Unforgettable Italy: 5 Unique Experiences

Picture it: a long, relaxing stay in a thousand-year-old castle in Tuscany, drinking wine produced on an estate with ties to the real Mona Lisa, renting a boat for a tour of the Amalfi Coast.

These are some of the ways I was lucky enough to experience la Bella Italia during a recent journey with my family through Tuscany and the spectacular Amalfi Coast.

Here are five worthwhile splurges sure to enhance your next trip:

Stay in a Tuscan castle

Close your eyes and imagine the rolling hills and decadent wines of Tuscany. Now know that the reality of the place is even better. Twisted, knotted vineyards cover the rolling hills in patches of regimented rows that almost look like quilts. The air is fresh and sweet, and as you drive through the narrow curving roads, ancient towns and rustic old castles seem to pop up out of nowhere.

We rented a car for a more intimate look at the nooks and crests of Tuscany. Two things that made the visit all the more spectacular: our hotel and the wine.

Hotel Castello di Spaltenna is an ancient "castle" turned luxury hotel nestled in the vineyards of the Tuscan region of Chianti, close to the town of Gaiole. It's less an actual castle and more a medieval hamlet with a church that dates to the year 1000.

Three of us settled nicely into a two-bedroom suite with two bathrooms, a lovely living space and a fireplace for chilly nights. Staying here was a memorable splurge.

Our suite cost about €600 a night (about $870), but they have rooms available for around €200 (about $290) with breakfast included. Rates for simpler quarters on the premises can be as low as €130 a night (about $190).

The hotel has a Michelin-rated restaurant serving traditional Tuscan fare, but I was most taken with the early breakfasts on the terrace. Crispy, flaky croissants and tarts made by an in-house pastry chef, fresh scrambled eggs, yogurts, Italian meats, ripe fruit and fresh coffee complemented the roaring, lush summer just coming into full bloom.

The hotel also offers spa services, mountain bikes and suggestions for tours of the region.

Taste wine on a Chianti estate with ties to Mona Lisa

"I never drink when I am sober," joked Sandro Checcucci, our lively and thoroughly knowledgeable host at the Vignamaggio Estate in Chianti.

Sandro told us the 700-year-old estate has been making beautiful Chianti Classico wines for more than 600 years. But, he said, the vineyards have a much deeper past; they were cultivated by the Etruscans -- an ancient Tuscan civilization -- who made wine from the grapes grown on this land as far back as 500 B.C.

The castle itself has provenance as well. Vignamaggio Estate claims that Lisa Gherardini was born there in 1497. She would grow up into the mysterious woman immortalized in Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." Guests can opt to stay in the estate's rooms and apartments.

Sandro was thorough in his tour, and we walked away with a real understanding of just what goes into making a true Chianti Classico wine. All wines labeled "Classico" come from grapes harvested, pressed and aged in a small 27-mile region in Chianti, the original growing region of Chianti wines.

The Vignamaggio Chianti Classico Riserva is a full-bodied wine with fruity notes. We lingered at a beautiful table set with regional salami and cheeses as we tried each of the estate's wines.

Take a private tour of Renaissance Florence

If you have a limited time in Florence, there is no better way to experience the essence of the Tuscan city than to hire a private tour guide.

Walks Inside Florence tailored a three-hour tour to exactly the likes and dislikes of my family. Hate art? No problem! Love architecture? Fine! Want a tour of the city at night? A-OK.

We started our tour early, before the swarm of tourists invaded Piazza della Signoria and the temperatures soared. It's a little more expensive than a group tour but totally worth it. The tour company also offers small group tours, starting at €60 per person (about $85) for three-hour expeditions.

Our guide had everything planned, so we breezed through museum lines and enjoyed the Ponte Vecchio, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Baptistry, the Cathedral and much more. Our guide pointed out little secrets and unknown tidbits along the way and made our excursion to Florence memorable.

Tour the Amalfi Coast by boat

There is absolutely no better way to see the raw beauty of the Amalfi Coast than from the sea.

We arranged a private boat and guide from Lucibello, an excursion outfit in Positano, and were simply stunned by what we saw.

Lucibello is an outfitter offering boat tours along the Amalfi Coast.

Rugged cliffs framing enormous caves ... ancient stairways carved into the stone ... secret grottos we explored from the water ... swimming holes where you can take a dip ... thousand-year-old Roman towers set up to protect the coast from pirates and other intruders.

Plan a longer excursion and stop off in a different coastal town for lunch, a swim or shopping.

Private boat excursions on the Amalfi Coast are definitely a luxury. Our four-hour tour of the Amalfi coast with a driver cost €450 (about $650). We could have spent close to $2,000 for a high-end speed boat for the day. Lucibello also offers much more affordable group tours every day, including a tour of the Amalfi Coast and round-trip excursions to nearby Capri starting around €30 (about $43) per person.

