Buon giorno. I’ve been sharing some observations from a recent trip to Italy where Gladys and I visited family and celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary.

Here are a few more notes from our trip:

• It must be an adventure learning to cook in a new country. Italian temperatures are in Centigrade, not Fahrenheit like we are familiar with here.

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Then consider that many of the brands are not the same as they are here, so you’re not always sure how they’ll react in a particular dish.

And then consider the instructions, which may or may not be that helpful.

A box of lasagna in Italy offered instructions in a number of languages. In England and Spain it was suggested you cook them in a “hot oven” but offered no specific temperature. In France it suggested you needed a temperature of 180 degrees. In NO (Norway?) and Denmark it suggested a temperature of 200 degrees. And we weren’t sure where SE was, but there you needed a temperature of 250 degrees.

Those temperatures listed would be in Celsius.

• In Venice, on a brick wall facing a main canal, there was a large sign in English noting “Something Strange Happened Here.”

I’m yet to find out anything about why that sign was in English — maybe that’s what’s strange?

• Don’t let them find out in Washington or Baton Rouge, or else we’ll soon see it here. There was a 1-euro tariff (about $1.40 U.S.) on every ATM transaction in Italy, according to the receipt we got when using one.

• We traveled several times on very modern, very well-maintained toll roads called “Autostrada.”

Tolls for shorter trips of maybe an hour or so were maybe 4 to 6 euros but one longer leg of several hours was 30 euros.

Even without the exchange rate, I thought a toll of $30 was a lot compared to what I’ve seen in the United States.

We saw few police officers along our routes.

While there were numerous sites where speed was posted to be monitored by radar guns and cameras, I was told those were always out of order and no one paid any attention to them.

You didn’t see people hogging the left lane like you do here. They’d get over to pass and get right back in the right or middle lane.

I read somewhere the highest posted speed limit on the Autostrada was 130 km per hour, about 80 mph. I can tell you plenty of cars zoomed by going way faster than that.

• There’s a V.A.T. (value added tax) on business transactions and purchases that’s as much as 20 percent. V.A.T. on “basic products” is 4 or 10 percent. The prices posted included the V.A.T. so you couldn’t really tell.

Most things we saw in store windows and such seemed more expensive than here. For example, a store advertised Levi 501 jeans for 98 euros.

A quick search on the Web found plenty offered here for less than $50. Of course they would be an imported product in Italy.

WILL CHAPMAN is publisher of The Daily Iberian.