Just some more random thoughts ... since your wife is into cooking buy some wonderful cheese, have it vacuum packed and bring it home, cut it into smaller pieces and freeze it. It's legal to bring in hard cheese to the US. We do this all the time and the cheese we get from Italy, even after being frozen, is fantastic and a bargain. You can sometimes find shops where well-aged - as in 125+ year - balsalmico is a fabulous price. What I love about doing this is it makes the vacation linger long after we return ... everytime we dip into the cheese it all comes back.

As for wine, if you're into that, do a little research on wines that perhaps aren't imported into the US. We generally go with a list of what we want and then go on a fun treasure hunt to find the wines. The Lamborghini family has made some very fine wines that are not imported to the US (some of their wines are, but the better ones are very limited and stay in Italy). After visiting the Lamborghini winery, they directed us to a wonderful enoteca in Cortona where we found some of the last bottles of what we were looking for.

We've stayed at places where we've had our own cooks and that was fun because my son is into cooking and he got to help, go shopping with them to see what they looked for, and learn some of their recipes. You might look for some places like that in Tuscany or Umbria.

If your wife likes to shop, I can help there too, especially if she likes the majolica from Deruta.