76-Second Travel Show: 'Quest Lessons from David Farley'

Episode #016
F E A T U R I N G * 6 0 * B O N U S * S E C O N D S

THE CITIZEN KANE OF TRAVEL
I always call Italy the 'Citizen Kane of travel' -- it has the accolades, the press, the attention, the love. And anytime I go, I leave feeling all the hype was justified.

Some people equate things like seeing art and eating pasta in a Tuscan hill town as the 'real Italy.' Others might say it's hearing profanity on a gritty alley of Naples. Nearly getting hit by a Vespa in Rome. Shopping 21st-century fashion in Milan. Seeing where Darth Vader courted in one of those awful prequel Star Wars films at Lake Cuomo.

David Farley, whose travelogue An Irreverent Curiosity, wouldn't take a stab at defining a 'real Italy' when I met him for a Roman lunch in New York a couple months ago. He only knows that the town he bases his search for Jesus' stolen foreskin counts too.

Calcata, just outside Rome, is off the main Roman roads -- and indeed modern-day guidebooks. His 2007 New York Times article gave it some attention, for better or worse, as he wrote in World Hum.

Next time I'm in Rome, I'll be taking the bus out from Saxa Rubra bus station in suburban Rome to see a medieval town that looks like a 'cupcake on a high perch,' as Farley writes -- one filled with 'hippies, artists and bohemian types,' who saved it from demolition a few decades ago.

Maybe I'll go to take clarinet lessons.