Torcello, in the Venetian Lagoon, May 2007

We've been to Venice many times, and to Burano and Murano and San Erasmo. But one Lagoon island that always has held an allure for me is Torcello. Settled between the 5th and 6th Centuries, the first settlment in the Lagoon, it is now sparsely populated with only a few places to eat and two hotels. I decided that Sandra and Angel and I should stay two nights at the Locanda Cipriani http://www.locandacipriani.com/ , kind of one of my dreams coming true.The photo above is Torcello's Byzantine Basilica and the church of Santa Fosca through the garden of the Locanda.


This is Sandra making faces at me, something she usually does when I'm photographing her.

Angel took this photo of me being happy.

Its a zig-zag trip from Verona. Cab to the train, train to Venice, the vaporetto down the Grand Canale to the San Zaccaria stop, another one out to Burano, and and finally to Torcello, then a walk along an old canal to the Locanda. We arrived on a Tuesday, and were the only guests. With only 7 rooms, I felt cozy rather than alone. The staff made us feel very special. Dinners and breakfasts were wonderful. It rained once.

We spent an afternoon on Burano, eating lunch under an awning while the rain fell.

In the early morning hours and from 5 PM, before and after the daytrippers, Torcello was very quiet, peaceful and serene. The photo above was taken just before dawn looking out from our room over the Locanda's gardens to the Basilica and the church.

Lugano, January 2007

We went to Lugano, Switzerland, for three days in January to see friends who turned out later not to be friends. Americans, no less. So, my recollections of Lugano may be tinged with a little cynicism and disappointment. But the photos are pretty. Top to bottom...the far Lake shore sparkling at night; the near Lake front by day; Angel on our balcony; and a beautiful atmospheric shot taken by Angel.

We stayed at the Hotel Walter in a top floor room with a balcony. So our views of Lake Lugano were spectacular.

Lugano itself was not too exciting. Three big things to do....walk along the lake, go (window) shopping at the myriad of watch shops, ride the funiculare (cable railway) up the steep hills. That town is sparkling clean, the architecture is all right angles, the atmosphere is correct and quiet. It made me long for the colorful messiness that is Verona. There seem to be no contradictions in Lugano.

Falling in Love with Paris, October, 2006

The Notre Dame bell towers.

We took the overnight EuroStar sleeper to Paris, non-stop once we left Milano. We arrived at about 8 AM the next morning, after a restless 12-hour trip. We had bunks, we couldn't open a window because when another train passed by, you thought the world was ending. The overnight train gave us four full days in Paris, so all in all it was good.

Nothing prepares you for the sheer size and elegance of the architecture of Paris. Seeing it for the first time is like being in a magical stage set. We stayed at the Hotel Parc Saint-Severin in the Latin Quarter, with a view of St.-Severin and, behind it, the towers of Notre Dame. We could have spent our entire time enjoying the diversity of the Latin Quarter.

Look closely at the photo above. The base of the Eiffel Tower is hiding behind the very large trees. When you emerge from the cover of the trees, you just look up and up and up and up.


We walked all over, especially the Ile de la Cite and the Ile St-Louis, where we found a wonderful place for lunch, Restaurant Aux Anysetiers du Roy. I discovered pain au chocolat and will never look at an Italian chocolate brioche the same way again. We also found a wonderful restaurant near the Eiffel Tower, Restaurant L'Ami Jean on the Rue Malar. It was everything I had imagined a country French restaurant to be, which is why I look so happy in the photo above.

One night, we saw a monster on the Seine, a tourist river boat for dining and dancing, that looked like the Nautilus of Jules Verne. Tremendous klieg lights on the sides lit up the embankments as well as the windows of the homes above.

Ever wondered how obelisks were removed from Egypt by the Europeans? Here is the instruction manual on the base supporting the 3,200 year old Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, originally the location of the guillotines of the French Revolution.


A word about the Louvre...we did try to see the Louvre. We bought tickets, entered and were engulfed by hordes of people following the path of the Da Vinci Code. There were two thousand school children in front of the Mona Lisa...OK, maybe 50. Winged Victory was lost in a throng. So, I can't say that I enjoyed the Louvre. Standing for a long time waiting for a glance at a piece of art bothers both my lower back and my aesthetics. I do not like to suffer for art. There it is...if I am a philistine, so be it. I can study a book about art, I can be an armchair critic; I don't have to stand in front of a painting to appreciate it. I would rather be out in the city, walking among people, marvelling at buildings, parks and the life around me. I have little patience for museums, unless they are in Venice...then I have all the patience in the world. We had lunch at the cafe in the museum and left.

I can't wait to return to Paris.

Finding Corvara, Alto Adige, 2006

View from the road

One of the many great things about Angel is his interesting hobbies...ham radio and cycling...which have always taken us to great places. Ham radio took me to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, paradise. And cycling has taken me to the Alta Badia, where Corvara is, in the region of the Alto Adige.

Verona, in July of 2006, was a cauldron of heat and humidity. The A/C wasn't working because, as our landlord so quaintly put it, 'a little Italian spider must have crawled inside the pipes and built a nest'. How cute. Actually, the landlord hadn't maintained the system in fifteen years, and the outflow pipes were caked and clogged. But that is another story.

So, when Angel signed up for the Maratona dles Dolomiti, and asked me if I would like to go for three days into the high mountains, I thought it over for a nanosecond, and packed. We rented a car and drove north. As we neared Bolzano, my jaw didn't bother to close anymore...I couldn't believe the beauty of the mountains. Growing up in Northern California, I thought I knew beautiful mountains, but the Dolomiti are unique in all the world for their composition and color.

