“Beautiful Tuscany” doesn’t begin to do justice to this area of Italy, located in the northeast and central region of the country. Ancient home of the Etruscan civilization, which predated the Romans and gave the region its name, Tuscany was the source of the Italian Renaissance in the 13th Century and has long been a center of knowledge, ethnicity and the arts. It is no coincidence that the best inventive and intellectual figures in Italian history – including Dante, Botticelli, Michaelangelo and Da Vinci were all natives of Tuscany, as were Galileo, surveyor Amerigo Vespucci (who gave his name to the American continents) and Puccini. It’s also worth noting that the Florentine dialect is considered the literary standard for the entirety of Italy. Continue reading →