REGISTER: Bette’s Happy Hour with Lorenzo Turchi
Please register for our Tuesday Happy Hour with Italian author/sommelier Lorenzo Turchi, who shares his personal travel memoirs, from the heaviness of Tibetan genocide to the best wines in Tuscany
***Bette members will find the registration link for this event below the paywall. To join our community events and support independent investigative journalist in a time of grave peril, please consider becoming a member.***
“I was simply there, with everything I carried inside, trying to understand what holds a people together, what makes them dance, what makes them resist, what makes them pray.”—Lorenzo Turchi
On a recent visit to Florence, I excitedly told Monique Camarra I had met an Italian author in the Piazza della Signoria, who travels the world in search of indigenous tribes. She told me: “I’m not surprised. Every Italian thinks they’re Christopher Columbus.”
When I recovered from rotfl, she explained how there’s a keen sense of adventure that is inherent in so many Italians.
That innate adventurous spirit defines our next guest, Lorenzo Turchi, who joins us on Tuesday, June 16, 11 am Pacific for Bette’s Happy Hour (our bi-monthlyish Sunday Speakeasys will resume later in summer, when my travel schedule slows). Members will find the registration below the paywall. If you are not yet a member and would like to join our conversations, please do so here:
I met Lorenzo at a restaurant in the famed Piazza della Signoria, a lush town square adorned with statues that live outside the Uffizi — a museum where you can study Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and epic Caravaggios, including his famed Medusa. Among the statues in the Piazza is a reproduction of Michelango’s David — you can see the real one in the Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze just a short distance away.
I believe the waiters of Europe are the official ambassadors for each of their countries, and my husband and I struck up a conversation with Lorenzo, a sommelier at a restaurant in the square overlooking the David repro.
He told us about how two broken feet (from two separate scooter accidents) led him to writing a book about Tibetan genocide and our friendship formed from there.
Lorenzo writes a travel blog at lorenzinoontheroad. I invite you to scroll through his site — the photos are stunning and you can easily translate it into English.
He writes:
I slept in villages where time is measured differently from ours. I’ve seen men paint their bodies to become something bigger than themselves. I witnessed ceremonies in which the border between the world of the living and that of the spirits was as thin as the boundary between fear and faith.
I wasn’t a tourist at that time. I wasn’t even an observer. I was simply there, with everything I carried inside, trying to understand what holds a people together, what makes them dance, what makes them resist, what makes them pray.
The world is full of different answers to the same ancient question. Every religion, every rite, every tribe is a human attempt to give a name to silence.
Here you will find the faiths I have met and lived from within, the rituals and traditions that survive the centuries, the peoples and tribes that resist on the edge of the modern world. And they will continue to arrive, because the road is not over yet.
As I listened to his stories, his travels from country to country to seek out indigenous tribes and learn from their cultures — a desire he gained from his dad who traveled the US to seek out Native American tribes — I knew I had to bring him on Bette.
He set about to translate his Tibet book in English for us (you can find a link below), and I also asked him to tell us about his travel writing from Tuscany. You can find a link to his book The Wineries of Tuscany, also below.
On the back cover, he writes:
Forget the guides that send you where everyone already goes.
This is the Tuscany of wine seen by someone who lives it every day: a Florentine sommelier who takes you to the small producers, at the end of the gravel roads, where the person filling your glass is the very one who made that wine with their own hands.
Eight territories - from Dante’s Vernaccia to Brunello, from the two Chianti to the Super Tuscans of Bolgheri - with the stories no one tells you, the producers chosen one by one, and how to reach them from Florence.
No cold lists, no invented experiences.
Just real wine and the honest voice of someone who lives in this land.
And here is a summary about his “Tibet & The Lama” book:
At twenty-three, Lorenzo left Italy alone. No plan, no group, no safety net. China first — Beijing, Xi'an, Lijiang — then deeper, always deeper, until the Tibetan plateau.
This is not a travel book. It is a testimony. A raw, unfiltered account of a young man walking through one of the most politically charged places on earth, trying to understand what he sees without pretending to have answers.
He writes about Tiananmen's engineered silence, about monasteries turned into tourist attractions, about pilgrims praying to a broken god. About the Panchen Lama's empty golden throne — a six-year-old child kidnapped in 1995, never seen again. About a people already divided by centuries of internal wars, then finished off by tanks.
But this is also a deeply personal book. Two broken feet, years later, forced him to finally write what he had been carrying since that journey. The result is something between a diary, a political essay, and a confession — intimate and brutal at the same time.
"A people imperfect, massacred by invaders who believed themselves perfect."
Here, he describes himself:
Solo traveler. Writer. Thirty countries, always off the beaten path — Tibet, Palestine, Colombia, Vietnam, tribes of Africa. I write what I truly see, what most people would rather not look at. No filters. With a deep honesty toward myself and toward those who read.
You can find links to his work here:
Tibet book in English: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2HWTTCR
Tuscany Wineries book: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0H2Y831ST
His blog: https://lorenzinoontheroad.com
Support/Donate: https://buymeacoffee.com/lorenzinoontheroad
Look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Please keep scrolling to register.
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