What's new in Italy? Doors closing, doors opening

What doesn't change about Italy is that it's always changing. In 2012 some long-closed doors are opening again. Historic sights, newly scrubbed and restored, are coming out from behind scaffolding. A few more monuments are still under wraps, but getting closer to completion. Italy is revealing itself anew (or molting).

In Rome, the Colosseum is being cleaned from top to bottom and given permanent lighting. For the first time, tours are being offered to previously restricted areas -- underground passageways and the third-floor parapet. This behind-the-scenes tour is available only by booking a 90-minute tour at least a day in advance with Pierrici, a private company (www.pierreci.it).

At Rome's Palatine Hill, you can now tour the House of Livia, the home of the wife of Emperor Augustus. Guided visits, which are included with admission, take 20 people in every half-hour to tour the site and its newly restored frescoes. As surviving Roman wall paintings are rare (these date back to the first century B.C.), it's worth the trouble.

A few doors are better left closed: Rome's Mamertine Prison is no longer worth a visit. Until recently, it was a charming and historic sight. Today its artifacts have been removed, and a commercial tour-bus company is charging 10 euros for a cheesy "multimedia" walk-through. Don't go in. And avoid getting sucked in by the clever advertising for the Time Elevator Roma or the hype surrounding the new, inconveniently located MAXXI modern-art museum, which to me comes off like a second-rate Pompidou Center.

At St. Peter's Basilica, you won't have to descend into the crypt to find the tomb of the late, beloved Pope John Paul II. After he was beatified on May 1 (bringing him a step closer to sainthood), his remains were moved to the Chapel of San Sebastian on the main floor on the basilica (midway between Michelangelo's Pieta and the main altar).

In Venice, as renovations continue at the Accademia -- showcasing the city's top collection of Venetian paintings -- some major canvases are out of view and some rooms are closed entirely. There's still scaffolding around the base of the Campanile, the dramatic bell tower on St. Mark's Square, but a three-year restoration of the lovely little Bridge of Sighs -- popular with romantics who kiss as they glide under it on a gondola -- is now complete.

In Florence the big news for visitors is the energetic young mayor's passion for traffic-free zones. Once brutal for pedestrians, the city's core is now a delight on foot. That means it's also more bike-friendly, and you'll find appealing city bike tours and bike rental services readily available.

Florence also now offers a new sightseeing pass called the Florence Card (50 euros). Though it's unlikely to save you much money, it saves you the hassle of making reservations for the top sights (Uffizi and Accademia galleries), and -- most important -- allows you to bypass the long lines. The card is valid for 72 hours, includes most sights, and covers free use of city buses. Especially if you'll be seeing five or six major sights within three days, the pass is worth it for the convenience and the time saved.

At Florence's Duomo Museum, the restoration of the original panels of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise is wrapping up. The famous panels are being reinserted in their door frames and should be back on display for a formal inauguration on June 24, 2012, the feast day of Florence's patron saint, John the Baptist. And Florence's Galileo Science Museum, which was in a jumble of restoration for years, is now all fixed up and ready for prime time.

Sadly, the biggest change in Italy for 2012 is the result of a natural disaster. When I was in the magical towns of the Cinque Terre in May 2011, I never could have imagined that, just a few months later, the streets I walked on would be under more than six feet of mud and rocks, devastated by a horrific flash flood.

Of the five towns of the Cinque Terre, the two most popular towns for tourists -- Vernazza and Monterosso -- were hit hard. Monterosso plans to be ready for business in the spring of 2012, but Vernazza's road to recovery will take longer. At www.ricksteves.com we're host a landing page with updates, travel information, and hotlinks to organizations accepting donations to aid the town's recovery.

In spite of the damage and disruption, I'm already making plans to visit the Cinque Terre in 2012 and expect to have a wonderful Riviera experience. The strong spirit of its people and the love of its many honorary citizens -- the legions of visitors, like me, who have left a piece of their hearts there -- will ensure that the Cinque Terre will rebuild.

(Rick Steves (www.ricksteves.com) writes European travel guidebooks and hosts travel shows on public television and public radio. Email him at rick@ricksteves.com and follow his blog on Facebook.)

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Cannolis, raviolis and 'tude: Arthur Ave. in the Bronx wants to be known as real Little Italy

NEW YORK (AP) — Arthur Avenue in the Bronx is the kind of place where you might be bribed with a cannoli.

