Woo-hoo! Today is the first day of phase 2 in Italy – meaning that the lockdown is being slowly, gradually, cautiously lifted. We are finally allowed to leave our house to go for a solitary walk and to visit our family members. Up until this point, I had only left the house 3 times in 56 days – twice to walk into town to get money out of the cash point and once to the…
Here in Ischia, the island is keeping safe, but we’re also battling with our own positive cases of COVID-19 and I wanted to give you an update on Ischia and the corona virus and what’s going on here. Since everything is closed and we’re all staying at home, I feel like I’m in a vacuum. I read the local newspapers online, read the comments and follow the local Facebook groups, but what I most come…
Many people ask me what’s winter like in Ischia. When I was growing up in New York, we would visit my family in Naples every summer. Up until I moved to Rome in July 2009, I only knew Italy in the summer. Since then I got a chance to see what life was like at different times of the year. But I never experienced winter on an island until we moved to Ischia in December…
On a warm day in October, me and my friend Christa, who was visiting Ischia, decided to spend the day in Procida. Neither of us had any idea of what we wanted to do or see there, so we just went and wandered the streets. Procida is just a 10 minute ferry ride from Ischia. It’s much smaller than Ischia with a population of about 10,000 residents (Ischia has about 70,000 full-time residents). Ferries run…
Can you drink the water Ischia? Short answer: Absolutely. I drink the tap water here and quite like the taste. Back in the Hudson Valley we had a water softener at our house and the water was salty, while the water in New York City was treated with chlorine and had a chlorine taste. The water here tastes much better. So if you’d like to save money on bottled water and avoid using plastic as…
If you walk around the island for awhile, you’ll notice there are beautifully coloured ceramics everywhere from window sills to doorways, from street signs to restaurant signs, from gorgeous murals on the front of buildings to tiny tiles of house numbers. If you take a close look, you may notice that in the corner of many of these signs is written Keramos d’Ischia. These custom hand-made signs come from the ceramics shop Keramos d’Ischia in…
