When you call a foreign country home and summer rolls
around and you find yourself planning a vacation to the old place you used to
call home, you realize how strange your life has become. You are now, in many
ways, a tourist in your own land. You find yourself
I truly wasn't trying to harm her. It was early April-that cruel month
when birthday invitations ramp up again, when kids who've gone stir-crazy all
winter have learned with fiendish skill how to push all your buttons (and push
them, with relish)-and my daughter
Were Dante to write the Inferno today, I have no doubt that
commuting in Florence would be among the punishments in his nine circles of
Hell. Thus, I was rather nonplussed to read Mayor Matteo Renzi's assertion that
his favorite means of getting around Florence is on foot, as
Perhaps it's some kind of maternal sacrilege, but I must confess a loathing for birthday parties, which, here in Italy, tend to be of epic length, demanding the ferocious stamina of a gladiator fighting off a pride of peckish lions. They typically involve weird clowns, animatrici of arbitrary talents,