prosciutto, sausages and spiced salamis — ‘le Norcinerie’.

Among the several other local specialities that are being shown off at the fair, the Castelluccio lentil. It’s a lentil growing in the area, around at 1500 metres above sea level.
The fair runs trhough March 4.

Not only tasty local specialties draw visitors to Norcia, but also natural sceneries with the wild countryside of the Valnerina (Parco dei Sibillini is in the surroundings).

- Getting there
Norcia is not served by rail; you can get there from Rome traveling by train up to Spoleto station, and then from there continuing by bus. The same from Perugia: train up to Spoleto and then bus.
- See Norcia (Umbria) on the (interactive map).

Beginning May 6 Eurofly will start non-stop flights from
New York (JFK) to
Palermo (PMO),
Naples (NAP),
Bologna (BLQ), and
Rome (FCO) starting from as low as $749 round-trip. The fares include $140 fuel surcharge but do not include U.S./foreign taxes of $69 per passenger. (see offer details)

Business Class seats on these flights, start at $3,138 round-trip; they include private check-in, lots more leg room, satellite telephone, eight channels of video, and ten channels of audio.

By closing our series over the major Carnival festivals taking place across the peninsula, we can’t leave out the Viareggio Carnival, whose carts parade is the most famous in Italy.

Also the Carnivals of Cento (Emilia-Romagna), of Sciacca (Sicily), and of Oristano (aka ‘Sartiglia’, Sardinia) — not covered in the previous posts, deserve to be included among the most important ones.

The closing days of Carnival, in the town of Ivrea, Piedmont, are celebrated with a three day orange-fight involving the whole town.

The orange fights are held between teams of orange throwers on foot, representing the masses, and hooded people standing on carts drawn by horses in gay trappings, the masters’ henchmen.
Battles take place in the squares all over town, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday running up to the grand finale on Shrove Tuesday.

See Ivrea (Piedmont) on the (interactive map).

The closing day of Carnival is approaching; here’s a video from the most famous Carnival in Italy.
(For details about the program of Venice’s Carnival see this pdf).

(via YouTube).