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1. Score a Great Deal A just-launched global database of hotel discounts, cheapostay.com, is true to its name, listing more than 85,000 properties with rates up to 50 percent off. You can search by name, city, airport, or nearby landmark. At press time, we discovered a double room at Le Méridien Montpaasse, in Paris, for just $255. Meanwhile, veteran booking site hotels.com has added a new feature: every Tuesday at 12:01 a.m., the site posts approximately 400 new packages—they’re only listed for 24 hours, so the earlier you log on, the better your odds of snagging a discount. You’ll find bargains primarily in the U.S., Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada.

The best part?Offers are for rooms that can be booked through the year. 2. Get Traveler Feedback The new research site travelpost.com helps you decide where you should (or should not) stay by culling more than 2 million user reviews from 10 websites, including IgoUgo, Orbitz, and Travelocity. 3. Decide the Best Time to Go The latest calendar-based China insert nut Suppliers research tool at kayak.com allows you to view the lowest room rates each day for the next two months—a double at New York’s Tribeca Grand Hotel, for example, costs $290 on May 23, but jumps to $371 one week later. Yapta also launched a new rate-tracking tool that lets you keep an eye on prices at properties worldwide.

A Taste for Travel Your April Food Issue is now my bible and guidebook. In one all-encompassing magazine, you covered many of the places my wife and I are visiting this year: London, Marseilles, Singapore, Spain, Istanbul. It’s as though you published it just for us. —Peter Volny, Fountain Hills, Ariz. Kitchen Confidential As an aspiring chef, I deeply connected with “The Cookbook Collectors” [April], about Matt Lee and Ted Lee’s fondness for diving into a cookbook. I remember reaching to the top of my mom’s bookshelf and reading every one I could access, from Wolfgang Puck’s Live, Love, Eat! to Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. With the aid of a cookbook, I too was able to travel the world in my own kitchen. This article reminded me of that. —Patrick Glenn, North Caldwell, N.J. Season’s Eatings Aleksandra Crapanzano’s “Summer Is Served” [April] stirred up so many wonderful memories of food and place: soft breezes with burgers on the grill at our summer cottage, and stark winter nights with plates of osso buco distributed slopeside at my favorite mountain resort. Thank you for transporting me. —Peter Uhl, via e-mail Big in Japan I read “Bone Soup: A Love Story” [April] with gusto but was puzzled by the writer’s claim that “Japan doesn’t have a culture of street food.” This is simply untrue. Among the delights of more than a dozen years of living in and traveling throughout Japan, I found the street food—especially ramen and oden handcarts—to be as satisfying as any sushi bar or formal washoku restaurant.

The author should revisit Japan during the annual Bon festival in August and focus on local matsuri (festivals), where street food takes on a very different significance for the Japanese. —Joe Hlebica, Red Bluff, Calif. structural rivets Reader’s Find My wife and I often seek out movie locations while we travel, so when I read about the French village of St.-Jeannet in “Retu to Provence” [April], I recalled the property in town used as John Robie’s house in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. It can be seen from the Frogs’ House, the base for our explorations. The owners give tours to nearby wineries—be sure to taste the local Bellet. It’s not made anywhere else. —Richard Oldham, Orlando, Fla. Chatter Readers sound off about “100 Places to Eat Like a Local” [April]. What’s the best gelateria in Rome? Why no mention of sushi in Taipei? You had plenty to say about where to eat now: Windy City residents were especially vocal. “How does Chicago goose-egg the entire article when there’s so much great food?” questioned one reader. “The Chicago Dog is the best representation of the All-American hot dog.” From another local: “O’Connell’s Pub, in St. Louis, is laughable compared to our burger joints.” T+L’s breakfast picks, however, gaered praise. Others agreed that New Orleans, Nashville, and Austin, Texas, deserved the accolades, though one felt that fried chicken is better had in Memphis. Food for thought? Another reader tweeted it best: “About to head out. Maybe an impromptu food tour?”

