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The Florentine
I don’t tend to think of Phil Dunphy and Clark Griswold, the dopey dads of Modern Family and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, respectively, as characters with whom I have much ...
In the past week, I’ve had a particularly dense concentration of deadlines and a growing list of ungratifying errands to be run. In the past week, I also reactivated my ...
By the time this column is printed, this is likely to be old news, but file the intel away for future reference. It seems that the Bellini Gallery—that antiques-filled, Arno-facing ...
At the start of our senior year of high school, my friend Anna and I discovered we’d neglected to earn the gym credits required to graduate. In a kind of ...
I had dinner last night with an old friend and onetime Florence housemate, someone who inspires envy quite easily: ritzy job in Rome, gorgeous wardrobe, adoring fidanzato. Even though we ...
My mother calls something a “Rear Window experience” when it fails to live up to great expectations (“I’m excited to take you to this restaurant. Sure hope it’s not a ...
Hello, my name is Mary, and I’m not an alcoholic (I don’t think). But if I am one thing, I am categorically unable to keep wine glasses from shattering into ...
Have you ever had “comeback sauce”? Originating in the American South, like your author, it’s a spicy catch-all (ketch-all?) condiment, a dubious blend of mayo, paprika, garlic and chili sauce, ...
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but in the sixth grade I almost nabbed first place at my school’s spelling bee. (Please hold your applause until the end, ...
I grew up attending an Episcopal church in Mississippi, which felt a bit like swimming on the moon. Our priest once remarked in a sermon that if a Mississippian hears ...
My first year and a half or so in Italy was spent grasping at any sort of anchoring point. For a brief period in this trial-by-fire, I bunked—“lived” would be ...
On Facebook recently, an acquaintance put out one of those pseudo-“ask the audience” posts. You know the kind: ostensibly the person wants input, but really their mind is quite made ...
Sex and the City’s writing-by-the-window sage “couldn’t help but wonder” about a lot of things, rarely speaking in the cadence of certainty. One of the exceptions was her oft-quoted proclamation ...
Now that we—in the EU, at least—are all sick of the GDPR and would gift Lucifer our cookie consent on a Christmas tray if it meant the link would just ...
You might remember a scene in Annie Hall that takes place after the titular character and Alvy Singer have parted ways. Alvy receives a frantic 3am phone call, rushing across ...
In an exercise of sound judgment, the powers-that-be here at The Florentine recently barred me from posting photographs I’ve taken on TF’s channels without first consulting him. I mean them. ...
Tutto incluso. “All-inclusive.” What a difference these two words make in a housing listing. Having the costs of water, gas, electricity—and in certain otherworldly apartments, WiFi—factored in to a ...
From the period of November 2016 to April 2017 I was positively desperate and, as a result, insufferable. You will read that and perhaps link it to a certain orange-tinged ...
In Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, a grandmother goes on a road trip. She wears her finest organdy garments so in case of an accident, “anyone ...
If you rent in Florence but don’t expect to live your entire life in one palazzo, you will probably one day navigate the hurdles of early withdrawal from a housing ...
Real estate is said to have three rules: location, location, location. Rents rise in fashionable areas—this is, of course, amplified in Florence. And, rather inconveniently for cash-strapped city dwellers, leading ...
Neighborly interactions have increased exponentially for me since I made the jump (down) from a third-floor walk-up to a ground floor apartment. This is thanks to a phenomenon I rarely ...
Rent had been due a few days, but Amber and I had time to find a fourth roommate to help us pay it. This was Florence. People needed rooms. The ...
For Daniel, details of {a person named} Florence’s relationship with James were hazy prior to the whole group’s arrival in {a city named} Florence. Florence and Daniel had never met ...