Stay in the summer palace of a king

Nestled in the elbow of the Amalfi Coast, Positano is a winding, ancient city built on ragged cliffs that drop straight down into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The town is tiny, and in the beginning of June, it's covered in beautiful, delicate flowers that fill the air with a subtle fragrance. Lemon and orange trees line the streets and grow fruit the size of a human head.

Hotel Palazzo Murat was once the summer home of a king of Naples.

The cliffs were settled by prehistoric man and over thousands of years have been settled again and again by different cultures. Because of the proximity to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, there is a distinct Moorish influence throughout the coastal towns.

The Hotel Palazzo Murat is a gorgeous hotel built in the 17th century in a traditional Neapolitan Baroque style. The large stone palace sits close to the beachfront in Positano. Many rooms have balconies covered in bougainvillea that look out over the cliffs and the sea. In 1808, King of Naples Gioacchino Murat (who was also the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte) decided to make the palace his summer home.

His vibrant gardens still grace the grounds of the palazzo. There is also a vegetable garden that provides fresh produce for the hotel's Michelin-rated restaurant. Stroll through the patio area in the afternoon, and you might see the chef making homemade pasta for the evening's meal.

Breakfast in the courtyard includes a full buffet of fresh fruit, pastries, cheeses and meats. Cocktail hour outside in the early evening is complete with live music and hors d'oeuvres.

The rooms in the original palace have high ceilings and rich, old-world charm. Depending on the season, the most luxurious rooms could cost around €450 ($650). I stayed in a newer part of the hotel, where the rooms are spacious and charming with colorful tiled floors and flower-covered balconies overlooking the gardens. These "superior" rooms cost about €240 (about $350) in peak season, but prices drop dramatically in the fall.

Vacationing in Italy is unforgettable at every budget. And if you can afford a splurge to enhance an already spectacular experience, do it! But most importantly, take time to talk to the locals, sit for long spells with a glass of house wine and a nice view, eat as much as you can hold and share the experience with people you love.

Ranking Countries on Innovation

As a child, upon meeting a friend of my parents, I would immediately ask what grade they were in. My dad explained that after your last year of high school, you stopped counting that way. People kept learning stuff, but they didn't say they were in 17th grade, or 30th grade. After a certain point, the set of knowledge is not well-ordered. MBAs are not 19th graders, or 21st graders - they're just, well, MBAs.

This is the message that the folks over at INSEAD who compiled the Global Innovation Index have yet to learn. The recently released index purports to rank 125 "countries/economies".  The "countries/economies" are ranked in "terms of their innovation capabilities and results."

Switzerland finishes 1st.  Sweden comes in a close 2nd. Singapore gets the bronze. The U.S. came in 7th, behind Hong Kong, Finland and Denmark, and just ahead of Canada. 

The presumption that the rankings are somehow meaningful undermines a lot of good and interesting analysis that went into compiling the ranking, and which is contained in the body of the INSEAD report.

The report lacks the courage of its own caveats: the "methodology adopted for the report...is extremely sensitive to modeling choices and missing data points," it says of itself. In essence, it says that being in first place versus fifth place doesn't mean very much - which is correct - but then proceeds to pretend that Mauritius' 46th place finish in the "output sub-index" means it is better at outputting innovation than Namibia (49).

If you were forced to rank countries on innovation, say by a hostage-taking macroeconomist, this is not a bad way to do it. The INSEAD ranking includes some 80 indicators.

Some are straightforward, like educational expenditure as a percentage of GDP, or net high-tech exports; others are more abstract–a single number measures political stability; others are wishful leaps, such as "national feature films per million population," which is meant to be a proxy for "creative activities". The existence of "The Lincoln Lawyer" therefore means the U.S. is marginally more creative than it would be in a world where Matthew McConaughey had never pretended to be an unscrupulous attorney, when there is a strong case to be made that the opposite is true.

Singapore's rise from 7th place to 3rd is described as a significant improvement, when the report's own fine print says that this difference is essentially the margin of error.

This is the sort of semantic gruel that passes for soup with consultants: "research is increasingly context-driven, problem-focused, application-oriented, and interdisciplinary," it says.

Aristotle was pretty interdisciplinary, back in his day, and Isaac Newton worried a lot about applications. If you can tell me what "context-driven" or "problem-focused" actually means, and why there's more of it now than in 1820, I'll personally buy you a beer.

At many junctures, the authors of the report repeat the same gambit: "There is no good way to measure X, they say. Here is a measurement of X. Here are the conclusions we draw, in granular detail, from that measurement."

Engineers have a saying for this: "garbage in, garbage out."

This is particularly a shame because, buried in the flighty statistics, there's a lot of good in the report. There are real differences between Brazil and Mexico, between the United States and the United Kingdom, between India and Indonesia.