Mode architecture has never been particularly welcome in Venice. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn were all rebuffed in their efforts to add to the city’s historic fabric. Only after heated controversy did a soaring contemporary bridge by Santiago Calatrava open last year over the Grand Canal. But one latter-day architect, Carlo Scarpa, did manage to put a subtle imprint on the archipelago city—his native town. Scarpa’s idiosyncratic approach veered outside the Inteational Style of Modeism, the dominant mode during his lifetime, tapping sources as diverse as Wright, the Viennese Secession, and Japanese tradition. And in a career spanning five decades, until his death in 1978, Scarpa won a cult following among architects around the world.

He remains little known to the general public. But to tour his works today, almost all of them concentrated in Venice and the Veneto region, is to embark on a jouey of aesthetic discovery. I’ve mapped the best route for taking in Scarpa’s unparalleled museums and impeccably detailed spaces, starting in the heart of the old city and then driving to the nearby towns and countryside. Day 1: Venice and Verona Soon after arriving in town, I follow the crowds making a beeline for the Piazza San Marco. But I don’t join them at the basilica or the Doge’s Palace, instead heading for a far newer landmark: the showroom Scarpa created for the Olivetti company in 1957. Diagonally across from the celebrated cathedral, it’s a jewel-like temple for secular objects. Scarpa transformed a long, narrow space undeeath the arcade along the square’s northe flank into a dazzling, intimately scaled showcase for the display of Olivetti typewriters that, by the middle of the last century, had become coveted icons of mode design.

As Scarpa was a Venetian, water played a key role in almost all of his projects. At the Olivetti showroom I find a carved black marble pool in the entryway, as if to echo the fonts of holy water at the basilica. Ahead is a floating staircase of marble slabs suspended from bronze rods, leading to an upper level with balconies along one side. The floors are intricately patteed in colorful Murano glass tiles. The space was until recently a cramped commercial art gallery, but the superb craftsmanship and pure geometry of Scarpa’s achievement shine through. A five-minute walk from Piazza San Marco is Scarpa’s most important project in Venice, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, in the central Castello district, where the architect remodeled the ground floor and garden of a 16th-century palazzo that now houses an art museum and research library. Just outside, he created a delicate wooden footbridge across the narrow canal between the palazzo and its small piazza. It leads into a series of chambers on the palazzo’s lower level, long prone to periodic flooding; Scarpa’s solution was to leave a gateway open to the canal and add stone-lined channels that allow high waters to course through the building without covering the floors.   Scarpa lined an adjacent exhibition hall with travertine slabs, inserting backlit panels of frosted glass edged in brass as vertical accents. Water is an equally important element in the rear garden, where it flows from a pond scattered with water lilies at one end through a series of hollows, emerging from a spout that pours into a basin.   This tranquil spot feels miraculously far removed from the city’s tourist throngs. But I’m not surprised to see other visitors inspecting the details. One of them, Juan Rivera, is a Washington, D.C., real estate developer who trained as an architect and came to Venice specifically to experience Scarpa’s buildings. “So much comes at you in Venice that’s political or religious,” Rivera says. “Scarpa doesn’t do any of that. He’s simply saying, ‘Look at this—it’s beautiful.’” With several of Scarpa’s most significant designs waiting for me on the mainland, I head by vaporetto for the Piazzale Roma to pick up a rental car, passing under Calatrava’s glass-and-steel bridge on my way. Any clash between modeity and Venice’s deep-rooted tradition fades as I hurtle in my compact, fuel-efficient Mercedes-Benz B 180 across the causeway that links the islands with terra firma, driving then for