Europe

July 7, 2017

Growing old and blind in Rome: My venture into Italy’s No. 2-ranked public health care system

My new look. For the first time in my life, at 61 years of age, I'm wearing glasses. Photo by Marina Pascucci

As the United States free falls into Donald Trump’s Let-Them-Eat-Cake healthcare plan, I am learning first hand the benefits of the healthcare American progressives dream about. It’s not by choice. It’s not by journalistic research. Instead, for the past two months I have had an inside look at Italy’s public healthcare through my own misfortune.
I am now half blind.
My right eye has gone from near 20-20 to non functioning. If I close my left eye, it’s like a steel door covers my right eye with slits to let in some light. I’m a prisoner in my own skull. My depth perception is shot. Most everything is blurry as if scuba diving without a mask. This didn’t happen gradually. It happened nearly overnight. And it’s frightening.
(To read more, click here.)

June 16, 2017

Berlin: “Silicon Valley on the Spree” heading toward a very bright future with eye still on a very dark past

One of the many musicians in front of Brandenburg Gate, once the symbol of East-West division and now one of top attractions to 12 million visitors a year. Photo by Marina Pascucci

all over Berlin you can find chilling, haunting memorials to Germany’s ugly involvement in the Holocaust and communism. A four-story museum is dedicated entirely to the evils of Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. The Stasi prison still stands, as is, giving tours four times a day to show what they did to prisoners who merely had a negative thought about their lovely lives in East Germany. A Holocaust Memorial was erected as recently as 2005 and covers a space the size of a football field. A DDR Museum shows what life was like under communism, a system that strives for mediocrity, a quest that undermines all human emotion and drive.
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June 13, 2017

Iceland’s Hakarl (fermented shark meat) isn’t as hard to eat as it is to pronounce

The shark meat dries for three to four months before being consumed.

The greatest of the gross, the lowest of the lousy, is a food so vile its legend — not to mention its aroma — has reached every corner of the globe. It’s called hakarl. If you know Iceland, you know hakarl. You just didn’t know the name, nor can you pronounce. In Icelandic’s inane pronunciation guide, you say it HOW-kaht. That’s Icelandic for — wrap your mind around this — rotted shark. While talking to Icelanders around the country, they’ve all tried it. It’s an Icelandic holiday tradition, kind of like American fruitcake but much worse — if that’s possible.
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June 7, 2017

Iceland’s geological wonders make reality look like science fiction during grand tour of island

Snaefellsjokull inspired Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1864.

Iceland’s nature is a geological kaleidoscope filled with images that leave you open mouthed as you nearly drive off the Ring Road. Snow-capped volcanoes. Turquoise-tinted icebergs. Glistening glaciers. Lava fields. Molten magma. Puffin-covered cliffs. Half-destroyed islands. In a country the size of Colorado are enough geographic wonders to fill a volume of National Geographics. Iceland often only gets in the news when one of its 30 active volcanoes erupts and sends broadcasters scurrying to learn how to pronounce the damn things. But Iceland is more than Mother Nature blowing her fuse. You can’t compare it to one woman. Iceland is a beauty pageant, with spectacular sights at every turn.
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June 3, 2017

Iceland: From Great Depression to Hottest Destination on Earth — but bring your credit card

Hverfell crater across Lake Myvatn in North Iceland is one of the country's many majestic landmarks.

In the last few years, Iceland’s light has shined all over the world. Temperatures in May might be in the low 40s but no country is hotter than Iceland. Since 2010, its tourist numbers have shot up like the geysers that pepper its countryside. In 1990, Iceland had 90,000 visitors. It has doubled in the last six years to where officials expect 2.2 million in 2017.

I was one of them.
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May 3, 2017

In Bruges: Medieval fairy tales do come true in one of the sparkling pearls of Northern Europe

At 2.be Beer Wall. Bruges is a great weekend getaway for Marina and me.