Understanding these differences is important to policymakers who seek to facilitate innovation. The report is a step forward in that understanding, despite itself. There are enough examples sprinkled through the body of the text to make it worth reading: a new tuberculosis treatment regime in India; a new way of looking at grain storage in Argentina.

But the raison d'être of the report, the ranking of countries by innovativeness, is akin to a list of the 100 most eloquent novels - fundamentally silly in conception, and no more an aid to understanding innovation than such a list of novels would be to understanding felicity in prose.

The kid in me hopes that Oman can improve its 4th place finish in "innovation linkages," and that the Kiwis of New Zealand can do better than 8th next year in "knowledge creation".

The adult in me will be as grumpy about next year's rankings as he is about this year's.

But I'll still read the report, which will no doubt have good details buried under lazy aggregations.

Romney Opens Presidential Bid Challenging Obama

Just as Mitt Romney declared Thursday that he's in, it's suddenly looking like he'll have more company in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

While Romney made his candidacy official in New Hampshire, political heavyweights Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani caused a stir of their own with visits to the first-in-the-nation primary state. And rumblings from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota further undercut Romney's standing as the closest thing the GOP has to a front-runner.

"I'm Mitt Romney and I believe in America. And I'm running for president of the United States," Romney said to cheers on a sunny farm here in Southern New Hampshire.

The former business executive previewed a campaign message focused on the economic woes that top voters' concerns: rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and persistent foreclosures.

"It breaks my heart to see what is happening to this great country," Romney said. "No, Mr. President, you had your chance."

It's a pitch tailored to the conservatives who hold great sway in picking the GOP's presidential nominee in Iowa and South Carolina — and the independents who are the largest political bloc in New Hampshire. And it is as much a statement on his viability as it is an indictment of Obama's leadership.

"Barack Obama has failed America," Romney said as he began his second White House bid. "When Barack Obama took office, the economy was in recession, and he made it worse."

Romney comes to a presidential contest that lacks a true front-runner.

In the last week, the still-forming field became less certain with Giuliani visiting an Italian restaurant here and meeting privately with state activists. In North Conway, Giuliani said he hasn't decided yet if he will run again and that he expects to make up his mind by the end of the summer.

But he certainly sounded like a candidate, telling reporters that the nation is being led in the wrong direction by Obama.

"He's been in office a very long time now and his results on the economy have been abysmal," Giuliani said. "His only answer to it has been, `Oh, I inherited this.' Well, my goodness, he's been in office long enough now, so that whatever he inherited, he should've straightened out by now."

Palin, her party's 2008 vice presidential nominee, was set to arrive in New Hampshire later Thursday for appearances that highlighted her potential to upend the race should she run. Aides weren't releasing her schedule, but her family's bus tour that rumbled out of Washington last weekend was likely to overshadow the declared candidates.

Perry, too, gave hints he was considering a bid, though his aides sought to tamp down expectations he would join. Tea party darling Bachmann is inching toward a run, perhaps giving the anti-tax, libertarian-leaning grassroots movement a candidate to rally around.

"Who is it that rules this great nation?" Romney said in a nod to tea partyers. "You do."

Embracing familiar conservative rhetoric, Romney said Obama has spent his first three years in office apologizing to the world for the United States' greatness, undercutting Israel and borrowing European-style economic policies. He cast Obama as beholden to Democratic interest groups and indifferent to out-of-work Americans.

"It's time for a president who cares more about America's workers than America's union bosses," Romney said.

He said Obama's policy in Afghanistan was wrong, his spending too high and said his administration sought to seize power through regulation and fiat.

"This president's first answer to every problem is to take power from you. ... And with each of those decisions, we lose more of our freedoms," Romney said.

Romney's strengths are substantial: He's well known and he's an experienced campaigner. He has a personal fortune and an existing network of donors. He has a successful businessman's record.

But his challenges are big, too. They include a record of changing positions on social issues including abortion and gay rights, shifts that have left conservatives questioning his sincerity. He also has struggled to allay some skeptics of his Mormon faith.

Romney oversaw a health care law enacted in Massachusetts that's similar to Obama's national health overhaul, which conservatives despise.

"If I ran through all my mistakes, Ann would love it and you'd be here all night," Romney said, referencing his wife but not explicitly acknowledging the hurdle while calling for a repeal of Democrats' national plan.

His rivals weren't about to let it go. Asked about how big a problem Romney faces regarding the Massachusetts health care law, Giuliani was critical.

"The reality is that Obamacare and Romneycare are almost exactly the same," Giuliani said. "It's not very helpful trying to distinguish them. I would think the best way to handle it is to say, it was a terrible mistake and if I could do it over again, I wouldn't do it."