When you live in Manhattan, it is only natural to crave space. On weekends, residents flock to Central Park like it is Vermont. I’ve been in “huge” New York city stores that would fit in the remote corner of a Target parking lot. It’s reflexive – if humans really do want that which we can’t have, then forget happiness, I want square footage.

Which is why when I travel I typically prefer open-air settings over just another version of my own cramped hometown. So when my family and I decided to go to Italy, instead of a hotel near the Duomo in Florence or outside the Vatican in Rome, we chose to stay in rural Tuscany.

We rented a villa with nine bedrooms and five bathrooms (seven if you count the two in the one-bedroom pool house, which is bigger than my entire apartment), which cost us less than a three star hotel in a major city would cost. The villa was located outside the small town of Cetona, which boasted three restaurants, four gelato cafes and a host of other small shops that, taking riposo (the Italian “siesta”) into account, were open for about two hours a day. But if you managed to get to the food store a stock up on food and wine (which is hard because portions are about one-quarter the size of American portions), then holing yourself up in the house with a bottle of Chianti (or, at 3 euro per, a case) was the best you could hope for out of an Italian vacation.

Not that the Sistine Chapel isn’t as majestic as advertised, or the Coliseum as imposing as you imagine it would be, but to me traveling is more than seeing a string of sights and convincing a string of beautiful local women that you are related to Frank Sinatra. It is about getting a feel for a country and for its culture, eating its food and attempting to speak its language, even if in the two weeks you are there you only speak one complete Italian sentence and mispronounced three of its four words. And to me, the way you really understand what it means to be in Italy is to sit at a table under a thatch overhang, drinking wine and laughing (preferably with others), pausing every so often to look out at the breathtaking views of vineyards, olive plants and sunflowers.

So that’s what I did for two weeks. And sitting there with more square footage than I could ever know what to do with, I decided all I really wanted out of life was more prosciutto. Too bad the butcher was closed, again.

- by Dan Murphy of [redacted] fame