150 Beautiful Italy Quotes to Ignite Your Wanderlust

If you’re looking for the ultimate list of Italy quotes, I’ve got your back. I’m a quote addict too, especially when they’re about my favorite destinations.

It’s impossible not to love a country like Italy, and after visiting places like Tuscany and the northern lakes (Lake Garda, Como, and Maggiore), I understand why it has inspired so many people in so many ways.

It really has it all, and you can never get enough of it, so until you can book a flight and plan your next Italian road trip or city break, scratch your travel itch with these 150 quotes about Italy, from inspiring sayings about Venice to excerpts about the Sicily to beautiful quotes about Rome.

*This post may contain affiliate links from which I earn a commission (for more info, read my disclosure). As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

*I try to keep the information on this blog as updated as possible, but I still recommend consulting the latest prices, opening hours, and other details on the official website of each site, hotel, and tour, as well as checking the updated public transport routes and timetables.

Looking for the most beautiful travel quotes about Italy? Here are 150 Italy quotes including quotes about Rome, Venice, Florence, and more!


Italy Quotes

1. “I was offered a free villa in Hollywood, but I said no thank you, I prefer to live in Italy.” – Ennio Morricone

2. “You may have the universe if I may have Italy.” – Giuseppe Verdi

3. “Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.” – Bertrand Russell

4. “Italy is a geographical expression.” – Klemens von Metternich

5. “We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

6. “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” – Anna Akhmatova

7. “Italy is my destiny; it calls to me to return home.” – Melissa Muldoon

8. “One of the great joys of traveling through Italy is discovering firsthand that it is, indeed, a dream destination.” – Debra Levinson

9. “The name of Italy has magic in its very syllables.” – Mary Shelley

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10. “The creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.” – Mark Twain

11. “For sure, in Italy, the sun always shines.” – Aleksandar Mitrovic

12. “Italy – I love the late-night culture, hanging around the square at midnight with everyone, catching up, and having a drink.” – Gemma Chan

13. “All my ego wants is to be sitting by a lake in Italy. It doesn’t want to be backstage, warming up.” – Chet Faker

14. “A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.” – Samuel Johnson

15. “In Italy, they add work and life on to food and wine.” – Robin Leach

16. “Even now I miss Italy dearly, I dream about it every night.” – Eila Hiltunen

17. “Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building after seeing Italy.” – Frances Burney

18. “Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.” – Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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19. “Italy is a hot country. Wherever you feel heat, your excitement and passion come out. We’re hot-blooded, and where there’s passion there’s love, but also anger, hunger, excitement.” – Gino D’Acampo

20. “I was in Italy on vacation, and I saw my reflection in a mirror. I saw how unique my skin was and why people stop me on the street to ask about it. I started falling in love with it.” – Khoudia Diop

21. “What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.” – Erica Jong

22. “Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn’t have Rome. We wouldn’t have Florence. We wouldn’t have the marvel that is Venice.” – Matteo Renzi

23. “Move to Italy. I mean it: they know about living in debt; they don’t care. I stayed out there for five months while I was making a film called ‘Order Of Death,’ and they’ve really got it sussed. Nice cars. Sharp suits. Great food. Stroll into work at 10. Lunch from 12 till three. Leave work at five. That’s living!” – John Lydon

24. “Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.” – Rebecca Solnit

25. “Italy and London are the only places where I don’t feel to exist on sufferance.” – E.M. Forster

26. “When life gives you twists and turns, chique yourself up in Italy!” – Barbara Conelli

27. “How beautiful is sunset when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!” – Percy Bysshe Shelley

28. “And don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land” – E. M. Forster

29. “I find other countries have this or this, but Italy is the only one that has it all for me. The culture, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, the history. Just everything to me comes together there.” – Frances Mayes

30. “And I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her. She is the school as well as the playground of the world.” – E. M. Forster

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31. “If you deconstruct Italy, you will, in the end, see a grapevine, a tomato, and a small boy hammering a shard of marble.” – Pietros Maneos

32. “[Italy is] A country where pleasure principle dominates.” – Sari Gilbert

33. “I gasp for air if I don’t get to breathe Italian air once a year.” – Danny Meyer