a while along the Brenta River before taking the autostrada directly into Verona, arriving less than two hours later. Scarpa’s Museo di Castelvecchio is easy to find—it’s in a hulking 14th-century fortress along the Adige River—and after checking into the Hotel Colomba d’Oro, in the city center, and lunching on veal cutlets at the Trattoria I Masenini, I head over to explore. At the Castelvecchio I reencounter Scarpa’s emphasis on texture and juxtaposition. From 1958 to 1964 he reworked the museum, which displays medieval and Romanesque art and ancient weaponry, to make its history come alive by revealing the layers of the past. He inserted mode windows behind the Gothic arches and laid new carved stone and grooved concrete floors that resemble plush carpets. The interiors have a spare elegance that renders this one of Europe’s most sublime museum buildings.   Day: 2 On to Asolo   The next moing, I drive about two hours northeast along the autostrada and then on smaller roads through a bucolic landscape to Asolo, the picturesque hill town where Scarpa lived from 1962 to 1972. Asolo proves an ideal base for exploring two more Scarpa designs as well as villas drawn up by that most famous architect of the Veneto region, Andrea Palladio. Entering Possagno, I make my way to sculptor Antonio Canova’s former home and the adjacent museum, partially designed by Scarpa, known as the Gipsoteca. The building provides an airy exhibition hall of white planes and glass, which harmonizes with Canova’s white casts. As he did at the Olivetti showroom, Scarpa made the best of a narrow plot, designing a cascade of levels that descends toward the cast of Canova’s masterpiece The Three Graces, poised in front of a glass wall with a sparkling pool outside.   Day 3: Tomba Brion   All this painstaking attention to detail reaches its pinnacle at Scarpa’s most elaborate creation, the Tomba Brion. A short drive south of Asolo, at the end of an allée of cypress trees in the village of San Vito d’Altivole, Scarpa drew up a private necropolis on an L-shaped site around the edges of the municipal cemetery. Massive, sloped concrete walls screen out sound and the sight of cofields and houses beyond. A cubic chapel seems to float in a pool of water at the entrance. The architecture is vaguely reminiscent of Mayan ruins or Japanese temples, but mysteriously reinterpreted in a way that makes the visitor feel altogether transported into some ethereal realm where a serene beauty has banished all other elements. In a fitting epitaph to my Veneto pilgrimage, I find Scarpa’s grave near a coer of the L shape, inside the public cemetery. It’s a simple marble slab inset with brass lettering and lines that radiate outward, as if beckoning a new generation to follow his example. Michael Z. Wise is a Travel + Leisure contributing editor. For dozens of driving getaways, including wine country weekends, New England foliage tours, and scenic European routes, go to travelandleisure.com/ideas/driving.   Many airlines fly nonstop to Venice’s Marco Polo Airport, located just eight miles north of the city.   Stay Hotel Colomba d’Oro Colorful lodging near the Castelvecchio Museum. 10 Via Cattaneo, Verona; 39-045/595-300; colombahotel.com; doubles from $340. Hotel Flora 17th-century palazzo with a courtyard garden. San Marco 2283/A, Venice; 39-041/520-5844; hotelflora.it; doubles from $284. nut insert Factory Hotel Villa Cipriani Former home of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with a garden overlooking the surrounding countryside. 298 Via Canova, Asolo; 39-0423/52341; villaciprianiasolo.com; doubles from $295. Eat Al Covo Well-crafted dishes like house-made gnocchi with baby calamari and spider crab. Castello 3968, Venice; 39-041/522-3812; dinner for two $130. Hosteria Ca’ Derton da Nino Excellent small-town fare. 11 Piazza Gabrielle d’Annunzio, Asolo; 39-0423/529-648; dinner for two $130. Osteria Alle Testiere Tiny, informal seafood spot; reservations recommended. Calle del Mondo Novo, Castello 5801, Venice; 39-041/522-7220; dinner for two $120. Ristorante al Conte Pescaor Seafood specialties including homemade tagliolini with king prawns and asparagus. San Marco 544, Venice; 39-041/522-1483; dinner for two $100. Trattoria I Masenini Next door to the Castelvecchio Museum. 