When we lived outside Naples, our local hospital was called La Schiana for the small mound on which it perched rather than its grand official designation: Ospedale Santa Maria delle Grazie di Pozzuoli. The city of Pozzuoli was old before…

It happens at books groups that someone asks if Opi is real. Oh yes. And it has been real for a long time, as the site Opionline can tell you in English and Italian. Altitude 1250 ft, current population 500,…

Near Ancona is the hill town of Loreto, an international pilgrim Mecca since it hosts the House of Maria. That Maria, the mother of Jesus. You may wonder what it’s doing in Central Italy and also why it’s so Baroque,…

We lived in Lucrino, outside Naples, for nearly a year. It wasn’t the best of apartments. Built into a hill, only the living room and kitchen had windows, not the bedrooms. No heat or ventilation. In winter the cold was…

Ancona, Italy – the name comes from the Greek for “elbow.” Ancona is a stubby elbow into the Adriatic in the quiet charm of central Italy with rolling fields of lavender and sunflowers, serene hill towns and limed soil that…

With the death of her husband, my lovely mother-in-law Sara plunges into the Byzantine world of Italian post-mortem bureaucracy. Yet recall that this is the land of Machiavelli, of official lexicons that border on the Baroque. Example: when I was…

Every country has codes, every culture has codes, even as globalization washes over us. I offer these few don’ts, these non si fa (one doesn’t do this) behaviors that I picked up by doing them in Italy and learning, oops,…

I first saw Lake Erie in 1961 on a westward trek with my parents from our home in New Jersey to a family reunion with LA cousins what they determined would be in centrally located Yosemite. My mother, with her…

It’s an unspeakably beautiful spring day and having given the next chapter in my new book to my writing group, I’m puttering in the yard with a relatively clear conscience. Now Italian has many marvelous words, and speaks eloquently of…