We made a stop at this beautiful crystal lake, Lago di Carezza (Karersee). In November 2006, we drove Sandra to the Dolomiti, and of course the Lake was frozen and buried in snow.

Driving down into the valley in which lies the beautiful resort town of Corvara, I was convinced we had accidentally gone to Austria. And we had, in a way. The Alto Adige was part of Austria, and was given to Italy after WWI. Then Mussolini did bad things...tried to eradicate the Ladino native culture, actually having German names chiseled off of grave markers, changing everything to Italian. A commission after WWII decreed that the heritage of the Ladino people of the mountains be restored, and now the people of this region speak German, Ladino and Italian. Ths street signs are in at least German and Italian. The architecture is chalet style, with a great use of wood. The towns are sparkling clean, and in the Summer, flowers are everywhere.

View from our room at the Posta Zirm.

Above all, the mountains. And at night, the crisp cold air, with the cowbells in the distance. We stayed at the Hotel Posta Zirm, which will celebrate 100 years in 2008. Our room was in the new addition, four stories tall, with a large balcony. At night, we threw open the doors and windows, and slept under down comforters. Heaven! I forgot for a few days about the little spider in the pipes.

Corvara, and the surrounding towns in the valleys of the Alta Badia, are so different from Verona. The most important things here are sports, good health, hearty eating, simple dressing.

Lest I forget why we were there, this is a photo of Angel carbo-loading at 4:30 AM on Sunday so that he could cycle out in the dark to join 9,000 other cyclists in the town of La Villa at the starting line for the Maratona (http://www.maratona.it/).

Contradictions

World Cup Soccer Night 2006 out of control (in the middle of the pile of revelers is the beautiful Peace Fountain of Piazza Bra)

Venice, Carnevale, 2006 daily polite crowds

Exuberance, individualism, joy, celebration, unrestrained.

Frenetic, fanatic, lemmings, bacchanalian, pagan, danger.

So, which is it?

Depends on the passion. The worst example of an uncontrolled crowd that I have ever been in was the night that Italy won the World Soccer Cup Championship in 2006. I had to turn around and go back to the apartment to safety.

There is a theory about this: that Italy is a country of 'asking permission' so that, when a legal opportunity arises to go wild, Italians go wild. That night was entirely insane.

I'm not comfortable with this.

There are so many contradictions in Italian daily life in Verona. One that every expat notices is the fanatical cleaning of the home...hearing furniture being dragged across floors in the apartment next to you every day to clean for any dust that may have dared to settle...but the city can be littered from one end to the other, with dog poop on the marble sidewalks making walking an eyes-down activity. The painstaking care of the city gardeners who plant flowers in the intersection islands, only to have a motorist late to a restaurant date park in the middle of the flower bed. A man standing nonchalantly waiting for a bus, cleaning out his wallet, little receipts fluttering to the ground all around him...then he walks away.

Too many rules. Little revolts.

I'm not a sociologist, these are only observations. Still, it puzzles me. I wonder why in my own country, a nation of laws, where we have so much freedom of expression and meritocratic freedom to achieve, a country in which people are generally so open, we mostly do observe pooper-scooper laws, littering is not acceptable, I don't personally know anyone who would park in the middle of a beautiful public flower bed. Are we Americans, often derided by Europeans as being 'repressed', the ones who have found a balance? Is it simply that our laws have teeth?

I don't know.

Festa di Santa Lucia, December 2006

The Feast of Saint Lucy occurs every year during the week surrounding December 8th. Hundreds of stalls are set up overnight in Piazza Bra and along via Roma, selling everything under the sun but mainly food, food, food.

I look forward to this event for the alpaca yarn seller from the Andes, the freshly made rounds of torrone (chewy or hard nougat candy) of every flavor, the frittelle (deep-fried dough cookie), the 2.54 lbs. (1 Kg.) of sun-dried tomatoes from the South for Euro10, or about $13.60, and the busy crowds of people. We walk down to the fair every day or evening...Angel loves the frittelle.

This was a beautiful crisp cold day.

The arch ending in the huge star is constructed of riveted structural steel. It begins inside the Arena and ends in the Piazza. I know its Christmas when the star goes up. After Twelfth Night, it is disassembled until the following year.

The little kids play on the spikes of the star where they touch the ground. The little kids shinny up the spikes and then slide down. The bigger kids climb among the lower spikes. There is no tan bark or sand to cushion a fall; the parents keep watch but not too close....totally unlike the United States with our ubiquitous potential for lawsuits.

Why I love Venice

My happiest memories of Italy are of Venice. So, in my journey to recapture my love of Italy, I must write about Venice.

So many things. I must have had an early fascination, arguing for the naming of a high school prom 'Venezia', building cardboard striped poles and gondola silhouettes.

One of my favorite movies being 'Summertime', with Katherine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi. And I have stayed at the Pensione Accademia, formerly the Villa Maravege, of the movie. I know where the shop was with all the 'antique' ruby goblets.


That first year, December 1969, a water taxi ride in the cold night, the dark canal, the twinkling lights of the chandeliers seen in the palazzi along the Grand Canal.

In 2000, our stay at the Europa & Regina. Walking through the misty evenings, coming out into the deserted campi, knowing that behind the flaking stones of Venice are the treasures of a legendary past.

In 2002, introducing our daughter to Venice, and the joy of having her fall in love with the city.

In 2003, recovering from my accident, deciding to spend ten full days in Venice, just taking it one hour at a time, taking it easy for the first time on a vacation. Discovering the Locanda Montin, a perfect gem of a garden restaurant with attentive service and exquisite food. And in 2003, taking that fateful day trip to Verona.