34. “No matter where I’ve been overseas, the greatest joy was moving into Italy. Italy has changed me, for the better.” – Efrat Cybulkiewicz

35. “A man has not fully lived until he experiences that gentle balmy clime of ancient empires, the land of lemon trees and the genius of Michelangelo.” – E.A. Bucchianeri

36. “In America, one must be something, but in Italy, one can simply be.” – Pietros Maneos

37. “People need Italy to be reminded of how to see beauty in ruins and permanence in transience.” – Unknown

38. “…is there anywhere in the world as full of beauty as Italy?” – Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera

39. “Totally contrary to my genetic makeup, contrary to my usual behavior and preferences, contrary to all logic, I fell madly in love with Italy, its people and its chaos.” – Nancy Yuktonis Solak

40. “If the landscape of human emotion were to exist in a country, it would be in Italy.” – Lisa Fantino

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41. “I love places that have an incredible history. I love the Italian way of life. I love the food. I love the people. I love the attitudes of Italians.” – Elton John

42. “For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery.” – D. H. Lawrence

43. “Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.” – Alexander Herzen

44. “The most stylish country in the world is Italy.” – Nick Rhodes

45. “Open my heart and you will see graved inside of it, Italy.” – Robert Browning

46. “Put a compass to paper and trace a circle. Then tell me which other country has such a concentration of places like Amalfi, Naples, Ischia, Procida, Sorrento, Positano, Pompeii, and Capri.” – Diego Della Valle

47. “The Italians have their priorities right: They’re driven, they do their work, but they really enjoy the day-to-day and they don’t put off the enjoyment of the everyday for some future goal.” – Frances Mayes

48. “Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don’t tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It’s fairly sexy. Of course I don’t know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don’t burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch.” – Barbara Kingsolver

Malcesine Lake Garda
Malcesine, Lake Garda


Rome Quotes

49. “Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.” – Robert De Niro

50. “Rome, the city of visible history.” – George Eliot

51. “Rome is not outside me, but inside me…Her feverish sweetness, her tragic countryside, her own beauty and harmony, all these are mine, for my thought and my work.” – Amedeo Modigliani

52. “Rome is everybody’s memory…” – Eleanor Clark

53. “To Rome, for everything.” – Miguel de Cervantes

54. “Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.” – Giotto di Bondone

55. “If we could be reborn wherever we chose, how crowded Rome would be, populated by souls who had spent their previous lives longing to inhabit a villa on the Janiculum Hill.” – Francine Prose

56. “Methinks I will not die quite happy without having seen something of that Rome of which I have read so much.” – Walter Scott

57. “When in Italy, you Rome.” – Punny Leone

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58. “Rome is not like any other city. It’s a big museum, a living room that shall be crossed on one’s toes.” – Alberto Sordi

59. “Rome will exist as long as the Coliseum does; when the Coliseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.” – Venerable Bede

60. “Rome has grown since its humble beginnings that it is now overwhelmed by its own greatness.” – Livy

61. “Rome seems a comfort to those with the ambitious soul of an Artist or a Conqueror.” – Pietros Maneos

62. “Rome lifts you up but won’t let you settle down – it turns you into a bird without a nest.” – Glenn Haybittle

63. “It was Rome. The whole city a museum.” – Darnell Lamont Walker

64. “Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.” – George Eliot

65. “Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.” – Richard Meier

66. “For someone who has never seen Rome, it is hard to believe how beautiful life can be.” – Unknown

67. “Rome holds my psyche in balance. Whenever I’m there, it’s like a holiday.” – Giambattista Valli

68. “You fall in love with Rome very slowly, little by little, but if it happens, it will be for a lifetime…” – Nikolaj Gogol

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69. “Rome knew love, better than I ever could, so I let the city take her hand, and followed close behind, picking up the pieces of her melting heart.” –Atticus

70. “I am a sucker for those old traditional places, and Rome is as good as it gets, particularly when you throw in Italian food.” – Roger Federer

71. “Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.” – Anatole Broyard

72. “When in Rome, live as the Romans do; when elsewhere, live as they live elsewhere.” – Saint Ambrose

73. “In the evening we arrived at the Coliseum when it was already twilight. When one looks at it, everything else seems small. It is so huge that one cannot keep the image of it in mind; it is remembered as smaller, and when one goes back there it seems larger again.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Rome's Forum
Rome

Check out this 7-day Rome-Florence-Venice itinerary!



