Estate 2026 (summer playlist)
Two Weeks, One Car, A Lot of Volume
Last summer was the epic one — 28 days, Paris to Sicily to Puglia to Rome, Bonnie charming every cab driver from Palermo to the Pantheon, John discovering "OCEANICA" and the rest of us discovering that "Pink Pony Cup" is the correct name of that song, actually, and we will die on this hill.
This year we kept it tighter. Two weeks, a rental car, and a loop through the north: Milan down to Camogli on the Ligurian coast, then back up and around through Bassano del Grappa, Marostica, Verona, and Bergamo. Less ground covered, more time to actually sit at the table. More aperitivo, fewer alarm clocks. The kind of trip where you find yourself driving the long way back to the hotel because the song isn't over yet.
Camogli was the centerpiece — that pastel stack of fishermen's houses spilling down to the harbor, the smell of focaccia coming out of every other doorway, the water that color of green you can't quite describe to someone who hasn't seen it. John ate his weight in spaghetti alle vongole, ordering it at lunch and again at dinner without a hint of shame. He learned to say "un altro, per favore" with the exact intonation of a small Italian man who knows what he wants. He mostly hides his Italian, plays it cool, lets us fumble through the menu, and then every so often he drops a sentence that makes a waiter light up and the rest of us go quiet. Thanks to La Scuola, his Italian immersion school, he knows more than he lets on. Bonnie's Italian, somehow, keeps getting better too.
We also lucked into the Sagra del Pesce, Camogli's annual fried fish festival, which turns the whole waterfront into one long celebration of whatever came in off the boats that morning. Plates of crudo for days. And then the moment that's going to live in my head forever: standing on the harbor first thing in the morning, eating fritto misto served straight off the back of a fishing boat into a paper cone, washing it down with a cold can of beer. The best breakfast I have ever had. I will be chasing that one for years.
The drive north through the Veneto was its own kind of magic. Bassano for the bridge and the grappa. Verona for the obvious reasons but also for a late dinner in a piazza where the light did that thing it does in July. Bergamo's upper city at golden hour, walking the walls with a gelato.
And then Marostica, which we will remember as the cherry town. Everyone was selling them. Roadside stands, back of a Fiat, an old woman with a folding table and a hand-lettered sign, a kid with a crate balanced on a stool. Bowls and bags and paper cones of them, that deep almost-black red, still warm from the sun. We bought too many. We ate them in the car, in the room, on a bench, walking. Stained fingers for two days.
Marostica is also a chess town. Every other year they stage a live human chess match in the piazza, costumed pieces moving square to square, a knight on an actual horse. We weren't there for the festival but you can feel it in the place — the checkered stone, the way the square is laid out like a board waiting for its pieces. A town that takes both cherries and chess seriously is the kind of town we want to come back to. The kind of stop that doesn't make the guidebooks but makes the trip.
The soundtrack was the car. Always the car. Whoever had aux had the floor, and the rule was simple: if it makes you want to roll the window down, it stays in. This playlist is what survived.
Each song is a stretch of road, a roundabout we took twice, a chorus we all knew by the third day.
A few favorites from the family:
John's picks: "Italia Starter Pack" by J-Ax. I can still hear him in the back seat, in full voice, owning the "pa-pa-pa-ra-pa." No idea what the rest of the song was about and he didn't either, but that chorus was his. We'll be hearing it in the kitchen for months. His English-language pick from Radio Kiss Kiss was "Talk To You" by ANOTR feat. 54 Ultra — a glossy dance track that makes him want to dance every time it comes on, fully committed, in the car or out of it.
Bonnie's pick: "AL MIO PAESE" by Serena Brancale, Levante & DELIA. Serena Brancale has now shown up on Bonnie's list two summers running — last year it was "SERENATA," this year it's this one. There's a warmth to her voice that fits the way Bonnie moves through Italy, like she's already home. The song itself is a love letter to the south, to a hometown, to the place that made you, and Bonnie sang along to it the whole way north like it was hers too. By the second week she had the chorus down. By the end she was correcting John's pronunciation.
Mark's pick: "Bella Madonnina" by Tananai. The beat hooked me first, but there's a moment where a plucked string instrument comes in that sounds, to my ear, like something off a Yoshida Brothers record. We'd just come back from Japan a few months earlier, the shamisen still rattling around in my head, and here it was again in the middle of a Milanese pop song. Italy doing what Italy does — picking up something from somewhere else and making it sound like it always belonged here.
This is what summer in the north of Italy sounded like for us this year. Driving music, dinner music, "one more glass of wine on the terrace" music, cherry-stained-fingers music. We hope it carries a little of that with it.
Benvenuti nella nostra playlist Estate 2026. Roll the windows down.