Angel and I always say that when you step off the train and come out of the terminal, seeing the broad steps disappearing into the waters of the Grand Canal, you know you are in a place like no other on earth. Unlike other Italian cities, no one seems to be in a hurry, no one seems to be trying to own the sidewalk.



I love the quiet of it. No motorinos, no loud noises. Just the slap slap of the water, people calling to each other. The fruit and vegetable boat pulled up to a fondamento, the equivalent of a produce stand floating on water. The early morning walks to Piazza San Marco, before the popcorn and the pigeons and the people.


I love the Lagoon, and the islands in it. San Erasmo, Burano, Torcello and Murano. Torcello is so wild and unspoiled.

And I love the light. The incredible shifting light. In any weather, the light.

Carnevale, Venice, February 2006

Everyone must see Carnevale once. We sat in Piazza San Marco in the sun at Cafe Florian on a bitterly bitingly cold Venetian day and watched the parade go by.

Later we walked to Campo San Stefano. My family name being De Stefano, I always ask Angel to take a photograph of me with 'my people'. In Venice, there is only one Piazza, and that is San Marco (and Piazetta San Marco); the rest are all 'Campo'.

Twelfth Night, January 6, 2006

Angel and I had observed 12th Night at our home in New Jersey in 2002, 2003 and 2004 with a big party for our friends, featuring all Italian food that we spent two weeks cooking from scratch. Angel even made his own pasta. I had a general idea about the holiday and its religious significance. In my mother's house, we always had a creche scene set up, but the Three Wise Men were kept across the room from the Manger until January 6th, when they finally were allowed to 'arrive' to bring their gifts to the Baby.
I knew that in Italy the Befana, the Good Witch, flew around on Twelfth Night bringing gifts to good little boys and girls and coal to misbehavers. What I did not know was that the Befana suffers an unkind fate every year. She is a witch, and therefore she must be burned.
These photos are my first Twelfth Night in Italy, and this is the burning of the witch in Piazza Bra. You can see that the bonfire starts with a very large straw effigy of the Befana's head and neck...and big hat...and ends with smoke curling towards the sky. The direction in which the smoke blows is supposed to foretell what kind of year everyone will have.
This was a really amazing event. It seemed that the entire city turned out by the thousands, yet there was no disorder (this was not the World Cup Soccer celebration) and everyone waited patiently for the Befana to burn down and the smoke to swirl. Then the announcer read the smoke, and everyone drifted away.
I was captivated by the whole spectacle.

"...whoever remembers first..."

One of the things about Italy that takes the most getting used to is...from the Anglo point-of-view...the almost complete lack of customer service, or the concept of customer service, or any apparent training in customer service, or any idea that customer service might be a desirable business practice.

Today, Angel called the heating repair man, who was here two weeks ago, and whom we have not heard from in the interim. The man left all the valves to our hot water radiators completely turned off at the source, because the main valve is broken, and on a day when the temperature outside was 95 F., the radiators were pouring out heat. He came once and succeeded in leaving us with no hot water in the faucets. Two days later a man who works for him returned to restore the hot water to the faucets and to say that the master valve needs replacing and will have to be ordered. We are now at today, when Angel called. Angel speaks Italian, so there was no misunderstanding what transpired.

• Angel: Buon giorno, blah blah blah. I am calling to find out when you will be returning with the new valve.
• Man: Oh, I am very busy, right now my schedule is full.
• Angel: Can you fix the problem before the August holiday?
• Man: No, that is not possible.
• Angel: Then let's schedule an appointment for early September.
• Man: Oh, if I put in my book now, I will forget about it. You call me in September.
• Angel: Wait a minute. You or your worker have made two visits to my apartment, and if this isn't fixed before the cold weather [not an unreasonable thing for Angel to say, as we have experience from 2006 with A/C repairs taking five months], then we will have no heat in the apartment when the cold weather comes. Isn't this something you need to follow through on?
• Man: I'll forget. You call me.
• Angel: Well, I think you should be the one to call me and let me know what your schedule is.
• Man: Well, whoever remembers first should call the other person.
• Angel: Mille grazie, molto gentile, buona giornata. [If you don't understand that last part, that is the pro forma 'thank you very much, you are very kind, have a nice day'...with just the tiniest touch of sarcasm].

This is not an isolated incident. This is how things work. We will have to hound and call and pester and persist, and then maybe in early October before the first frost, we will see the replacement valve. I will draw no conclusions about lack of anything, I will make no sweeping generalizations, I am just reporting what happened. Sigh.

Americanness

Sedona, Arizona 2001

I'm not sure yet what I want to write here. So I will just begin.

I have never felt so American as since I have moved to a foreign country. Doesn't sound like a profound statement, does it...kind of a no-brainer. So, to explain...I always thought that as the granddaughter of two lines of immigrant families, Irish and Italian, that I still must have roots in Europe. And having traveled to Italy in 1969, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and then the move later in 2005, I thought I was prepared for what has turned out to be a monumental change. Angel and I always say, Moving to a foreign country is not for the faint of heart.

Nothing prepares one for living abroad. You have to be retrofitted after you arrive. When you are a tourist, you have the luxury of seeing only that which you wish to see. You can romanticize, gloss over, be in denial about just about anything. When you live, in my case, in Italy, the otherness of the place is in your face each and every day. I may as well have landed on a different planet.