Venice Quotes

74. “When I went to Venice my dream became my address.” – Marcel Proust

75. “All the cities in the world are, more or less, similar to one another. Venice is like no other.” – Carlo Goldoni

76. “If you read a lot, nothing is as great as you’ve imagined. Venice is – Venice is better.” – Fran Lebowitz

77. “A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.” – Arthur Symons

78. “When I seek another word for ‘music,’ I never find any other word than ‘Venice’.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

79. “Venice, half woman, half fish, is a siren dissolving into a marsh of the Adriatic.” – Jean Cocteau

80. “If I could rename love, I’d call it VENEZIA.” – Conny Cernik

81. “Venice is eternity itself.” – Joseph Brodsky

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82. “This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.” – Thomas Mann

83. “All of Venice is tattered, resewn, achingly lovely, and like an enchantress, she disarms me, making off with the very breath of me.” – Marlena De Blasi

84. “Venice never quite seems real, but rather an ornate film set suspended on the water.” – Frida Giannini

85. “Paris is an ideal place to become informed, while Venice is a place to think and write.” – Pontus Hulten

86. “To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.” – Alexander Herzen about Venice

87. “My first impression of Venice was that it might be hard to make anything happen there. Everything seemed to have already happened. Venice seemed like a kind of exalted remembering.” – Glenn Haybittle

88. “In Venice, if you didn’t know where you were going, you usually ended up in the Piazza and since that was always true, maybe it was always where you were going.” – Scott Stavrou

89. “In the end, there’s always this city. As long as it exists, I don’t believe that I, or for that matter, anyone, can be mesmerized or blinded by romantic tragedy.” – Joseph Brodsky about Venice

90. “I cannot write about Venice; I can only write about me, and the sleeping parts of myself that Venice has shocked into wakefulness.” – Jessica Zafra

91. “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.” – Truman Capote

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92. “Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley

93. “The surface of Venice is constantly metamorphosing and painting Venice is almost like being a restorer, peeling off the layers to find the picture after picture underneath.” – Arbit Blatas

94. “Venice is incredible. Although you may have seen it in pictures, you can’t grasp how beautiful it is until you visit.” – Gino D’Acampo

95. “Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.” – Roger Ebert

96. “Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.” – Frances Mayes

97. “I love to get out and see real life and to walk, which is why I love Venice so much – it’s such a great walking city.” – Limahl

98. “The building I most admire is the Doge’s Palace in Venice, both by day and by night. Looking at it from the lagoon, it resembles a floating kilim carpet. I love all the bridges which connect houses, people, gardens and palaces. I also love moats to isolate yourself. A ha-ha for secrecy, as in every English country garden.” – Anouska Hempel

99. “It’s so easy for me to get caught up in the feeling of a city like Venice, where everything is just beautiful color and gorgeous buildings that are so peaceful. You can roam around and get lost in the labyrinth.” – Nanette Lepore

100. “If I could live in one city and do every single thing I do there, I would choose Venice. You can’t turn your head without seeing something amazing.” – Nile Rodgers

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101. “I will never forget experiencing Venice for the first time. It feels like you are transported to another time – the art, music, food and pure romance in the air is like no other place.” – Elizabeth Berkley

102. “Venice is a place that is high on reinvention. The kind of place that you can go and be whoever it is you want to be and do whatever it is you want to do and nobody’s really going to ask you a lot of questions about it.” –  Will Arnett

103. “Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections … and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive nor take off for weeks, stores are closed and mail ceases to litter one’s threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city… the fog is thick, blinding, and immobile… this is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self-deprecating thoughts of coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you’ve got company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility…” – Joseph Brodsky

Need more of Italy in your life? Check out these romantic books set in Italy, lovely Italian piazzas, and gifts for Italy lovers (which you can totally buy for yourself)!



