Welcome to the history tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello, and welcome to the show. Today is our travelogue from our fabulous trip all over Italy. My goodness, we went to Rome, to Venice, to Florence, to Modena, to Parma. I mean, where didn't we go?

Us would be 56 of us. There are so many voices from this new and unique journey that you will hear very

little of the voices you're accustomed to, that is, to say say Susan and I. So before we begin with

like day negative one, I think is what we call it, we have an announcement for you with regard

to our Chicago field trip, which is coming up in June of next year. The actual field trip is now

sold out.

However, the dinner cruise, which will be on June 6th, is now open.

So anybody who's in the area or will be in Chicago on June 6th and would like to join us,

go to like minds travel and look for the dinner cruise.

We'll link it up in our show notes too.

But it is going to be a good party. They always are. That's an easy thing for me to guarantee. Yeah, sometimes there's a conga line. It gets out of control, but it's always a good time. Yeah, note to self, Betsy Ross House, out of control. So you never know. You never know, but it's always fun. So on to our trip. When we got off

the plane, of course, we were really tired and we couldn't check into our hotel. So we just

kind of meandered and just walked around and got the lay of the land and were astonished

at the number of palm trees. I hadn't expected that. Susan and I and our plus ones always get

there a couple of days ahead. We get local snacks for the gift bag. We scout some locations, and then we

go on some side quests of our own. And a side quest that I had marked from a long time ago,

a travel writer and chef named Anthony Bourdain, I'm sure

you're familiar with him, noted a restaurant that he had, quote, the finest caccio Ipepe in

Rome. And so we made a point of going there the very first night. It was quite beautiful. It was hard

to find. It was down some

courtyards and then we enjoyed the tolling of a bell. And I don't even know if there was a sign

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