LIGHT MODE
DARK MODE
On a trip home for the Christmas holiday, I met up with a Florentine friend in San Francisco, where the rogue moved two years ago for a short-term photography gig and a girlfriend whose infatuation for him lasted much less time than his newfound love for the Bay area.
Love is something cherished and rare, but for me, falling in love is as unavoidable as tripping on uneven cobblestone. And it’s not my fault. For those who have ...
There is something about Peter Pan that moves me. It may be the way he knows how to wink. Or how he can laughingly fly into a sword fight. Or perhaps I'm simply struck by the very genius of him, comforted and reassured by the immovable conviction that he
The whole world is full of cultural investigators, and today, it's just you, me and the fencepost trying to figure out why people do the things they do. There are tons of signs to scrutinize along the road to cultural understanding and they all point to how a population
For some people ‘sorry' is a sour word, too tart to keep inside the mouth, for even a moment. For others, ‘sorry' is like a cough-drop, slightly menthol-flavored and meant to relieve, not heal. And then there are those for whom it's not about words
If you ask Francesca why she became a tour guide, she'll tell you about having to inventarsi una professione after her university degree brought her nothing but harrying waitressing jobs during high season. In the end, guiding suits her. Francesca's ability to look a complaining client
This morning, a newspaper whose name means ‘read' printed a headline that I've been trying to get my head around. One Italian in 10, it says, suffers from stress da rientro, a form of the blues that stems from one's disgruntled return to work and sudden withdrawal
Italians rarely have middle names, but if my friend Paola had one, it would be ‘Intimidating.' She realizes I feel this way and doesn't mind it in the least. I truly like her, and she knows that, too. So different from my own phlegmatic nature, capable people impress
Living abroad is an exercise in acceptance. When you stop craving chocolate-chip cookies and consider Cantucci a satisfactory dessert instead of a jaw-breaking stone-age fossil, you're in. When the memory of sales tax becomes as faded as a tricolored flag left hanging since the last
My mother-in-law likes to tell my children the Tuscan joke about the cat that waited for the mouse to emerge from its hole in the wall. For three days, the cat sat outside the mouse's home, waiting, waiting, waiting. When eventually the cat barked ‘bow wow,'
In the movies, workers sit in cubicles and wait for the day they'll be asked to pile their picture frames into a topless box and take their bedraggled desk-top plant elsewhere. This happens in real life too and it's called ‘being fired'. If you are an
The little black dress was invented to make fancy hotel dinners bearable, even when the table is too wide to attempt to talk across it. Parties like these are called ‘functions,' and diners usually butter up their nearest neighbors rather than buttering their own bread. If you're a