I was a somewhat jaded American. Didn't like some aspects of my culture, what I thought I saw it becoming, so I became intolerant. Still don't like the celebrity worship, of which I am critical, pervading American society. I really hate what has happened to the governance of my country, but at least as a student (in college and in my life) of political science and history, I know that there are broader canvases being painted than a few years of Bushies can't destroy. I worry about apathy and the dumbing down of the majority of the media.

I had ceased identifying with my own tribe. So I thought that leaving this all behind was the right step for me, until I read a scathing diatribe against America and Americans in general, full of cheap shots at my fellow countrymen and women. The fact that it was written by an American who had never lived abroad for an extended period made me start to question my own assumptions. I didn't want to think that I was like this person. Reading the diatribe, I heard myself saying, No, that's not right; no, it's not like that.

I had to ask myself, where is my compassion, my understanding, my acceptance of my fellows? And I had to answer that I hadn't done enough to cultivate those parts of my character.

Congruent with all of this, I could not help but observe all the crazy little things in Italian daily life and the bureacracy that would never be tolerated in hyperefficient America. And I began to appreciate more the patchwork that is my home country. Now that I'm in Italy, I seem to be reclaiming my own identity as an American, when I thought I came here to reclaim my lost identity as the granddaughter of Italians. From the far side of the Atlantic, I can now see America in all its complex beauty...I wasn't able to see the forest because I was lost in the trees. I can also appreciate Italy more because now I know where I belong. I know now that this is a sojourn and I will take all the best out of it that I can.

Our stuff arrives, 20 October 2005

Let me tell you something about moving into a city in Italy. It is a scary experience. So here are the photos. Look at them, and tell me if you think my eyes were open or shut during most of this day.

Very scary. All your worldly goods come up the outside of the building on a small (5' by 6') flat platform, with sides that are usually not up. One guy at the bottom on the street, and two guys at the top pulling everything in through a window. And we are talking the third floor, which for Americans, think 5th floor, because the ground floor lobby ceiling is about 18-20 ft. high; the 'piano nobile', where the Countess lives, has ceilings of about 20 ft; which brings us to our floor which has ceilings about 10 ft. high...(originally the servants floor, they didn't get 20 ft. ceilings)...so this works out to about the 5th floor, to my way of thinking. And it seemed even higher when I looked down at that hydraulic platform.

The guy at the top whistles...you can whistle, can't you?...and up comes your stuff.

Sometimes one of the guys at the top runs down the staircase to the street to help with a really big piece, and then runs back up to pull it in through the window.

No one, not anyone, told us...not the realtor in Verona, not the international move coordinator in Seattle, not the shipping company in Naples, not the delivery company in Verona...no one...that staircases are not used. And I asked...'Do you need me to measure the staircases?' No one said 'No, silly, we levitate the stuff up.' Elevators are not used. Everything comes up the outside of the building and in through a window. So, in our naivete, we measured, I drew schematics of the grand 18th century staircase (added in that century to a 14th century building sitting on top of a 10th century 'basement'), measurements of the doors through which we thought our goods would pass. Nope.

She wants us to put this where?

We were left with 287 items, big and small, to place, unpack, put away. And there is no such thing as 'We would be happy to come back in two weeks and pick up all the boxes and packing material, Signora, no problemo.'. No such service. Angel had to pack all the collapsed cartons into pallets, wrap them with twine, and take them to the trash bins in the neighborhood, sometimes after dark. All the packing materials had to go into big black garbage bags. We did pay for some removal; the man who ran the delivery operation had a small business on the side, reselling cartons, so we had to pay him to take them away and then he sold them. Such a deal!

Angel's Sixtieth Birthday

Yesterday was the Big Day. Angel turned Sixty. I didn't know what I was going to do to celebrate the day. I had been in a bad space for weeks, only recently coming out from under my dark cloud. The weather is beastly hot, some days so hot and still, you can't breathe. I didn't want to cook up a storm to give a dinner at home with friends. So I did something new, invited our two best 'couple' friends to dinner at my favorite restaurant, the one I always return to for comfort and special times, La Taverna di via Stella.














Angel had left at 6:10 AM for a Gruppo Uno club ride. Ten years ago, for his fiftieth birthday party, at our home in New Jersey, he had gone out in the morning with friends for another birthday ride, but he didn't know there was a big surprise party in the making at home, and so was about an hour late for his own party. For this birthday, I told him ahead of time that something was planned for Saturday evening; he made it back to the house at 8:30 PM, and was showered, dressed and at the restaurant at 9 PM. Bravo.

This was one of those magical evenings in Italy with friends, where everything goes exactly as it is supposed to, smoothly, flawlessly in fact. Each of our 'couple' friends was meeting the other for the first time, and they hit it off terrifically. Our waitress was on top of everything. The food was delicious. What more could we ask? There have been evenings like this in New Jersey, of course. But this evening was a coming together of all the elements...our beaming host, Paolo, wishing Angel 'Auguri!'; our excellent waitress, asking me throughout the evening, 'Va bene?' We were taken care of. Dinner started at 9. We were the last ones in the Taverna, leaving at 11:30 to many wishes of 'Buona Notte'.

Why do I live here?

Someone asked me today...'I know you have probably had some great experiences in Italy - are there any memorable ones? Or anything day-to-day that really stands out as "this is why I live here"?'

Well, today might not be the best day to ask that, since it is 100 degrees F. out and climbing. But I will try. The air conditioning is working flawlessly and the apartment is cool, comfortable and humidity-free.

The morning starts with a great cappucchino and an even better brioche at Cafe Tubino. We run into our language teacher from 2004, Enrico, who is glad to see us. We are his success story, i due Americani who came to learn Italian and returned to live in Verona.

