Happy Holidays, dearest readers. The T-Boy Society of Film & Music’s final poll for 2020 is dedicated to PILGRIMAGES: Sacred Destinations. We felt this would be an appropriate theme as we slide into the holiday season. Though 2020 is a year we’d like to have in our rearview mirror, it’s been a great year for T-Boy because of you.

For 85 days, between March and June of this year, my wife, Orna O’Reilly, aka Chef Double O, and I hunkered down inside Villa Allegra, our little bright-white house with Santorini-blue shutters tucked inside the Valle d’Itria just outside of Ostuni, as Italy imposed a nationwide lockdown of biblical proportions to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

Elsewhere I wrote about a more formal Monterosola red wine tasting but their whites simply lent themselves to an informal late summer brunch . . .

Capri is a lovely little island that floats in the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Naples and where the air is scented with bougainvillea that tumbles in wild abandon over the garden walls of white-washed villas.

At a time when COVID-19 keeps us from traveling overseas, I enjoyed some travel vicariously by reading about a vineyard in Tuscany while tasting some of their organic wines. While it was a poor substitute for actually walking the rows, smelling the breeze blowing over the 25 hectare hillside estate, and touring the cantina, the experience was improved by tasting the wines.

As the brutal heat of summer assaults our lives as if we were a roast in an oven, FAVORITE BEACH DESTINATIONS has been selected for our new T-Boy Society of Film & Music’s poll. Research revealed that the origin of the word “beach” is somewhat ambiguous, ranging from the Old Norse bakki (bank, as of a stream) to the Old English baece (stream) to “beach,” a mutation of “bleach” (as stones are bleached by the sun and water).

In Palermo, Arab craftsmen carpeted the Norman palace with glittering mosaics and 18th-century artisan Giacomo Serpotta fashioned fanciful scenes from stucco in chapels around the city. Few interiors in the exotic, enchanting, and at times exasperating capital of Sicily, though, are as enchanting as the stately dining room of the Palazzo Lanza Tomasi.

You may not be traveling to far-away places in the immediate future, but we can bring them to you. Here’s T-Boy’s third installment of virtual trips by our staff, and we hope you’ll be able to go there and to other distant destinations soon.

This is the second installment of Ed Boitano’s series on Pilgrimages. In the inaugural installment, Pilgrimages: Places I’ll Remember, Boitano covered Dylan Thomas – Laugharne, Wales, Antoni Gaudí – Barcelona, Catalonia, Frida Kahlo & Leon Trotsky – Coyoacán, Mexico and The Barbary Apes – Gibraltar. Now quarantined at home due to the coronavirus, Boitano is doing a lot of remembering these days.

Today, the whole world seemingly knows of biscotti. Pronounced in Italian as bee-SKOH-tee, it literally means “twice baked” – with the result of an absence of any moisture in the biscuit. Known for its resistance from spoiling, it was a staple for Roman Legionnaires.