Many years ago, my father, a teacher, was begged by a student not to tell his parents he'd been caught fighting. "I'll bring you a box of cannolis every Friday," promised the student, who worked at a pastry shop in this old-school Italian-American enclave.

My dad did not accept the cannolis. But as a kid growing up in nearby suburbs, I often had treats from Arthur Avenue that he brought home. Then one day, I saw Arthur Avenue listed on an iPod app for New York City destinations and decided it was time to get to know the old neighborhood myself, before it morphed into some Disneyland of Italian-Americanness.

I'm happy to report that while Little Italy in downtown Manhattan has shrunk to barely two and a half blocks, what some call the "Real Little Italy" in the Belmont section of the Bronx is thriving, and it's as authentic as ever.

Visitors will readily find dozens of Italian restaurants, bakeries, butchers and produce stands that still sell all the goodies my grandfather remembers from growing up in the Bronx. But it's the mix of the surly and solicitous on this several-block stretch of Arthur Avenue and the intersecting 187th Street that lets you know this is a real community, in which a slight wariness of outsiders can only slowly be scratched away to expose a deeper warmth. Leave to others the affected display of intimacy or token use of ciao: On Arthur Avenue, if someone speaks to you in Italian, it's because he thinks you do. If someone greets you, it's because he knows you.

On a recent visit, as I tagged along with my father and grandparents to see the neighborhood through their eyes, my grandpa grabbed a hunk of meat at Biancardi's and exclaimed, "Pork butt! I haven't seen this in years!" They used to call it tenderloin, explained Sal Biancardi, a third-generation butcher, and it can be hard to find these days. But not here.

My grandfather, Dominick, the son of an Italian immigrant and his Italian-American wife, had grown up in the Bronx, and he and my grandmother raised their kids there. (While my grandmother is the daughter of Russian immigrants, she's an Italian cook, taught by her mother-in-law.) My generation was raised in the suburbs, but even there, when questions like "Where'd ya get the meat?" (or the raviolis, or the manicotti) were asked, the answer was usually "Arthur Avenue."

Dominick, who is 89, recalled that he first went to Teitel Bros., a wholesaler and retailer of Italian products from beans and olive oil to spices and tomatoes, around 1932. He didn't live especially close to Belmont — he remembers taking a streetcar with his mother to get there — but even back then, when the borough was full of Italians, it was the place to go.

In recent years, the area has been getting more attention. NYC & Company, the city's tourism arm, marketed it as part of its "Visit 9 in '09" campaign. The annual Ferragosto street fair, held this year on Sept. 11, has grown from drawing a few thousand to around 17,000 last year. And then there's the app.

But merchants promise that most of their clientele are still people who grew up in Belmont or whose parents used to live there, even though few Italian-Americans are still residents. They report seeing a panoply of license plates each Saturday — from Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont — as folks fill their trunks with delicacies and necessities for the week.

A few hours on Arthur Avenue — and some innocent questions — will bear out that merchants are not focused on, and are even charmingly unprepared for, tourists.

A query about the differences among sausages with long Italian names in one store, for instance, only revealed what was already apparent: Some were thick and some were thin.

A friend remembers once visiting a shop and eagerly asking what kind of ravioli they had, anticipating pasta made with pumpkin or sage like one might see at an upscale market.

Meat and cheese, the answer came back. She pressed. Meat and cheese, the salesman deadpanned again. While Arthur Avenue has benefited from the general rise of Italian cuisine — Chris Borgatti of the renowned fresh pasta purveyor Borgatti's declares, "Italian food has surpassed French food" — it is not of the trend.

Most of the shoppers on Arthur Avenue, in other words, know what cervellata is (a kind of sausage, made with lamb at Peter's Meat Market). And they like their ravioli with either meat or cheese. (Borgatti's, though, does have a variety with spinach.)

Jerome Raguso, of Gino's Pastry Shop, calls the neighborhood a "family reunion."

One of the joys to a visitor is observing those intimacies of customer and merchant.

The other, of course, is eating. A conversation about Arthur Avenue is a conversation about food, and it can be hard to go without getting requests. A Scottish friend who went with me once loves the savory biscotti from Madonia Brothers bakery — made from their famous olive or multigrain breads and laced with rock salt. A neighbor of my parents put in an order for unsalted ricotta, made fresh daily (as is the mozzarella) at Calandra's cheese shop.

Sal Biancardi remembers a call from a woman in California looking for a sausage she remembered from her childhood. Did they still make it? They did, and it was on a plane shortly thereafter.

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