Florence and Tuscany Quotes

104. “Florence’s is a subtle beauty – its staid, unprepossessing palaces built in local stone are not showy, even though they are very large. They take on a certain magnificence when day breaks and when the sun sets; their muted colors glow in this light.” – Fodors

105. “Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.” – Henry James

106.Tuscany is so full of history and beauty – you meet wonders of art and architecture on almost every corner. But I love the region’s homier aspects: the special sweetness of the tomatoes, the soft mozzarella, the heady scents of basil and garlic everywhere.” – Trudie Styler

107. “Tonight I watched the sun set at Ponte Vecchio. I think it’s safe to say I have finally found the place that feels right to me. I just can’t believe I had to come halfway across the world to find it.” – Jenna Evans Welch

108. “Imagine a pair of woman’s lips, Mogor whispered, puckering for a kiss. That is the city of Florence, narrow at the edges, swelling at the center, with the Arno flowing through between, parting the two lips, the upper and the lower. The city is an enchantress. When it kisses you, you are lost, whether you be commoner or king.” – Salman Rushdie

109. “Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can get you a nice little villa in Tuscany, and that’s close enough for me.” – Lois Greiman

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110. “Florence is actually a very fateful city. Often one has a sense of Florence answering one back, if you know what I mean.” – Glenn Haybittle

111. “Visiting Florence was like attending a surprise party every day.” – Jennifer Coburn

112. “In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise.” – Virgil Thomson

113. “Verona is a very beautiful city, but Siena just never ceases to fascinate me.” – Anne Fortier

114. “We had never before been to Italy in May, and it is truly the most wonderful month. The Lucchese countryside is a riot of color and scent. Every road, even the busy autostrada, is lined with brilliant red poppies, making the most mundane street look picturesque. The olive trees dotting the hills are covered with silvery green and the pale cream of new buds, while the grass is tall and soft, every patch threaded with wildflowers.” – Louise Badger

Piazza del Campo in Siena, Tuscany, Italy
Siena, Tuscany

Are you obsessed with this region too? Read these novels set in Tuscany!



Amalfi Coast Quotes

115. “They say that when Judgement day comes, the people of Amalfi will have no change in life, for they are already living in paradise…” – Melissa Hill

116. “There was a magical timelessness to Capri, a special atmosphere, and a sense of history.” – Kitty Pilgrim

117. “If bliss could be a color, today would be Amalfi Blue.” – Lisa Fantino

118. “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.” – John Steinbeck

A quote about Positano


Quotes About Italy’s Islands

119. “The best place to go in Italy for a summer holiday is the island of Sardinia.” – Gino D’Acampo

120. “Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the spirit. It is in Sicily that is the key to everything […] The purity of the contours, the softness of everything, the exchange of soft colors, the harmonious unity of the sky with the sea and the sea to the land…Who saw them once, shall possess them for a lifetime.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

121. “There is not in Italy what there is in Sardinia, nor in Sardinia, what there is in Italy.” – Francesco Cetti

122. “Sicily is a blessed land. First, because of its geographic position in the Mediterranean. Second, for its history and all the different peoples who have settled there: Arabs, Greeks, Normans, the Swedes. That has made us different from others. We exaggerate, we overdo. We love Greek tragedy. We cry, we fight, sometimes for nothing.” – Marcello Giordani

123. “But you don’t come to Palermo to stay in minimalist hotels and eat avocado toast; you come to Palermo to be in Palermo, to drink espressos as dark and thick as crude oil, to eat tangles of toothsome spaghetti bathed in buttery sea urchins, to wander the streets at night, feeling perfectly charmed on one block, slightly concerned on the next. To get lost. After a few days, you learn to turn down one street because it smells like jasmine and honeysuckle in the morning; you learn to avoid another street because in the heat of the afternoon the air is thick with the suggestion of swordfish three days past its prime.” – Matt Goulding

124. “To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Quote about Sicily

Did you like these Italy travel quotes? Check out my roundups of wanderlust-fueling travel quotes in Spanish, Spain travel quotes, quotes about France, London quotes, and Greece travel quotes too!