We take a giro (a small walkabout) and run into more friends, Roberto and Francesca, and have a short chat with them. The semi-annual sale season is here, so we window shop.

We stop at the shop of my friend Agnes, and Angel tells her how much fun he had watching the 7th Stage of the Tour de France, in person, and how great France is. She loves that. Angel goes on home, and I stay to hang out at the shop for awhile. Agnes' oldest son, the pilot, comes in and we laugh and talk. Agnes' helper Olivia, who is Swiss, sits down to share yet another story with me about the lack of customer service at a shop in town, and we laugh about that.

I head back for the apartment. I stop in to the travel agency on the ground floor of our building to let them know that the older gentleman they helped yesterday, when he collapsed outside on the street, was now alright and that I wanted to thank them for providing him with support until emergency services arrived. He and his wife are friends of ours. They are happy to hear he is doing better.

I arrive at the apartment, full of warm and fuzzy feelings of community and friendship for all. OK, that is overstating... it is miserably hot and airless out, and the primary feeling I have is 'thank God the A/C isn't acting up, like it did last summer'.

However, my morning today is one of the great things about living in a small manageable city that just happens to be in Italy. The slower pace allows a lot of interaction. The fact that we live in the Centro Storico means that we are in a microcosmic neighborhood, where we can know a lot of people. Going out of the apartment, there is always someone to whom to say hello, a smile, a 'Buona Giornata'. That is a completely different morning than the one I would have had living in New Jersey, and it is a morning that I wanted to find. Looks like I found it. And the day is only half over.

Going Away, August, 2005

Friends gave us a going-away party. Sandra didn't come because she didn't want to deal with friends and family asking her, 'How do you feel about your parents moving to Italy?' 'And, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?'

And then it was time to go, August 1.

Sandra wouldn't hear of a car service for all our bags and us, so she drove us in her big SUV, packed to the gills. Emily's cat carrier was on my lap, there was not a square inch of empty space anywhere. We had 7 suitcases, 1 Aero bed in a big suitcase, each other and Emily. We left for the airport.

Sandra and I were relentlessly not crying. Angel was looking out the passenger side window off into space. Nobody talked much during the ride. We were excited about our adventure, she was happy that we were following our dream, but we all knew it would be at least six months before we were together again. We always taught Sandra, first you have to dream, then you have to plan. So, here was the plan in action. I was about to get what I campaigned and lobbied for.

At security control at the airport, Sandra had to stay behind. I will never forget her frozen smile as she didn't cry. At the going away party, one of our friends said that some of our other friends had wanted to surprise us at the airport with a big sendoff, and what did I think. I said thank them for the thought, but no thanks. Sandra told me later she would not have been able to deal with all of that. It had to be, as it always is, just the three of us.

Emily rode in baggage. At Rome, changing planes to Verona, I asked if my cat was alright. Answer: What cat? THAT is when the tears not shed in Newark came. Sobbing. In Verona, Emily just looked at me accusingly. Believe me, it was reproachful and accusing.

It took Emily one year to start to recover from her ordeal, after spending the first three months hiding in the closets, and at the end of this second year, she is finally back to her old self. Our newcomer, Annie, is largely responsible for this. Our little Italian gatta came to us in June 2006. As a kitten, she never let Emily ignore her.

It has also taken me two years to start to adjust. This blog is my process. How did the Italians, and all the other emigrants, leave their families, countries, all they knew, before phones, faxes, emails? What brave...or desperate...people they were. I come from a family of emigrants, from Italy and Ireland, so I thought I was born for this kind of sea change. The jury is out, though I am a little more hopeful today than I was last week.

Sharing Italy with our Daughter, Part 3

Our daughter Sandra, a woman in her own right.

Sharing Italy with our Daughter, Part 2

Mom and daughter...the bond that is never broken. My mother used to quote the old saying (she said it was Irish), 'Your son is your son 'til he takes him a wife; your daughter's your daughter for all of her life'. Sandra is the joy of my life.

March 2006, dinner at Antica Taverna Via Stella, my favorite Veronese restaurant. I always feel at home there, and I am drawn to have our special occasions there.

March 2006...taking a moment in Venice.

In a water taxi out to Murano.

A Mother-Daughter moment. I look like I am saying a Momism...'No, absolutely not, don't even talk to me about that'. Sandra has her 'Mom will get over it' look on.

Our day at the Lake in 2007.

Sharing Italy with our Daughter, Part 1

These photos are of Sandra and her Dad, sharing Italy from 2002 through May 2007. Our greatest joy is to have her come 'home' to Verona (her phrase) and then take her places.

In 2002, before our move to Verona, she came to Italy with us for two weeks. We went all over, the Grand Tour.

In 2006, she came to Italy for my birthday in March. It was the first time we had been together since August 1, 2005. How wonderful to see her. We went to Venice for the weekend, staying at the Pensione Accademia.


Again in 2006, she joined us for Thanksgiving Week. Though it was cold and snowy, and everything was shut down, we drove to the Dolomiti, so that she could see those magnificent mountains.

The photo directly above is an example of the 'two peas in a pod' thing. They do this unconsciously. Probably discussing New York Life. They are sitting in a restaurant in the Dolomiti, the only one we could find open in late November. Everything closes for two months before the frenetic ski season.

We also drove to Lazise on Lake Gardia for lunch.




In 2007, she arrived in late April, staying 10 days this time. We spent one day out on Lake Garda, taking a high-speed ferry to Malcesine for lunch.

