I would love to live in Italy. Before you ask, no, not because of the pasta. I can give or take spaghetti - I do like tortellini - it's hard for me not to like anything with mushrooms.
The year before I got married, my best friend and I considered where to go for our summer vacation, one choice was Yugoslavia or the Balkans as we love seafood, and I was told by a friend who'd visited the area that the Balkans have a great tradition of cooking seafood.
In the end, we chose Switzerland - wrong choice - on reflection, I preferred the year before when we went to Austria. One of the trips we went on was across the Brenner Pass - not recommended if you're afraid of heights - and onto the Northern Italian village of http://www.sterzing.com/en/sterzing.html. The setting is idyllic with the Tyrol mountains as the backdrop to the village and the vast ranges of culture mixing in the area.
Art
One of the reasons I'd love Italy is that there is so much cultural history there, from the great opera houses to great artists of the past, I can lose days in museums and bookshops.
Food
Beyond pasta, pizzas, and ice cream lies a wondrous world of food. Not the least is places in Italy are never far from the coast, not only would this be a treat for my stomach but I do some of my best thinking/writing sitting in the winds on cliffs.
Not only would I love to sample the seafood, but I would also have liked to cook some of it - I used to be a reasonable cook.
Long before Gino d'Acampo http://shows.stv.tv/this-morning/food/1335077-gino-dacampos-cantuccini-recipe/. There was an Italian cook on Harlech TV called Toni Stefano. The shows dated back to the early days of colour TV, and the age of Fanny Craddock.
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