The Bon Vivant Blog

This is a food store, not a restaurant – but it’s definitely worth a visit. Luckily, we happened to pass by this deli while strolling along the fish market street. The tiny tortellini with paper thin pasta through which you could see the meaty red filling caught my eye alongside the wheels of cheese in [...]

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A very well-known purveyor of gelato in Bologna which has won awards . It is a different kind of gelato from what we had a Perche No – much richer-tasting with a fuller mouth feel. In fact, as they are scooping it out from the containers, the gelato just looks thick and hangs off the [...]

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In contrast to Sorbetteria Castiglione, this is just an ice cream window with two servers flanked with a row of ice cream mixers/makers. It would be easy to walk past this place if it weren’t for the line of customers. The fact that there is a line-up even at 11pm tells you that this is [...]

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Listed in the Michelin Guide for Italy as a ‘Bib Gourmand’ restaurant, this place has made me re-think the trust I put in the ‘Bib Gourmand’ ranking. Dinner was €42 – which wasn’t bad for Venice, being a reasonably expensive tourist town. But the food? I think the word ‘Meh’ best describes my reaction to [...]

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This was probably my favourite store in Italy. It’s inside an old church that has had its inside torn out and about 4 floors of books and restaurants installed. It’s a huge bookstore, with at least 3 restaurants – one for sandwiches, one for pasta, and one that is a wine bar (there may be [...]

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In August, Bologna gets hot. I don’t mean some jerk saying “hot enough for ya?” hot – I mean run from shadow-to-shadow hot. It is one of the hottest places in Italy in the summer, and generally speaking the entire town (mostly) closes down for the month. It is ridiculous by mid-day – 38 degrees [...]

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Recommended by a friend who had been to Cernobbio before, we made a reservation about a month before coming to Cernobbio. The lady at the local tourist office told us it would be a short walk up from our hotel, but after walking up the mountain 20 minutes from our hotel, and realizing it would [...]

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Now this is one restaurant that deserves a Bib Gourmand certification – delicious dinner for two including wine (yes, in Venice) for €27? The owners should be called magicians, not restaurateurs. Let me back up. Last night we walked by a huge mob of people outside of this restaurant – we wrote down the name [...]

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Usually when you’re traveling in European countries, “Mexican” restaurants aren’t real Mexican food, but rather are Tex-Mex; so when we were in the beautiful lakeside town of Como, who would have thought that we’d find a “Mexican” restaurant that served some of the best pizza in town? This place was in the Lonely Planet, so [...]

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Considered one of the world’s most luxurious hotels, Villa d’Este in Cernobbio certainly deserves this reputation. We didn’t venture too far into the very large grounds, where hotel rooms begin somewhere upwards of €500/night, but we sat near the pool, and sipped a drink, and looked out over Lago di Como, and enjoyed the view. [...]

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