They even hung out at the beach by the castle in Sirmione.

Then three days in the northern Lagoon on the island of Torcello at the Locanda Cipriani. What a history that place has!

We anticipate another visit in October 2007, just ten days this time at home in Verona. With a couple of day trips. The exchange rate USD to Euro is AWFUL, so we will cool our heels at the palazzo. *big smile*

Apartment hunting, 2005

An aerial view of the main piazza, Piazza Bra, and the Arena.

The view from our balcony.
Looking up towards our balcony and, to the right, our living room windows.
The neighborhood. The bridge is out of the picture to the left. Our building is on the far right. The two white awnings are at the best pizzeria in the city, Salvatore.
Angel in the door of our building.

Angel and I never had the same idea about what we were doing. I thought I was escaping suburban conformist life in America and going to a better more authentic life in Italy, hopefully for a very very long time. Angel believed, essentially, that he had been 'perfectly happy in my rut', and that he was going to give this a try for a year or two. Yet he agreed to fund this whole project, and agreed to take all our 'stuff'. I told him I wanted to plunge into the icy water of culture shock all the way, and make a new home, not a pied a terre.

We went to Verona in late March, very early April to look for an apartment to fulfill our last requirement to obtain from the Italian Consulate in NYC our Elective Residence visa...a one year official contract for a place to live. We both agreed that the apartment had to have 'the Wow! factor', or else why uproot our lives? We have a beautiful home in New Jersey, it isn't as if someone was holding guns to our heads.

Angel had contacted Weichert Realtors in New Jersey who referred us to COFIM agency in Verona. The first day, the very first day, we saw the apartment in which we now live. As it was when we found our house in New Jersey, and each other, it was love at first sight. The rest of the first week we went through the motions of looking at eleven other apartments, but nothing compared.

The remainder of the month...which we spent in a little hotel (the apartment we had rented for one month having turned out to be a disaster, so we had to live in a hotel)...was all spent with negotiations.

Many times, Angel said, I just can't do this. We would walk past a small park with freshly mown grass, and he would start to say, I'll never smell fresh cut grass again. I began to call his anxiety-driven moods his self-directed black holes. He said I was like the Queen Mary...having set a course, nothing could stop me.

In retrospect, there was really absolutely no way we could have known that we were walking into such a terrible situation. The previous tenant, with whom we met several times, voluntarily described the neighbors as being buon educati...well behaved. Not. The problematic neighbor told us how happy she was to have Americans for neighbors, and an older couple without children so there would be no noise problems. Not.

So, with his hand shaking, Angel signed the contract. We celebrated that evening at our favorite restaurant. And already the next day, Angel was saying, What have I done! I put this down to expected nerves over the enormity of the commitment. Now, the ball was in our court, and we were due in Verona on August 2 to take up our new lives.

A few things about Verona, 2004, Part 2

In four weeks of language school, we saw and did a lot of wonderful things. None was more 'other', out of my experience of my life, than the torchlight parade and reenactment of the revolt against Napolean by the Veronese in 1797. We showed up, having no idea what to expect. Each year has turned out to be a little different. Actually, in 2007, there was no parade, because the 2006 parade got a little out of control, so the powers-that-be cancelled the celebration for 2007.



Ever been in a torchlight parade, with torches made the old-fashioned way with burning pitch? We are in Europe, where each person is responsible for his or her own safety, so you have to keep your eyes open for a burning scrap of the mantle of the torch flying off. I saw such a scrap fly off, and land in a woman's furled umbrella. Unseen by the woman, I had a visio...unless I acted quickly...of the woman turning into a human pyre in front of my eyes. So without thinking, I mean really without thinking, I reached into her umbrella to pull out the scrap. This is how napalm must feel, on your fingers. And it was only a tiny dot. My hand burned all night.


Raised in California in the '50s, going to 4th of July parades in Redwood City with baton twirlers and marching bands, I am destined to love these things. So the sight of fields of silken banners twirling in the night made my heart race.

This is the kitchen table of our little rental apartment on via Interrato della Aqua Morta. The name of the street means 'burial of the dead waters'. It used to be a small canal leading to the Adige River, a canal still used in the latter half of the 1800s, but is now a busy filled-in paved street. Our apartment was two levels, with a roof terrace, totally exposed to the sun, where Angel slept before doing his language school homework. This is one of two dinners I prepared in four weeks. We're in Italy...eat out!

One of my favorite shots of the city, taken from the Teatro Romano, which is on the side of the Adige where we live. The view is of the Centro, the old historic center. The first big pointed tower is Chiesa San'Anastasia, and the shorter one to the right is Torre Lamberti.

Well, here we are, Sandra's parents who ran away from home. Our daughter lives in our house in New Jersey, while we are spending a few 'student semesters' (maybe ten or twelve) in Italy.

A few things about Verona, 2004, Part 1

This was the year we came to language school. We stretched our brains around trying to learn the basics of pronunciation and grammar in four weeks. Total immersion. Four hours a day, five days a week. As Angel would always say by about 11:30 in the morning, my brain is going BOOM BOOM. Then there was a school-related activity in the afternoon, and a minimum of two hours of homework each night. One night, because I had been sick for three days, I decided to study vocabulary for three hours, instead of doing my 'compiti' (homework) assignment, and the next morning reasonably explained to the instructor, Enrico, my decision. No, that did not fly. A ten-minute lecture later on the importance of structure and repitition in learning a language, I resolved to be a good student and not skip any more compiti.

Each morning we walked from our rental apartment to school, stopping at Nello's cafe for an incredible cappucchino.