Quotes About Other Parts of Italy

125. “Milan is beautiful in fog, like a woman with a veil.” – Ornella Vanoni

126. “Verona has long haunted the English imagination.” – Francis Russell

127. “Delicious Verona! With its beautiful old buildings and the lovely countryside. With its quite Roman bridges. With marble churches, towers, rich architecture that overlooks the ancient and quiet streets where resound the cries of the Montecchi and Capulets“ – Charles Dickens

128. “A lake as beautiful as the beginning of creation.” – D.H. Lawrence about Lake Garda

129. “The waters of this lake are the loveliest colour imaginable: purple in the shade and emerald green when they break on the white rocks.” – D.H. Lawrence about Lake Garda

130. “When you write the story of two happy lovers, let the story be set on the banks of Lake Como.” – Franz Liszt

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131. “Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.” – Mario Batali

132. “For many, the gastronomic heart of Italy is the Emilia-Romagna region. Its capital is Bologna, which is often overlooked by tourists but has a beautiful historic center and a lively yet chilled-out atmosphere.” – Gino D’Acampo

133. “What full, extended glee, Sirmione, seeing you again more beautiful than all the islands and peninsulas that Neptune raises on the different waters of transparent lakes or the immense sea.” – Catullus

134. “What I remember most about those days is how happy we all were. When I think back on my life growing up on Terra d’Amore, tides of warm memories wash over me like the waves of the Mediterranean. Our little farm, nestled in the hills and valleys of Montecalvo just outside Bologna, was idyllic. Indeed, it was an Italian paradise…a veritable heaven.” – Giacomino Nicolazzo

135. “The Italian proverb says ‘See Naples and die’ but I say, see Naples and live; for there seems a great deal worth living for.” – Arthur John Strutt

136. “Naples is curiously chaotic and, if I’m honest, a bit dilapidated. It certainly has a ‘lived-in’ look. It’s alive, it’s vibrant, it’s a little bit dirty, it’s busy, and I loved it. I felt like this was how Rome would probably have been 2,000 years ago. There’s a real bustle, and it’s down and dirty.” – Paul Hollywood

Sirmione Lake Garda
Sirmione, Lake Garda

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Quotes About Italian Food

137. “So… Italian gelato. Take the deliciousness of a regular ice-cream cone, times it by a million, then sprinkle it with crushed-up unicorn horns.” – Jenna Evans Welch

138. “I’m definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working – if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.” – Anthony Bourdain

139. “There’s nothing more romantic than Italian food.” – Elisha Cuthbert

140. “Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” – Federico Fellini

141. “Italian food is seasonal. It is simple. It is nutritionally sound. It is flavorful. It is colorful. It’s all the things that make for a good eating experience, and it’s good for you.” – Lidia Bastianich

142. “Polenta is to northern Italy what bread is to Tuscany, what pasta is to Emilia-Romagna and what rice is to the Veneto: easy to make, hungry to absorb other flavors, and hugely versatile.” – Yotam Ottolenghi

143. “The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you’re hungry again.” – George Miller

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144. “I love the simplicity, the ingredients, the culture, the history, and the seasonality of Italian cuisine. In Italy, people do not travel. They cook the way grandma did, using fresh ingredients and what is available in season.” – Anne Burrell

145. “Italian food really reflects the people. It reflects like a prism that fragments into regions.” – Lidia Bastianich

146. “Italy will always have the best food.” – Diane von Furstenberg

147. “Italian food is my favorite food. It’s the most sophisticated eating system.” – Peter Gabriel

148. “Italian cuisine is the most famous and beloved cuisine in the world for a reason. Accessible, comforting, seemingly simple but endlessly delicious, it never disappoints, just as it seems to never change.” – Matt Goulding

149. “It’s in the nature of Italians to live life with a positive tone and to celebrate the invitations that come along in life. Italian food is so conducive to all of that.” – Lidia Bastianich

150. “In Italy, food is an expression of love. It is how you show those around you that you care for them. Having a love for food means you also have a love for those you are preparing it for and for yourself.” – Joe Bastianich



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About Or Amir

Hey, I'm Or! I'm a passionate traveler with a severe coffee, chocolate, and pastry addiction (or any other carb for that matter). I'm always planning my next trip to Spain, Italy, or any other country in Europe, and my goal is to help you make the most of each destination.

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