34 Via Roma, Verona; 39-045/806-5169; dinner for two $80. See Banca Populare di Verona 2 Piazza Nogara, Verona; 39-045/867-5111. Fondazione Querini Stampalia Castello 5252, Venice; 39-041/271-1411. Former Olivetti showroom Piazza San Marco, Venice. Gipsoteca 74 Via Piazza Canova, Possagno; 39-042/354-4323; museocanova.it. Museo di Castelvecchio 2 Corso Castelvecchio, Verona; 39-045/806-2611; comune.verona.it/castelvecchio/cvsito/index.htm. Tomba Brion Via del Cimitero, San Vito d’Altivole. Venice University Institute of Architecture Santa Croce 191, Venice; 39-041/257-1111. Hosteria Ca’ Derton da Nino Excellent small-town fare. Alle Testiere With only 24 seats and a strong following, getting a reservation can be a challenge, but if you succeed, you'll be rewarded with fresh seafood—including seasonal specialties like tiny softshell crabs—a varied wine list, and friendly service. Sommelier Luca Di Vita presides over the tiny salotto, outfitted with an antique marble-topped bar, where he advises patrons on how to pair the best Veneto whites. Piatti del gioo might include sautéed John Dory with lemon and orange, sprinkled with tarragon, and Luca’s homemade ginger-and-vanilla gelato. Al Covo Well-crafted dishes like house-made gnocchi with baby calamari and spider crab. Hotel Villa Cipriani Former home of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with a garden overlooking the surrounding countryside. Museo della Fondazione Querini Stampalia Hotel Colomba d’Oro Colorful lodging near the Castelvecchio Museum. Hotel Flora Ristorante al Conte Pescaor Seafood specialties including homemade tagliolini with king prawns and asparagus. Trattoria I Masenini Lunch on veal cutllets at this spot, located next door to the Castelvecchio Museum. Banca Populare di Verona Former Olivetti showroom Instead of the basilica on San Marco, head for a far newer landmark: the showroom architect Scarpa created for the Olivetti company in 1957. Diagonally across from the celebrated cathedral, it’s a jewel-like temple for secular objects. Scarpa transformed a long, narrow space undeeath the arcade along the square’s northe flank into a dazzling, intimately scaled showcase for the display of Olivetti typewriters that, by the middle of the last century, had become coveted icons of mode design. As Scarpa was a Venetian, water played a key role in almost all of his projects. At the Olivetti showroom is a carved black marble pool in the entryway, as if to echo the fonts of holy water at the basilica. Ahead is a floating staircase of marble slabs suspended from bronze rods, leading to an upper level with balconies along one side. The floors are intricately patteed in colorful Murano glass tiles. The space was until recently a cramped commercial art gallery, but the superb craftsmanship and pure geometry of Scarpa’s achievement shine through. Gipsoteca Venture to sculptor Antonio Canova’s former home and the adjacent museum, partially designed by Scarpa, known as the Gipsoteca. The building provides an airy exhibition hall of white planes and glass, which harmonizes with Canova’s white casts. Castelvecchio Museum Architect Scarpa’s Museo di Castelvecchio is easy to find—it’s in a hulking 14th-century fortress along the Adige River. From 1958 to 1964 Scarpa reworked the museum, which displays medieval and Romanesque art and ancient weaponry, to make its history come alive by revealing the layers of the past. He inserted mode windows behind the Gothic arches and laid new carved stone and grooved concrete floors that resemble plush carpets. The interiors have a spare elegance that renders this one of Europe’s most sublime museum buildings. Tomba Brion The building's architect, Scarpa drew up a private necropolis on an L-shaped site around the edges of the municipal cemetery. Massive, sloped concrete walls screen out sound and the sight of cofields and houses beyond. A cubic chapel seems to float in a pool of water at the entrance. The architecture is vaguely reminiscent of Mayan ruins or Japanese temples, but mysteriously reinterpreted in a way that makes the visitor feel altogether transported into some ethereal realm where a serene beauty has banished all other elements. Venice University Institute of Architecture