Verona is a city of fashion, relentless and everywhere. This is a life-size advertising piece to the right of a door into a small dress shop. Note the left hand on the breast, and her provocative posture even though she seems completely detached from the panting man attached to the hand. Angel calls Verona the city of hipbones and belly buttons. In Spring, Fall and Winter, everyone is buried in sweaters, coats, scarves, hats. But in Summer, the skimpier the better, the more see-through the better. Summer fashions in Verona would get a woman picked up for loitering in Manhattan. And what is a 5'2" size 14 (on a good day) woman to do? I have a lot of flowy skirts in my wardrobe, and sexy shoes. Shoes I can do.

This is one of my favorite photos. A store window reflecting a building. I just like the juxtaposition.

When passing by, I always look up to remark on this wonderful roofline. It is unique to the city, alone in its fantasy.

Prosciutto di Parma. With any kind of cheese. With any kind of melon. All by itself. The real thing.

Sweetness and Light

Sweetness and light. A phrase my Italian-American father used to derisively hurl at my Irish-American mother because he disdained her outlook on life. He was a realist, he said; she always wore rose-colored glasses, he said. She only saw beauty and good, even where there was none, he said.

A tourist is caught in a warp of sweetness and light. Everything is fresh and new. Familiarity has not bred contempt.

Venice in 2003

February 13, 2003, I walked into a restaurant with my husband and another couple. It was 12:05, the restaurant should have been ready to be open for business. Instead, a worker had opened a 7' x 3' trapdoor, just inside the entrance. Laughing and ready to have a wonderful lunch, I stepped into space and crashed into the basement below. Fortunately, I lived. Too dramatic? You should have been there. Anyway, when the orthopaedist gave me the all-clear to travel, we decided to go to Venice for ten days, and stay put. Usually, we take very active vacations, but this was not a year to be dragging suitcases around Italy. So, we stayed at the American Hotel in the Dorsoduro quartiere of Venice, where I could easily return to nap and take the pressure off my back. It was a really beautiful time.

St. Mark's Sqaure after a hard rain, late at night. The Basilica almost looks like a cardboard stage set.



'Bush infame'. Well, they got that right. 'Infame', a wonderful word meaning vile, infamous, despicable, villainous. Another good word is 'brutta', meaning rough and uncouth, not of good appearance or character. The Italian language has a lot of one-word all-emcompassing descriptions.


We took the vaporetto out to the Lagoon island of San Erasmo for the Festa del Mosto, a community celebration of the first pressing of the grape. 'Mosto' is what is left over at the bottom of the barrel, the essence of the grape. At least, that is what I understand. There were only a few tourists, yet we were as welcome as if we were family. The food was great.

This is at the Tramontin Gondola Yard. The Tramontin family is fourth-generation, still building new gondolas at the cost of Euro 30,000 each. The first builder, the great-grandfather of the man in the center of the photo, is the designer of the oblique angled gondola, which allows the gondolier to guide the craft using one oar, necessary in the narrow heavily-trafficked canals. The Tramontins use four tools...a saw, an axe, an adze, and a plane.

2003 is the year we discovered Verona. Already thinking of moving to Italy for a year or so, Angel had the idea that we should go to language school first. Before the trip to Venice, we researched some schools and accomodations. Venice was prohibitively expensive for a month's stay. But I found a website photo log of Verona in all its beauty, and so we looked into Linguit.IT and traveled by train one day to check it out. Walking up via Porta Nuova, I fell in love. The photo is Piazza Bra, with the Orologio (clock tower) in the background, where via Porta Nuova empties into P.zza Bra.

Return to Italy, Part 3

See Venice and die. Unless you've fallen in love with Venice, that sounds like a silly phrase. It isnt.

This is the photo that I used for the announcement of Angel's 2001 retirement that went out to all the invitees to his dinner. The caption was: 'Work, work, work is over, over, over.' He is sitting on the outside breakfast terrace of the Hotel Europa & Regina. If you saw 'The Talented Mr. Ripley', with Matt Damon, this is the hotel at the end of the movie. The last years of Angel's career in IT were challenged by pushing back against a CIO who was hell-bent on outsourcing, no matter what the human cost to the people with whom Angel had worked or had worked for him. He won that battle. In this photo, he is contemplating something, maybe retirement the next year, even before he made the decision.

This lovely baritone was singing 'O Sole Mio' when I took this photo. Singing just to me, I swear. I am a romantic and something, at times, of a sentimental slob, so the song brought tears to my eyes. He also is the baritone in the PBS one-hour documentary in their 'Great Streets' series, 'The Grand Canal with Nathan Lane'.

The soft slap-slap-slap of the water. The late dusk. Too beautiful.

Our last night at the Europa & Regina was memorable. Our table of eight trip buddies (people we had grown close to in two weeks, but were probably never to see again) had a hilarious time. We laughed so hard. One 80-yr-old couple has us in stitches. We asked the secret to their 50-plus year marriage. His answer: I always say, 'Yes, dear'. Her answer: I haven't shot him yet.

Return to Italy, Part 2

The second part of the trip moved back north, eventually to Rome. We stayed at the Excelsior on the via V. Veneto, the grandest hotel I had ever stayed in to that date. I really love elegant old hotels...'if these walls could talk'. We did and saw all the usual, over four days. These are some of my personal memories.

In the lobby of the Excelsior, every morning the man would clean the glass revolving doors. The flower arrangers would build new table arrangements five feet tall. The newspapers would be hung on their rods in place on racks. The cut crystal must have been hand-polished during the night, it gleamed and shimmered in the early morning. Just a wonderland.


