Italy celebrates the 700-year anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death while I reflect on one of my favorite books as a young adult.
In lieu of travel, my birthday was lunch and dreams and praying for a vaccine 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 […]
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 after a new Sacking of Rome. The streets were empty. […]
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 the very rumor that the Roman military drew near. They […]
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 hillside 450 feet, the complex became somewhat of a mecca […]
Naples Underground covers 2,500 years of Naples history dating back to the Ancient Greeks.
The Appian Way is Rome’s road of blood. The other day Marina and I walked nearly six miles of arguably Italy’s most famous road, a hike always shrouded in violent history. It was on this road that Spartacus and his 6,000 slaves were crucified (See “Spartacus: Failed Labor Revolts”) in 73 B.C. It was on this road that Ancient Rome’s generals led their armies to […]
Italy is crawling with yellow fever. I am. It’s all over me. From my head to my toes to my senses all the way to my taste buds and brain. But I’m not suffering. No, I am wallowing in bliss. Going against the grain set by the rest of the European Union, on Feb. 1 Italy lowered its Covid restriction level from orange to yellow. […]
Hello again from post-lockdown Italy where Monday I finished my second quasi house arrest in the land that Covid first engulfed. I was in lockdown so long I started a 10-part Netflix series on blood clots. I walked past pubs, long closed, and got weepy at the mere sight of a Peroni sign. My mask has formed a semi-visible indentation on my face. People ask […]
It took only one week for my adopted country of Italy to have a more screwed-up government than my old country in the United States. On Tuesday, Italy’s government collapsed. Prime minister Giuseppe Conte, the popular political outsider who steered Italy from the most Covid-bashed country in the world into calm seas, turned in his resignation. He lost support from a small party with major […]
Anyone got a good recipe? Something simple? Something different? I’m going to be homebound a while. No, I don’t have Covid. I’m not in quarantine. But I’m retired in Italy where our latest Covid numbers pushed the cautious government to up my Lazio region’s restrictions Sunday from yellow to orange. It’s the second highest in Italy’s color-tier system in which regions change colors nearly as […]
