Taking communion today, I flashed back to a conversation with a guard in a museum in Spoleto, in the center of Umbria, the green heart of Italy. It involved squirrels and happened like this. I was in a writing program…
Blog Archives
Where’s that sabrage knife?
We had a chance to buy a very nice sabrage knife this summer, but even Maurizio with his mania for acquiring kitchen things his wife finds optional drew (or cut) the line at a $500 (circa) sabrage knife. The experience…
Delicious b&b in Friuli
We just got back from Italy where we spent some days in Friuli, a beautiful, not-often-visited region north-east of Venice, a land of vineyards, quiet towns, delicious, fresh and imaginative cuisine, thoughtful and engrossing museums, festivals and Hapsburg elegance. The…
Italian deer inherit the land
Some images work on your mind, whispering “story” or “metaphor” or “fable” or “warning.” Italy is freezing this winter, blanketed with quantities of snow unseen in many years. Here in the village of Alfedana in the mountainous spine of Italy,…
African queens in Naples
In the years that I lived in Naples, one of the most beautiful scenes took place on Thursday nights in the summer. Imagine. It’s perhaps 10 o’clock, still warm, with a breeze from the Bay. The Castel Nuovo (the “new…
Dangers of Italian wind
It always struck me as strange that for a coastal city, wind was considered such a mortal risk in Naples. I’m not talking about howling winds, tornado winds or hurricane winds. I mean breezes that might just flutter summer leaves.…
Italian at the train station
Aside from native born Americans and some tribal peoples, most of the world is bilingual. I studied a few languages at school in a desultory way, but it wasn’t until 1990 when I moved to Italy that fluency took on…
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…
How to curse a book thief
I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, a fictive biography of Poggio Bracciolini, the great book-hunter, active circa 1417 and pictured here in cute bucket-cap. It’s an illuminating read. In the very first chapter I found a useful suggestion. Did anybody…
What Italians do best
Between 1990 and 2000, I taught for the University of Maryland’s European Division at the U.S. Naval Base in Agnano, outside of Naples. Some of my students were the walking wounded of civilian life. “The drill sergeants didn’t beat me…
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