A Month in Italy | The Check-In - May 8, 2026
Me, 4/11/26, Lake Garda, Italy
Letter
Dear Reader,
The Check-In is something I send out every other week to share what I’m reading, thinking, consuming, and sometimes dreaming.
I missed the last check-in! So, it’s been 1 month.
It’s been a FULL month. Let me summarize my weekend excursions:
A visit to a massive tulip garden, Parco Giardino Sigurtà, with a walk around Borghetto sul Mincio, a quaint historic town, then a walk around Lake Garda at Lazise.
A visit to the North side of Lake Garda for a hike with WW1 bunkers and an epic view of the lake
A wild coincidence in which I noticed that my college undergraduate professors of Agricultural Ecology at UC Berkeley, a husband and wife, were traveling through Italy, and it turned out they had a stop at my new Italian boyfriend’s parents’ organic farm in Padova ! We attended the farm visit, and it was great to see my former professors, with whom I’ve kept in touch. This ended up being a last-minute discovery and rerouting of plans, which was the reason I didn’t get this newsletter out last time.
A trip to the Dolomites: Trento, Bressanone, Vipiteno, and hiking in Val di Funes.
A photo tour:
Parco Giardino Sigurtà
Borghetto sul Mincio
Lake Garda at Lazise
Cima Rocca Hike at Lake Garda
AgroEco Farm Tour with my Professors in Padova
Dolomites City Views (Bressanone, Vipiteno)
Dolomites - Val di Funes
We caught some chamois (English/French) or “camoscio” (Italian) on the mountains and could view them through my telephoto lens. They’re mountain goat-antelope.
I have a new event series with Tend Collective, Grounding Urgency Culture. It’s May 12th and 19th at 10 AM PDT.
Blogs this period:
No new blogs.
Instagram videos:
No new videos.
Warmly,
Alison
Action Item:
Get an accountability buddy! I recently set up two new systems of accountability with buddies:
Every other week check-in with friend MC, who I met at a meditation retreat last year in Los Angeles. We have content goals for Instagram and TikTok so we check in with each other to brainstorm and stay on track.
A coach I connected with on LinkedIn has invited me to his Coaching Collective calls that happen every other week and I’ll start attending those this month. This is a great way to learn from peers and share best practices.
Reading, watching, and listening to:
Reading.
The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit.
“Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.
In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.
The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.
While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.”
I found this one, as I found the last one of hers I read, Men Explain Things to Me, a little on the boring side. I appreciate Rebecca Solnit, coiner of the term ‘mansplaining,’ but she’s not one of those writers who speaks directly to my soul. This book echoed Paul Hawken’s 2009 book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World, and I don’t think I got too much more from her having already read his back in 2009.
I appreciated the reminder not to get too hopeless and cynical about the state of things. We’ve come a long way, and there are so many good-hearted people working towards creating a more caring, less violent world. I didn’t know a ton about primatologist Jane Goodall, and I liked the section where she covers this woman’s journey. “I shouldn’t have named the chimps. It wasn’t scientific. I didn’t know. I knew nothing. And the worst sin of all was that I was ascribing to them emotions like happiness, sadness, and so forth.” Because Goodall didn’t have a university degree, she didn’t know that she was supposed to study the chimpanzees in a detached way. Instead, she let herself get attached and ascribe emotions to her subjects.
I will be diving into Ms. Goodall’s works more deeply now, so I appreciate the inspiration from Ms. Solnit’s book.
Reading.
“I have been thinking about knitting bullshit now for quite some time, but I was alerted to a particular type of it while listening to Jamie Bartlett’s excellent series Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares (available wherever you get your podcasts). The first episode includes an interview with Anne McHealy, head of product at Inception Point AI, a podcasting company founded by Jeanine Wright, formerly COO at Wondery. Until its dissolution (by Amazon in 2025 at the cost of 110 jobs), Wondery was known for producing high quality, human-authored, narrative content. Inception Point AI, on the other hand, is a slop factory employing just 8 people which, according to Anne, publishes “about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.” Anne tells Jamie, that, to date, Inception Point AI’s podcasts have accumulated “12 million lifetime downloads. And we’re averaging about 750,000 downloads a month.” Stunned by these extraordinary figures, Jamie asks Anne about the editorial oversight of the content which she produces. Does she, or any of her colleagues, actually listen to any of these 3000 weekly episodes? With only 8 employees, who on earth has time to check the accuracy or quality of these podcasts? The answer, is, of course, that no one checks or edits the podcast content– but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes”
This blog piece was eloquently and passionately written and made my jaw drop to the floor. Beloved podcast producer Wondery closed only to open an AI slop factory?? Producing thousands of episodes of slop? With 12 million listens???
