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The Tender Year is an interactive collection of writing and artwork from around the world, by Naomi Krupitsky Wernham and Sam Galison.

The home page is a map, showing each entry at its geographic location, with all the entries connected in chronological order. You can click and drag to move the map, or scroll up and down to zoom in and out. Clicking on any of the black dots will take you to the entries for that place.

If an interactive map isn’t your cup of tea, we made a page that’s just a list with all our entries (most recent first).

We’re also on instagram: @studiogalison and @naomikrupitsky.

Soave

June 30th, 2018

We spent two nights in a barebones B&B in a vineyard just outside of Soave, Italy. Here, the cicadas start before dawn; the wine comes by the liter, grassy and green as the grapes it is pressed from. The pasta is served by what seems like the pound, balanced precariously on plates that are almost too small to contain it. Our sauce vocabulary now includes saffron & artichoke; bacon & tomato. Other words we are learning will be essential: Aperol. Sorry. Excuse me. Sliced thin. Yes! Thank you. Biscotti. Macchiato. Mozzarella.

You should always get to Italy hungry.

Thankfully for our untrained stomachs Italy is as good for the heart as it is for the belly. We are making cat friends left and right; wandering along alleyways bordered on one side by a string of impossibly cute shops and on the other side by a 1000-year-old castle wall. It is very healthy to be around old things.

One afternoon we spent in Verona, where it became immediately understandable why Shakespeare set plays in this winding, riverside hamlet. Here, we found our first salad in days; we learned that aperitivo hour starts around 10:45 am; we took pictures of the wall outside what Verona has decided is ‘Juliet’s house’. It is covered in band-aids with names of lovers written in sharpie: how the language of love has deteriorated!

And as a fun game, if you want to choose between continuing your relationship with me or with Sam, you can cast your vote as to whether Romeo and Juliet counts as a romance – an argument even charming Italy couldn’t quite smooth over. Choose wisely. We are still recovering from this battle.

It’s always strange to get to the point in travel where you realize that the moving itself – even though you don’t have a job (our main cultural measure for worthiness, right?) and you don’t have to go to CVS, and you don’t have to remember to put the trash out on a certain day – is its own kind of exhaustion. Since the end of May, we have been in a new bed every 2-5 days. We are expert toiletry-kit-gatherers; suitcase-stuffers; travel-snack-preparers. But for all of July, we will be in Florence – and being in one place for that amount of time is starting to feel like a physical pleasure; something we can sink our teeth into. To buy olive oil! To unpack! To spend three hours not in the same room as one another!

The summer of so many delicious things!