BUY THE BOOK: theflr.net/rentaldiariesbook After an endless hunt for an affordable one-bedroom in Florence, Italy, ran her ragged, Mary Gray launched her “Rental Diaries” column on all things apartment-related. Triumphs. Disasters. Minor inconveniences. Meddling neighbors. This compilation of the column’s first 30 volumes is no flowery manifesto about the healing powers of la […]
BUY THE BOOK: theflr.net/rentaldiariesbook After an endless hunt for an affordable one-bedroom in Florence, Italy, ran her ragged, Mary Gray launched her “Rental Diaries” column on all things apartment-related. Triumphs. Disasters. Minor inconveniences. Meddling neighbors. This compilation of the column’s first 30 volumes is no flowery manifesto about the healing powers of la […]
“I’m going to have to zoom in on your face and on the food, Mary,” said my cameraman colleague during a recent filming session in my kitchen. We were shooting a low-budget video about low-budget pantry staples geared at Gen-Z students in Florence. “It’s just that you don’t have very pretty cabinets, so […]
I was three Negronis deep with my friend Valentina recently when the conversation took a familiar turn. You know the one: discussing the merits and drawbacks of the day-to-day in our adoptive country versus our native one, and how they play into our personal psychologies. Particularly after a certain amount of time passes, […]
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 common. But I’ve recently begun to reconsider, based on the running gags in each character’s comedy, both involving staircases. Across his show’s 11 […]
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 Netflix subscription, because the need to binge-watch Friends chronologically suddenly became urgent. I can’t imagine why. Don’t worry. Despite the rent-centric title of this […]
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 jewel of a building—is currently on a Marie Kondo kick. I say this based on the boxes of dusty coffee table books now sitting curbside […]
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 accelerated recovery process, we were forced to enroll in Weightlifting with half of the Golden Wave, Tupelo High’s middling football team. Our class met daily […]
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 lived together briefly, she’s still the kind of person I imagine sleeps on a cloud, remembers to toss lavender sachets in the laundry, and keeps […]
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 Rear Window experience”). She’s never gotten over the time she force-fed my younger sister and me the Hitchcock classic—after much, much buildup—and our teenaged selves […]
