I knew South Africa had great wildlife; I didn’t know they had also had a great wine region just outside of Cape Town. I actually could have gone whale-watching and wine-tasting on the same day. (We did both, but on different days).

I don’t know a thing about wines. Let me correct that. I know I like red more than white; I know I like visiting vineyards because they always seem to be lovely, and I know that 1997 was a very good year in Italy.

But back to South Africa. We were there doing some pretty serious stories — about crime, about politics, about unemployment and unrest. But Cape Town cameraman Peter Rudden twisted my arm and on the last day — when all our serious work was done — and dragged me out to the wine country near Stellenbosch.

We spent a great afternoon at Meerlust, where cellarmaster Chris Williams showed us around and told us what makes this part of South Africa such a great place to make good wine.

Take a look at the video below:

done

I’ve often said that the Italians are good at food, fashion and football. Football meaning soccer of course. They do manage to win a World Cup from time to time, and normally put on a pretty good show.

But I guess now we have to add Fiat. While a lot of people used to joke that the name stands for “Fix It Again, Tony” the company has actually made quite a turnaround. While it looks like Fiat is coming to the rescue of Chrysler, the Turin-based automaker is not actually putting any money down. Now that’s the way to buy a company.

While I have long been a fan of one of the other lines under the big Fiat tent, Alfa Romeo, Fiat itself has never really done it for me. I guess that’s because I owned a Fiat Uno for a while. It was fine for tooling around the city, but you weren’t going to get anywhere too fast.

But Fiat does make good “fun” cars. We took the Fiat 500 out for a ride as the Chrysler deal was being made. It’s not a bad little car. Take a look at the video.

And if you think that’s fun, the old 500, which looks almost just like a VW Beetle that’s been shrunk, is an absolute blast.

It’s a little hard to find a bright side to an earthquake, but I was impressed with the smile from a traffic cop just outside of L’Aquila on Tuesday morning.

“I’m wearing everything I have left,” she told me. “It’s a good thing I had my jacket in the car, or I wouldn’t even have this,” she said, tugging on sleeve of her blue police uniform.”

Why the smile? She and her extended family were all safe, and got out of their homes uninjured in the quake, a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter Scale which was so strong it shook people out of their beds as far away as Rome and Bologna.

A day and a half after the biq quake, some people were still walking around like it was a very bad dream. Many of them were bandaged, having been hit by falling concrete or stones as the force of the tremor reduced so buildings to a dusty mess.

There were still lots of hugs. Some were embraces celebrating the gift of life: people simply glad to see other survivors. Others hugged to mourn their losses together.

Some people were just trying to get back into their homes, although few managed to do that, since there are still aftershocks. Others simply cried as they looked at ruined remains.

Some residents of L’Aquila and the smaller towns surrounding it stood around piles of rubble, praying that relatives might be pulled out alive. Not many had their prayers answered, although was one “miracle” reported Tuesday night, a woman pulled out alive from a building that had collapsed around her. That was 42 hours after the jolt.

Italy is no stranger to earthquakes. One near Naples in 1980, slightly stronger than the one in L’Aquila, killed nearly 3,000 people. And deadly earthquakes rocked Umbria in 1997. The huge one was just over 100 years ago, 1908 in Sicily, in which an estimated 70,000 people lost their lives.

And yet, every time one hits, it’s a shock. Even with smaller tremors people go running out into the street, especially if they’ve ever experienced a serious quake before. They know the damage a quake can do.

L’Aquila, the “big” city in the Abruzzo region with a population of about 70,000, was the epicenter of the jolt, the smaller towns around it were actually harder hit.

I visited Onna, a relatively rural and poor place just a few miles outside of L’Aquila. It had about 400 residents before Monday, April 6. Now most of them are sleeping in cars around or in a temporary tent city that’s been put up near by.

But when Onna eventually rebuilds the two and three-storey homes that came crashing down so quickly, it will be short 40 residents. One-tenth of the population didn’t make it out in time. Onna was literally decimated.

While Onna is not especially beautiful, the panorama is lovely, with snow-capped mountains rising just a few miles away. The largest is called “Gran Sasso” or the Big Rock. In the summer, when there’s no snow, you can see just how rugged it is.

It’s tough terrain that been home for centuries to tough people. One big quake won’t scare them away.

If you’ve ever been to Rome, you know it’s not hard to find a good meal here, and certainly not if you know where to look. We normally know where to look.”

Art history professor Liz Lev, someone we frequently interview on more intellecutal matters, has also been gaining a reputation as an excellent cook. So Rome producer Mario Biasetti and I, intrepid reporters that we are, went to check out the rumor for ourselves.

Liz was kind enough to invite us into her kitchen to show us how to make pasta all’amatriciana. I’m not a foodie, so I can’t give you an entire history of the dish, but it comes from a town not far from Rome called Amatrice.

It’s simple — pasta, a bit of pork, tomato sauce, onion, garlic, pecorino cheese — and quite filling, the kind of thing shepherds in the area have been eating for centuries. It’s also a classic Roman dish.

Take a look at the video below to see how it’s made!

Someone once told me that if you hang around long enough in the Middle East, news is bound to break at some point. It never stays dull for very long. That’s certainly been true on just about all my trips to Israel, and several of my trips to Lebanon.

Our timing was pretty good – as journalists – in the summer of 2006. We arrived on the same day that Hezbollah carried out a cross-border raid in the south and captured two Israeli soldiers. The next morning, Israel bombed the airport, so we weren’t going anywhere for a while. We had planned to stay for five days and ended up staying five weeks, as Israel pounded Lebanon from the air and sea. Despite that, Hezbollah kept up its barrage of rockets into Israel.

This time around it’s a lot safer. People keep writing to say “Be careful” and “Keep your head down,” but it’s really quite calm. That doesn’t mean it won’t change. This is the Middle East, but for now it’s life as normal. As normal as it can be Beirut, anyway, which is a pretty chaotic city.

We’re just here to report on the reaction from the Arab street, which is angry, but for the most part, not violent. Producer Marcia Biggs lives here, so she knows her way around, and cameraman Olaf Wiig, who’s been pretty much all over the world, is enjoying his first visit to the city that used to be known as the Paris of the Middle East.