A Photo/Journal

What better form of communication than a book,  and this one is particularly arresting.  It's called Slow Life in a Tuscan Town by Douglas Gayeton. Here is what he says in the preface:

As an American cast adrift in a foreign country, what I really sought were answers. I wanted to visualize what the rest of my life would look like. Intuitively I knew the people I met would show me a path. And I was right....

It turns out Douglas Gayeton is from Petaluma and married an Italian woman. This book contains his annotated photographs about life and cuisine and old Italian sayings, where food comes from and how it is prepared in his wife's ancestral village in Italy. We met him at Medlock Ames  winery tasting room in Healdsburg where giant copies of some of these photographs are prominently displayed. (The book had already been somewhat less prominently displayed on our coffee table for a couple of years.) Medlock Ames wine is sustainably made without the use of pesticides. Sheep, along with their shepherd and his dog, are pastured in the vineyards in the spring to eat the weeds that grow between the rows of vines.

In a further coincidence, the book has a preface by Carlo Petrini, the founder of the International Slow Food Movement. My 'Italian' niece worked for him during the time he was establishing the University of Gastronomic Sciences in the province of Cuneo in Italy,. The university is  devoted to new gastronomists and innovators of sustainable food systems. It was NOT he hastened to say, a culinary school. He (and the name 'Slow Food' )came to prominence when he took part in a campaign against McDonald's, opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome

Petrini writes in the preface:

Through this unusual portrait of aTuscan community, we come to understand that living slowly, once learned, can be done anywhere. It is not a matter of luck. It is a matter of choice.

I think this book is an  impressive form of communication on numerous levels.  And it is very fun just to page through it and to read the stories.