Flexibility makes yoga poses so much easier. It also makes travel so much more fun.

If Lisa B. hadn’t bent the rules that day on our way to Malpensa Airport, I might never have experienced C-Colzani Caffè. And that, i mie amici, would have been a major loss to my aspiring Inner Italian lifestyle.

C-Colzani has been named Gambero Rosso’s Bar of the Year for two years running. It is artisanal, sleek, smart, and gustoso. It is the creation of the young, talented brothers Marco and Andrea Colzani.

But I’m jumping ahead in the story. Lisa hadn’t premeditated going rogue but her instincts are sharp. As the representative of the travel firm sponsoring the familiarization trip to the Lake Como area, she was charged with keeping us on schedule. One evening, we dined at  il Griso hotel near Lecco on the eastern branch of the lake. C-Colzani continua

As cultural tourists, who among us isn’t dazzled by the Tuscan sun? We see ourselves feasting beneath its rays: Platters laden with antipasti, pasta, bistecca all fiorentina, Sangiovese wine, and sweets . . . la dolce vita.

But Tuscans in their 70s, 80s, and 90s tell a story of a different table.

These old kitchen hands are the witnesses who inform Pamela Sheldon Johns’ latest cookbook Cucina Povera: Tuscan Peasant Cooking (Andrews McMeel). Johns, an American cookbook author who owns Poggio Etrusco, an organic agritourismo near Montepulciano, has written a cultural and culinary history of a by-gone world. Cucina Povera continua

Photos make fine souvenirs but you can’t have them for dinner.

From now on, when I want to recall my visit to Monza last June, I can  reminisce over a plate of steaming risotto alla monzese (Monza Style Risotto) like the one  I sampled there.

The recipe comes courtesy of Guidarte guide and architect Laura Radaelli who escorted our media group around the charming medieval city.

In the course of exchanging e-mails to fact check my “Off the Beaten Track in Monza” article for Dream of Italy newsletter, I learned that Laura is an enthusiastic home cook. She shared some lore about the town’s signature dish along with the preparation method. Risotto alla Monzese continua

Chef Sara Jenkins, of NYC’s Porchetta and Porsena, writes in Atlantic magazine that Italian cooking has too often been shoved in the back seat behind haute French cuisine and even nouvelle Spanish.

She works to change that perception and hits upon two essential points.

First, there is no such thing as Italian cuisine. There are many Italian regional cuisines.

Second, the reverence for fine food in Italy is democratic. The plumber and the professor both appreciate and know good cooking.

Grazie, Sara.

Here’s her article.

Lovely Lisa, the neighborhood queen of zucchini and tomato cultivation, has diversified this season. She’s growing cantaloupes and I think she’s on to something. One plant is bearing enough sweet, juicy orbs to supply an entire block of freeloading friends.

I picked two cantaloupes and let them to ripen for several days in a cardboard box filled with tomatoes, peaches, and other fruit sitting on the kitchen counter. The rind beneath the webbing actually turned a lovely yellow, something I’ve never seen with store-bought melons. I could actually detect the scent of cantaloupe!

Lovely Lisa and her husband Dr. Bill host an annual pool party so the time seemed ripe to showcase her home-grown cantaloupe in my pot-luck dish. I wanted something more exciting than the classic prosciutto and melon (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

I remembered a Southeast Asian mixed melon salad recipe from Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken of Border Grill fame. It’s a vivid mélange of lime juice, sugar, hot chiles, and mint.

Hmmm, how to Italianize it? Sizzling Melon Salad continua