Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy.
Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.
This edition is more about why we are doing this than travel tips. Or more like, why write about travel based on firsthand experience crafted by hand, rather than handing it over to an efficient machine?
I am going to defend one argument today: people with a point of view should share their experiences of interesting places through content they write themselves.
If you’ve read my argument carefully, you should note two important elements: point of view and interesting. We are mostly talking about travel writing here, so interesting comes with places in this niche, but my argument and its distinctions stand for any kind of writing (or content), regardless of the topic. Let me save you the time and hassle. Yes, it means not everyone has a point of view, and not everything is interesting. Now, I’m not going to spend too much time describing what is not interesting or what is not considered a unique point of view. Let’s just give you two examples.
If you think Bali is a unique destination where you will find yourself and experience anything remotely interesting, you are either unbearably naive or it’s your first time abroad. The same applies if you think dolce vita is in Positano while eating lemon pasta and drinking limoncello. If you are a traveler, it is forgivable. It’s your first time abroad, or simply you just don’t care enough to go beyond the generic places — that’s fine.
Unlike most travel writers, I accept that. A week in Ayia Napa in Cyprus in a 5-star hotel by the sea was one of the most relaxing and chilled weeks I’ve spent on vacation. Nothing about that place was unique or remotely interesting, except that the sea was incredibly clean and beautiful, the weather was nice, and the hotel was super comfortable. The most challenging part of the trip was picking the right sausages from the breakfast buffet. I had a hard year, and sometimes, we all just need a week of 5-star hotel luxury by the sea. But I don’t write about this experience because I don't consider it interesting or travel at all. I just went to a hotel that happened to be by the sea, that’s it.
But if you are a travel writer, I assume you write about interesting places from a unique point of view, because you are the expert on that location. So “20 best things to do in Capri” probably isn't the best topic to start with… Also, some places are simply uninteresting, regardless of your point of view. Writing about Florence is a bit challenging, I would say. Popularity makes everything less desirable, and the joy of discovery fades away in the busy noise of fridge magnet shops.
And this is where a unique point of view comes in. You, the writer, should have not just an expert eye, but a first-hand experience of the place. A good example is Bali. We can all agree that Bali is nothing interesting. It is basically a Los Angeles non-stop pool party on a tropical island, sprinkled with eco-bio-health-yoga-guru-longevity bullshit, plus “look, I pay $800 for a pool with a villa, while you pay $1500 for a shitty room in a condo in NYC.” But how about Lombok? You’ve probably never heard about it, but it is the island literally next to Bali. Same weather, same country, same beaches, same but fewer people and definitely fewer digital nomads, thanks God. But is it a good place? I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Probably. Maybe not. I can’t write about it, because I don’t have firsthand experience. All I could do is research. Which AI does better anyway. Then why bother writing if you can just ask your bot?
Which brings me to my point: why bother writing by hand in the first place?
Few know that I have another newsletter for marketing leaders, called AI-Ready CMO (AI-Ready CMO). It has around 20K subscribers, a paid program, and generates sizeable revenue from sponsorships. It is almost entirely AI-produced. Why? Because it is about AI & marketing information for marketers. First, marketing itself is as interesting as Bali. Second, personal flair slows the consumption of practical information, which marketers want on this topic. So using AI to write it isn’t just bad. It is preferable. The human-in-the-loop is in curation, review, and editing.
Also, only a few know that there is a site behind Anywhere Italy. It hosts the main domain (anywhereitaly.com), and most traffic and signups come from it. It looks like this:
The site has been live for three weeks, and the newsletter since March, and the two now bring in roughly the same traffic. They bring in roughly the same number of signups, and the site does it without Substack's recommendation engine and with far less aggressive signup harvesting. Site traffic is close to doubling every day since launch. And a bot runs it: two articles a day, all the social promotion, an archive of 800 articles built on a curated database of 1,000 towns, which I set up once and now barely touch.
I write the newsletter entirely by hand. I use AI for research here and there, but it is me who’s typing this edition and all the other essays. The site is separate, and it is almost entirely automated. And regardless of how much you hate AI, every number points in this direction:
Writing content by hand is inefficient, and it generates lower growth. A well-configured bot can achieve more signups and traffic for your content than you can with endless hours of hustling and writing and working.
Yet, I still believe that you should do it by hand.
On the site, at least on mine, but let’s be honest, I can name 100 other travel sites and articles that look and sound the same, the content is something like this:
The best hidden pretty towns within a 90-minute drive from Verona
The top 10 most beautiful beach towns in Liguria
The definitive collection of hidden mountain towns near Milan
You get it. Mine are at least numbers-backed. A real database underpins it, curated by me, so the AI generates only from a defined set of towns with a defined focus. It has a tone of voice trained on my work, so it sounds a little like me. It is still a bot.