Were the episodes any good, you might ask? Infact, no. Drivel with fabricated information including a false history of knitting. We’re in deep shit if we don’t take some caution with how think critically about AI content we consume.
Watching.
I watched these three films:
Vermiglio - Italian (2024)
The Åre Murders (series, Netflix) - Swedish (2025)
No Other Choice - South Korean (2025)
La Città di Pianura - Italian (2025)
Vermiglio makes me so mad just thinking about it again! I try to watch as many films directed by women as possible because I’ve seen enough by men. This film was directed by Maura Delpero, born in Bolzano, so, not far from where the film takes place in the remote Italian Alps of Trentino. Unlike a typical male-directed film, there’s no fairy tale romance here. Instead, the women are portrayed accurately, as passive victims of male dominance—the matriarch we see giving birth to child after child, despite her frailty. Each pregnancy and childbirth increases the viewers’ worry about the risk to her life. The second story I won’t spoil, but it’s devastating. The film takes place during World War 2 and starts when a war deserter from Sicily shows up in their Northern mountain town.
Vermiglio is an Italian word meaning vermilion, bright red, or scarlet, as well as being the name of the town. To me, it conjurs up the deep life-sustaining red of menstrual blood.
The Åre Murders is a series of the genre Nordic Noir, which is one of my favorite film and TV genres. I need to make a blog of my faves! This one would not go on the list. The dark ice/snow/cold vibes were there, as were plenty of psychopathic and desperate characters, but the timing and pacing seemed just slightly off. Especially in the second story, the way they revealed whodunit felt too sudden. Still, the two main detectives are compelling! And the male detective is clearly a person of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry, so it’s nice to see the theme of immigration woven in.
No Other Choice is a dystopian thriller about a man who has it all: the large house, the beautiful wife, the career, and BBQs on the weekends, until he is laid off and can’t find a new job. Things get desperate as he realizes that the only way to get hired in a new role is to murder those in competition with him. It was tough to watch, but the themes were interesting. How far will we go to maintain a perfect-appearing life? Male worthiness/masculinity and their career. Corporations are heartless, money-making endeavors that will dispose of humans when able. But also themes of commitment, loyalty, and love.
La Città di Pianura was a quirky and drunk romp through the Northern Plain of Italy, where I’ve been living since March. Pianura means “plain” or “flatland” in English. According to Google’s AI “The Pianura Padana (Po Valley) stretches 650 km and covers much of Northern Italy and is crucial for agriculture (wheat, corn, rice) and industry, housing cities like Milan, Turin, and Bologna. Due to their flat nature, Italian plains are highly cultivated, industrialized, and heavily populated areas that were historically reclaimed from swamps and marshes.” The film follows two drunk older men as they search for “one last drink” over the span of a few days and nights. As they wander and find these drinks, they stumble upon other people’s lives and stories, picking up an uptight recent college graduate of architecture who finally acquiesces to play hooky with them. It was a fun exploration of “what if we listened to the stories of drunk old men instead of merely looking down on them.” In real life, however, excessive alcohol use is often the root of a lot of suffering, so it does seem like some sort of fantasy in 37-year-old director Francesco Sossai’s head—some trauma he wanted to resolve for himself. It reminded me both of the 2020 Danish film Another Round, about school teachers who decide to drink a little every day, and the 2004 wine comedy Sideways, about two friends’ drunk weekend in my home turf on the Central Coast of California.
My top recommended pick from this round would have to be: Vermiglio.
Listening.
I have been listening to so many episodes of A Little Bit Culty! Mostly while running. So many are good that I don’t even know which ones to recommend. I love them all.
Watching.
Swedish Bakery ASMR.
This week I’ve been feeling under the weather. Watching Swedish bakers make a myriad of pastries, mostly in silence, before bedtime was very soothing! Rolling out dough, folding in butter, and squeezing giant puffs of frosting—all very soothing!
