Start Here: What to Expect from Our Substack
Welcome! access all our cultural ramblings, destination specific goodies, food guides, & everything Italy free & paid from our expat POV.
Ciao a tutti,
We’re Kat (American, making progress but still mispronouncing Portogruaro) and Raf (Colombian, mastered the art of surviving Italian bureaucracy… mostly). We’ve been traveling the world for the past 10 years and now are obsessed with Italy’s magical and messy reality, not the TikTok-filtered version.
This Substack is here to offer you our sincere experiences during our dolce vita here in Italy.
We’re not big on trendy experiences or highlighting one restaurant as the “best” in a country already famous for food. We are big on sharing things we genuinely love and helping you to travel Italy like you live here.
We will still talk about our favorite pasta here and there, can you blame us? but our real goal is to share with you places you didn’t know about, cool neighborhoods in the big cities, delicious food you can’t find abroad, and some cultural tidbits we pick up along the way.
Now that you’ve had a brief introduction to Substack, we wanted to introduce the real perks of being here and what this all means for you.
Here’s the Deal: Italy’s more than carbonara and Colosseum selfies.
It’s beautiful beach towns where goats outnumber residents 6 to 1 (Alicudi, if you must know), hidden aperitivo spots locals fight to keep secret, and chaotic markets where someone will yell at you for squeezing the peaches. We’re here to help you ditch the “best of” lists and dive into the messy, magical reality of la dolce vita.
We’ll hype up the underrated stuff (did you know about Matera’s cave hotels!?) roast overrated tourist traps, and share the weird we’re still figuring out and live every day.
We’ll regularly publish things like cultural tidbits, helpful traveling planning tips, pictures from our life here in Italy, and some Italian words and phrases you’ll want to know for your trip. We’ll also share snippets of our newest articles that we publish on Mamma Mia Indeed.com. We have 40 detailed articles about Italy and counting, so for long-form content, we’ll point you there. But, here on Substack, we want to share the things that tend to fall between the cracks.
Most of our content here is free. We want our subscribers to feel like they can share our posts to anyone even if they are still outside of Substack. Still, you can choose to upgrade to a paid subscription for yourself, gift it to someone that’s planning their Italian trip, or if you simply want to support us and our work.
What you can expect to see around here
Some cultural findings and ramblings you might find interesting and useful for when you visit or plan a long term stay.
Unfiltered photo dumps.
Phrasebook fails and cultural hacks (like to never cut pasta with a knife, but you knew that already. Right?)
Travel tips to enjoy Italy like you live here instead of speedrunning a postcard or blindly following social media “top 10’s“.
Location specific posts every month. We started with Trieste, where we currently live, then will dive into our favorite cities and some small towns you’ve prob never heard of, and seasonal hotspots.
For our monthly destinations, each week, we’ll drop something new, covering these 4 categories:
“Hey, did you know…” to teach you something new about this destination’s history or culture. You can think of this as our favorite fun facts about the place.
“Eat up” to pinpoint a few dishes from the area that you shouldn’t miss on your trip.
“The little things in X” to de-influence you from traveling only on the social media bucket lists and instead enjoy the little things that make this destination so special.
Paid subscribers receive all free content plus
Extra content on our location specific posts, like bus hacks, secret routes, and how to flirt with deli owners for some prosciutto samples (works best if you’re a dog. Bandido will tell you)
Downloadable cheat sheets. A human-made, downloadable PDF that covers all the fast-facts and overarching things you need to know on-the-go to travel to said destination.
Access to conversations. Pick-our-brain Q&As, community chats, early access to our content plans and some saying in future content. This gives you the chance to vote on a destination you’re heading to and get your guides before your trip.
An immeasurable amount of our gratitude (what a steal!) because being a paid subscriber means you’re directly supporting us.
For March, we’ll keep the paywall down so everyone can join us as we showcase our home in Italy, Trieste.
The Substack content plan archive and future
Use this section to easily navigate through our location specific content and see what’s coming next.
We also write about more general stuff like De-romanticizing €1 Euro houses in Italy so roam around a bit and stay tuned. We don’t want to bombard your inbox with updates but do want you to know that if you open up our page every week, we guarantee you’ll have a few new stories to read.
Places We’ve Written About
These places you’ll find already written about by navigating back to our Substack homepage. Scroll down until you find the location you’re looking for and dive in.
Trieste
Rome
Sardinia
Bologna
Are you part of our group chat yet? Tap the link below to join! It’s easiest to access on the Substack app, which you can download on your phone (It’s the future!).
Now, if you’re looking for our in depth articles about Italy where we cover topics like How to travel with your pets in Italy, or a detailed guide about traveling to Sardinia were we cover from when to visit to recommendations of areas to stay and how to get around, you can find all of that on our website here! There’s a search bar and all to make it easy.
If you have any other questions, just leave us a comment on this post!
Ready to Travel Italy Like You Give a Damn?
Subscribe now. No fluff, no filters, just the good, bad, and what-the-actual-forno moments of real life here.
Either way, welcome and grazie! Glad we’re in this together.
P.S. If you’re here for “top 10 Tuscan sunsets,” bless your heart. Everyone else? Let’s get lost.