Still craving: coffee with hot, foamy milk and sugar-topped croissants for breakfast; brick-oven pizza made from scratch while you watch, even in the airport; Italian arugula; the bread in Rome; the meringues in Florence; a mild cheese we bought for an informal lunch one day in Rome (I didn't get the name of it); cooked spinach in Florence and Venice; Italian table grapes.

Not pasta. Not yet. No mas, or however you say that in Italian.

Glad to be back to: dollars (did the euro have to hit an all-time high on our trip to Italy?),  Honeycrisp apples from the farmers market, toast, my own cooking, free water in restaurants, SportsCenter.

High point of the trip: No, not the Great Monuments of Western Civilization. It was when the waitress who spoke no English was so dazzled by my Italian that she said to me, "Come si dice....?"

Unfortunately what she wanted to know was, "Come si dice...zucchine?" 

Actually it was funny that the English version of many of the menus translated "zucchine" as "courgette" (the French word for the squash) for those of us who couldn't figure out what "zucchine" meant. To be fair, that is what the Brits call zucchini.

Putting things in perspective: In the supermarket my daughter shopped at, no bottle of wine cost more than one euro. Doing one load of laundry in a self-service laundromat in Rome cost us nine euros. (That's about $13.) Italy is a country that has its priorities set.

(Photo of the remnants of our last dinner by me, as well as photos below)