Starbucks’s truly beautiful idea was the simple realization that Americans wanted to spend more money for a cup of coffee, that they’d feel much bett… - Anthony Bourdain

Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.

Spend any time in the real Italy, however, and you quickly realize that Italians don’t really pick grapes much anymore, and they certainly don’t stomp them either. They don’t pick tomatoes — or olives — and they don’t shear their sheep. Their tomatoes and olives are picked largely by underpaid Africans and Eastern Europeans, seasonal hires, brought in for that purpose — who are then demonized and complained about for the rest of the year. (Except when blowing motorists in the offseason — as can be readily observed on the outskirts of even the smallest Italian communities these days.)

I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books.