I’ve always avoided gondola rides in Venice just as I avoid all tourist traps. But with Venice coming out of pandemic lockdown, I gave it a try. It was worth every minute of our 45-minute ride.
Venice has had been more economically devastated than any city in Italy but as it crawls out of lockdown it reveals itself as the peaceful, romantic paradise it once was.
I’ve traveled to 107 countries but none in the last 14 months. I miss it more than anyone can know. Here is why.
The proposed European Super League is a greedy, elitist idea that will enrich the already rich and make it harder for others to compete and their fans to have hope.
La Nuvola is Rome’s answer to modern architectural marvels, a bookend to the legendary monuments this city built 2,000 years ago. Known formerly as the Nuovi Centro Congressi (New Congress Center), it is a gargantuan glass cube made up of 592,000 square feet of convention space. Built from 2008-16, it was awarded the 2012 Best […]
Italy celebrates the 700-year anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death while I reflect on one of my favorite books as a young adult.
Since moving to Rome in 2014, birthdays have never been dates of dread. I don’t see them as another year older. At my age, 65, they blend together, like cards in an ever-growing deck. Instead, birthdays in Rome are dates for adventure. Every birthday, on or around March 29, Marina and I head off to […]
The Augustus Mausoleum was the first of its kind in Ancient Rome, built even before the Pantheon. It has reopened to the public for the first time in 14 years.
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Gray skies the shade of a lonely broken highway greeted me Tuesday as I ventured out for the first time in Episode 1 of “Lockdown Rome: Season 2.” The science fiction tale of a broken, 3,000-year-old city has a different feel this time. A year ago, this city of 2.8 million felt like the day […]
ANZIO, Italy — You can’t tour Rome and Southern Italy without being in awe of the monstrous footprint this civilization laid down 2,000 years ago. Monuments and market places, mausoleums and temples, the most powerful civilization in man’s history stretched from what is now Great Britain to Persia. Peoples and armies in between cowered with […]
PALESTRINA, Italy — Before the Virgin Mary there was Fortuna Primigenia. She was the Roman Goddess of Fate, the oldest daughter of Jupiter. In 204 B.C., as the Roman Republic flexed its muscles, the largest sanctuary on the Italian peninsula was built in her honor. Stretching 1,300 feet at the base and crawling up the […]
Naples Underground covers 2,500 years of Naples history dating back to the Ancient Greeks.
