Italian Country House

This is the marvelous house of our friends Christina and Alberto, in Calosso, a small commune 60 kilometers (40 miles) southeast of Turin, in the Piedmont region.  They bought it in 2005, as a refuge from their small apartment in Milan. We arrived last night.  In my previous life as a financial analyst, I worked with Christina at Deutsche Bank in New York in the 1990s.  She met  and married Albert in that period, and soon moved with him to Milan, his home town. We kept in touch sporadically, but this is the best visit we've had together.

I'll post other images of the house and surroundings by tomorrow. It's a very picturesque area, covered by vineyards and hazelnut trees.  Not incidentally, the main plant of the hazelnut spread Nutella is just 25 km (25 miles) away, in Alba. (Nutella was first sold in the U.S. in 1983, and has since continued to conquer the world.)