“But people care about handwritten content, and they recognize bot-content!” The numbers suggest people don’t much care. Every visitor reads more than one page, stays more than two minutes, and some of them hit share and then sign up for this newsletter.
You still have to do it manually.
Despite all odds, I give you three reasons why you should write by hand. One will be practical, the other two are totally impractical:
First, the more you write by hand, the better data you'll give your bot so it can scale your content. Either use it just for research, or as a writing coach, or straight-up generate articles with it, the bot feeds on data. Writing is data. The more you write, the better the bot writes. While everyone is raving about “oh my God, AI gets trained on content on the Internet, where is copyright and privacy?” and other blabla, I can tell you right now: it is here, it'll happen, and you can do nothing about it. So why not train your own bot on your own data? At least you're in control of your own bot (kinda)? So write by hand, feed it to your AI, and use the bot to help you write better or write more.
Second, without you manually writing things, the entire activity becomes a soul-crushing numbers game. I love building a business, and I treat Anywhere Italy as such. I love opening my dashboard and seeing my numbers go up. But I never forget the core reason I started this: I wanted to write about Italy and share my experiences with others. If I don’t write, where’s the point? I love sitting down, plugging my headphones in, pouring a long coffee, and typing down my thoughts here. It’s almost like a meditation for me. I would write even if it’s my family who reads my stuff. If I cared about my audience as much as I am supposed to, I wouldn't spend an entire Sunday email on the niche question of why anyone should write travel content manually in 2026. I'm writing about this because it is on my mind right now.
Third, and this might sound weird, but you have a duty to share your point of view. The world, as of 2026, is fundamentally broken. I’m dead serious about this. Especially the Internet. It’s unbearably broken. I’m old enough to remember when it was not broken. What it was like before social media, before all this influencer bs and TikTok short-form brain-rot. Most of what I do on the Internet right now is configure filters to filter out the trash overflowing my screen. I hit mute/block/report 100X more than I hit follow/subscribe. And there are entire places on the net which I don’t even open anymore, just to keep my mind fresh, clean, and rot-free. I’m not naive, so I’m confident enough to say that most of this trash is coming not from programs, bots, or some unseen forces. Most of the broken content is coming from us, people.
To be fair, most people don’t possess a remotely interesting point of view. Not all opinions, POVs, or experiences are equal, and those with something unique to say struggle to get it out because the volume of idiocracy is 100X more than carefully created, deep-level content. We can argue about the why, but this is the reality we live in.
Whether you accept it or not, I think only losers cry about this. Nostalgia is for those who can’t accept the present and are afraid of the future. The best way to transform your present is to act on it and share your views with others. I believe that my POV is interesting, and I do live in an interesting place and visit even more interesting places. So why not write about it?
If you have a unique point of view and you know interesting stories, you have a duty to share it with others. It’s like a calling, a purpose, a mission —call it whatever you like. You need to do it. And the only way to do it is to create your content manually. I genuinely believe that it makes the world a better place. Those who have something valuable can live a better life just by consuming things crafted with love and care by other human beings.
I might be naive. But I’m also realistic enough to know I’m not creating content for those with the attention span of a 3-year-old baby. Even my choice of topic, hidden Italian towns, requires the literal extra mile that you go through to experience something more. But those with the time and energy to focus on quality are struggling to find proper content to read. That is why we have a duty to share. That is why we need to handwrite our articles, despite all the numbers and odds saying the complete opposite.
At least we, who still believe in this, have something cool to read.
— Peter
Pietrasanta, 23 August, 2026
New articles this week
I am currently managing a renovation project for my newly bought property in Turin. Also, Sophie slipped on the floor sadly, and we ended up in the ER. Thankfully, nothing broke, but I’ve been taking care of her a lot. She’s better now, so all good. But since the newsletter articles are handwritten, as explained, I had less time to write. So only two new articles this week.
One is the regular weekly town feature. This time, Assisi in Umbria. A popular destination for many, but an unpopular opinion of mine. Or is it?
The second article was about Italian water brands. I don’t know what’s up with me and my musings around market economics, probably my marketing blood flowing through these articles. After writing about the amaro and soda markets, I wrote about the water market. And next week, more of these content pieces are coming.
Next week, we will be back on track with towns in Lazio and upcoming food festivals, and I’ll also run some laps on popular Italian products.
PS: I’ve been featured on Michelle Damiani’s blog, where I wrote about my turf, Versilia. You can find the article here. Thank you, Michelle, for the opportunity!
