DAY ONE Norma Shearer, playing Elizabeth Barrett, gets all excited when Robert Browning nudges her to come to Italy with him. " Italy... ah, Italy!" she gushes, and rightly so. That's what I felt like doing after a cramped nine hour flight from JFK to Pisa. Don't even get me started about that! Everyone knows that flights from JFK to Orlando are supposed to be cramped, but to Pisa? Who goes to Pisa besides me and Galileo Galilei? The flight was long and tiring, and at one point I almost asked the flight attendant for fresh-squeezed water. But still... I was [View Full Entry]

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I finally decided to do it-- after 25 years, ritorno in Italia ! That's not bad, this going to Italy every 25 years. At this rate my next trip will occur when I'm 78 years old, and who knows? It may be in a box! (Just kidding; I plan on living past 100 because I want to see if the Democrats achieve a 100% majority in both the House and Senate.) My friend Eugene and I were talking one time about the figurative town of Cazzolungo, in Sicily. In the 1960s the town found itself, thanks to emigration, with a large [View Full Entry]

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Do you like to shop? I don't. I like to go and buy the things I need, checking them off a list as I go along from store to store, not doing any comparison shopping or wielding coupons. I mean, it's not because I'm rich or anything, but I've felt that time is more valuable than anything else-- time is the one thing you can't see, and so I'm loath to squander it. So, to make this as streamlined as possible, I've made a list of all the things I will need to bring to Italy in mid-July, which is cross-referenced [View Full Entry]

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Okay; I've gone on and on and ON about getting ready for this trip, both here and here. And there was talk of my mother possibly coming along with me for this looming Italian trip-- talk which, in a Northern Italian woman, is spoken silently but nevertheless reverberates along the horsehair-and-plaster walls of her 1912 semi-detached house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We'd always spoken about making the crossing together, a trip I know she'd love. After all, Mom hasn't been to see her cousins since 1950. That trip was captured on film, all stored in yellow Kodak boxes and annotated by [View Full Entry]

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