After all, who can not love Bruges? Let’s see, you combine the best beer in the world with the best chocolate in the world, put them in the middle of a town that looks like a backdrop for medieval fairy tales and you have Bruges. If you don’t like chocolate or beer or scenery right out of an oil painting, you’re obviously an alien from another planet who can’t read Roman letters and aren’t reading this anyway. So, dear reader, this is a love letter to one of my new favorite cities in the world. After 100 countries, dozens of capitals and hundreds of cities, towns, villages and truck stops, Bruges climbed near the top of the rankings.
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April 23, 2017

Rome’s birthday brings back fond — and not so fond — memories of my days in gladiator school

Rome turned 2,770 Friday. On Sunday, Rome's Scuola dei Gladiator marched to the Colosseum. In 2002, I was one of them.

I stand in a sandy pit surrounded by torches in front of three dozen tourists hoping a stiff breeze doesn’t fly under my tunic. It’s way too short, and I weigh the embarrassment of revealing my brand of underwear to strangers against taking a Latin oath from a chunky tie salesman wearing animal skins.

It’s graduation day at Rome’s La Scuola dei Gladiatori (The Gladiator School), and I have just demonstrated how to take a sword and skewer, fillet and behead an opponent in six simple strokes. Two months of training had culminated in this ritual, surfacing in Rome after a 2,000-year absence. Somehow I don’t think when Spartacus took this oath, he was worried about bending over.
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April 21, 2017

Favignana: “No. 13 Clearest Water in the World” tantalizes sun worshippers off Sicily’s west coast

Favignana's Cala Rossa, once the site of a great Roman victory in the 3rd century BC, now sport's some of clearest water in the world. Photo by Marina Pascucci

Yes, there it was, No. 13 on The Weather Channel’s 2016 list: Favignana, more specifically, Cala Azzurra beach. I’d never heard of Favignana, either. It’s a small island off the west coast of Sicily sporting a name it took me a month to remember. My girlfriend, Marina Pascucci, is an ace photographer whose whole profession is based on clarity. She’d been to Favignana (pronounced fa-vin-YAH-nah) before and wanted to take me to another special place for my birthday.
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February 16, 2017

Q&A: Through Eternity tour guide Luca De Angelis

Luca De Angelis, center, has a master's in archaeology.

I will do regular Q&As with tour guides at Through Eternity, Rome’s outstanding tour company for which I started blogging in December. I’ll talk to them about insights into their jobs, their lives and Rome. This month it’s Luca De Angelis, 38, a Rome native.
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February 9, 2017

Ten wild things I didn’t know about Michelangelo

It took Michelangelo 4 1/2 years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The advancements Michelangelo took art during the Renaissance stood out like the Sistine Chapel when compared with what came before and after him. It’s one of the many things I learned about Michelangelo during Luca’s five-hour Vatican tour. It was part of my new part-time gig: blogging for Through Eternity, one of the top tour companies in Rome. He told me so many things about history’s greatest sculptor that you won’t find in guidebooks or even “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” Michelangelo’s biography I devoured in my youth. Here are 10 things I learned that I will never forget:

(To read more, click here.)

February 2, 2017

Myths of the gladiators: Through Eternity tours sets the record straight

The thumbs down was not an indication to kill a fallen opponent.

I learned a lot about gladiators from books, particularly Daniel Mannix’s excellent 1958 tome, “The Way of the Gladiator.” However, I learned even more from Through Eternity’s Colosseum, Forum and Palatine Hill tour. Over five hours, it started with tours of the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. At the final stop at the Colosseum, tour guide Gracelyn Monaco blew away a lot of myths people have about the famed gladiators. Forget what you saw in the movie “Gladiator.” It was accurate but didn’t tell the whole story.

It wasn’t nearly as violent as the real thing.
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January 26, 2017

Traveling to Italy in 2017? Here’s my top 10 list

The Archipelago di La Maddalena just off the north coast of Sardinia is just one of many less-trodden destinations in Italy.

Here I present you with 10 places that you probably have never heard of, let alone never made your bucket list. So here’s my collection, in alphabetical order, of lovely, interesting, off-the-beaten-path places to visit in Italy in 2017. Print it, put it under a refrigerator magnet and know you’ll never eat a better pizza than outside on a warm Italian night.
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