A land of so many dreams, with its fairy-tale castles, hill-top towns and fabulous verdant landscape, Tuscany is also home to some of Italy’s very best red wines, based on the Sangiovese grape. This part of Italy is very much olive oil country too, with excellent cuisine, and a visit to Tuscany usually features high on any food and wine lover’s wish list.

In 2003, early on in my fourteen-month journey across Asia and while sitting atop the Great Wall of China, I wrote in my notebook, "Many ways exist to measure a journey—miles, months, passport stamps.  But now another measure has come to mind: walls traversed." In the year that followed I wrote a lot about traversing walls, though not the physical kind.

In this article I’d like to invite you to play a game.  Below you’ll find twenty quotes, listed in no particular order).  Read each of them aloud to yourself and measure it on an inspiro-meter: on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest level of inspiration), how inspiring is this quote for you?  Once you measured them all, post a comment below with a quote that’s closest to ten.

“The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”
Flora Whittemore