My first November in Naples was cold and wet. We lived in the basalt-dark center of the city. Our tiny apartment had no refrigerator to hold a turkey, no oven to cook it in, no American friends to invite us…
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Queen Joan’s Lurid Tastes
Here is the Villa Donn’Anna, lapped by the Bay of Naples. It was built on or around a palace where Queen Joan I (1326–1382) reputedly had beautiful young fishermen brought to her boudoir for nights of medieval passions, then thrown…
Posted in WWWS
The Ellis Island name myth
“They changed my family’s name at Ellis Island.” You hear that often. It’s a myth, an urban-immigrant legend. The Ellis Island clerks operated from passenger lists created by the ship captains or their agents at the port of origin who…
Vaudeville online!
Ladies and gentlemen, live from the great, gilded theaters of vaudeville and my own computer, hear authentic acts! Thrill to the song, the comedy, the gripping (sort of) drama of yesteryear! All free, all perfectly pure for the most delicate…
Posted in WWWS
Naples by moonlight
My novel in progress begins in Naples around 1900, in a palazzo on the bay. So I’m looking at images of the time and found this by Ivan Aivazovsky, an astonishingly prolific Armenian landscape painter who lived from 1817-1900. In…
Spanish flying incense
This has no connection whatsoever with my next novel. Just a cool fact. Here is the world’s largest incense holder. It’s in the Cathedral of Santiago and weighs 119 lbs. More precisely, it’s a botafumeiro, to be swung into motion…
In Galicia, with miracles
We just went to Galicia, on the north-west coast of Spain, where the rain falls (mainly) and pilgrims have come for centuries to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The draw is the body of St. James, which was being…
Millennia of pasta
Marco Polo’s claim to have imported the pasta concept from China is pretty much sauced with ego. For thousands of years, flour, water, salt and ingenuity have made pasta-like foods for the poor. In the first century BCE, Horace wrote…
Wanted: 50 hr. work week
In June, 1911, the Cleveland garment workers, mostly immigrant women, struck for a series of demands the owners considered outrageous: a 50 hour work week; a “short Saturday” (7:30am to 1:30pm); Sundays off; not being charged for use of the…
The anti-Statue of Liberty
In the midst of virulent anti-immigration legislation rampant in so many states now, I came upon this cartoon from the time of President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). Miss Liberty is complaining: “Mr. Wilson, if you are going to make this island…
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