WELCOME to my updated ITALY FEVER site and I invite you to follow along on new journeys and adventures via my expanded blog, www.italyfever.blogspot.com. Find news and events of Italy, plus favorite books, music, movies, and destinations---“feverish” tidbits to tease and inspire YOU to travel on your own in Italy, or vicariously, at home!

WHILE my passion for Italy and architecture keeps me juggling a design and
consulting business (VILLA TEXAS), there’s a LAVENDER MARKET in my life too. My longing for a Mediterranean lifestyle somehow evolved into growing lavender along the Pedernales River in the Texas Hill Country, which then blossomed into the creation of specialty shop on Main Street in
Fredericksburg, and along the way online shopping got added featuring
“Hanna”, a yellow Labrador and loving family member for me, and my husband, David. If it’s lavender, we love it and probably have it, at
www.lavendermarket.com. Say hello to "Hanna" when you visit online!

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Italy Fever: 14 Ways to Satisfy Your Love Affair With Italy From the jacket . . .
She had first traveled to Italy as a graduate student in architecture. She captured images of Roman ruins and historic Renaissance buildings and absorbed the sensuous landscape of rural Italy. And that's when it happened--the beginning of her love affair with a foreign country.

Now, more than ten years later, Darlene Marwitz renews her post-forty spirit by following a passion and indulging in engaging (and often humorous) ways to feed her Italy fever. She shares old and new ideas and humble experiences to help readers discover, interpret, and incorporate "pieces" of Italy into their own lives. Her favorite Web sites, books, and movies are eclectic gems.

From talking to a map of Italy on her walls to learning finger counting in Italian, from collecting old postcards of Venice and Rome to sampling gelato combinations and calling it "research," from cravingthe music of Andrea Bocelli to overdosing on Verdi and Puccini, fromstalking used bookstores for Italy-looking and -sounding titles to marathon movie weekends via video--she is smitten, even obsessed, with all things Italian.

About the Author

Darlene Marwitz holds two master's degrees from the School of Architecture at The University of Texas in Austin. She has a design and historic preservation consulting business and continues to write about, and travel to, Italy as often as she can. Marwitz lives in Austin and Fredericksburg with her husband, David Marwitz, and their yellow Labrador, Hanna. ITALYFEVER: 14 Ways to Satisfy Your Love Affair with Italy is her first book.