The breakfast room at the Excelsior was all white linen, on two levels, with the upper level looking down on the immense buffet. A white-hatted chef carved the leg of prosciutto to order while I tried to decide how to limit what I would choose from the fresh fruits and pastries.


And then there was lunch in that room, all by myself. The Tour had a limited number of tickets for an audience with the Pope, so I, the protesting Episcopalian, gave mine up to a Roman Catholic member of the Tour. I stayed...what a sacrifice...to have a splendorous lunch alone, to write in my journal, and to just feel like Mrs. Astor's pet horse.
Bernini's Baldacchino in St. Peter's never fails to strike me with awe. The canopy is so very high, and the whole thing seems impossibly delicate. The sight of it towering over all on those spiraling columns is so improbably. It is over-the-top Baroque, regal and of the Ages and is one of my favorite things in Rome.

We came around a corner in the Tour bus, and everyone let out a sigh. The bus driver pulled over so we could get out and take pictures. The fog was not a shroud, so this picture was possible. This is one of my most enduring memories of Italy...seeing Assisi for the first time.

Return to Italy, Part 1

After 31 years, finally ... finally! ... I returned to Italy. My husband Angel and I took a two-week Tauck tour. There are tours and there are tours, and Tauck is one of the best. Angel is well-traveled but had never been to Italy before, and I wanted him to see what I remembered loving from 1969.

After the first week ended, Angel said, 'If I had to go home today, the price would have been worth it...what a beautiful country.'

We began in Rome, two days early, and met up with the Tour on Saturday, driving immediately to the Amalfi Coast.

Our first stop was Ravello. The wisteria arbor is on a hillside overlooking the water. There I bought a cameo of a woman with hair flying, birds on her shoulders, pearls twisted through her hair. Every time I look at her, I think 'freedom'.

It rained off and on the whole time we were in Sorrento. We stayed at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria...one thing about that Tour, we loved every hotel, and it spoiled me for what I came to expect from hotels. Our room was magical, all white, old white tile floors, a basket of fruit and bottle of wine on a simple wooden table in the center of the room, an antique iron bed, a view of the Bay. This ceramic Bacchus, at the very top of the wall in the shop, was shipped to New Jersey, arriving three months after we arrived home. He has come back to Italy with us, now hanging in our beautiful small kitchen, next to our 14th century wall fresco. For years, he was the centerpiece of our kitchen in New Jersey, sometimes living in the summer outside on a patio wall.
This is a dramatic interior of one of the striped Tuscan Romanesque churches of the Amalfi coast. This architecture affects me more than any of the Baroque or Renaissance wonders of Rome or Florence. So spare and dramatic, so functional and inspiring.

Determined to find the joy again...

The last several months have been very difficult. I have been going through an 'adjusment to living in Italy' process. So, enough of that. I am embarking on a recovery process, to find again the joy that I felt at coming to Italy to live. So I will begin with my first trip to Italy, in 1969, working my way forward to today. I need to remember all the good things about this country in which I wake up every morning. It is too easy to focus on the frustrations of 'culture shock'. That is me, age 24, having landed at Malpensa during the Christmas holidays of 1969.

Disillusionment, Spring 2007

Well, here I am Verona, Italy, wondering what I am doing here, unable to get through to my husband about how I really feel, suddenly unable to keep a bright sunny outlook on this funny dream that is life in Verona.

I don't know how much of the above is depression talking. We are here 21 months, and are facing a major change. After all our endless morning-at-the-kitchen-table-in-New-Jersey planning sessions and what-iffing ourselves to death to uncover all the possibilities that existed, we are laid low by an unexpected glitch...our immediate neighbors. Continuing to live next door to them is becoming insupportable. They are from the South, and seem to be representing that part of the country accurately, according to our northern Italian friends. Politically incorrect? Certainly. Typical of the stereotype that the North has of the South? Definitely.

Our neighbors are loud, argumentative, scream at each other and at their maid at any hour of the day or night, and care absolutely nothing about our privacy. This situation is compounded by a landlord who, though well-meaning (the road to Hell is paved with good intentions), neglected to follow his architect's advice when converting the top two floors of the family palazzo into apartments. The result: highways of sound through the rustic wood beams and wooden floors. We are like two families living in our apartment...the screaming neighbors intrude on us whenever they open their mouths and don't seem to care if they can hear our lives taking place. It is a nightmare.

We may have to leave this beautiful apartment, truly a treasure that our friends...both Italian and stranieri (foreigners like us)...think we were incredibly lucky to find. If this apartment was transplanted to Manhattan, it would be multiple thousands of dollars per month in rent. Here it is an incredible Euro1400. We have 1,900 square feet, a balcony, a beautiful terrace; the location of the palazzo...a building on the Italian historic register, dating from 900, on one of the oldest streets in Verona...with proximity to the Adige River; fifteen minute walk to all the shopping, the philharmonic, the Arena, the Teatro Romano, churches with free concerts. This place is a dream come true for this half-Irish half-Italian girl from California.

We can either adjust to the neighbors or we can return to New Jersey to our house which would involve our adult daughter...who is living in the house and caretaking it (very well) for us...finding a new place for herself way ahead of the schedule we had all originally envisioned.

This dream of moving to Europe, specifically northern Italy, was my lifelong dream. My husband bought into it and graciously made it happen. And now that the dream is under attack, I believe I am being blamed...or I am blaming myself...for having had the temerity in the first place to ever think I could do this. I can hear my Irish mother saying, Watch out what you pray for.

So this is where I am on this day of my first post in my first blog.