I've been obsessed with Italy for as long as I can remember, but international travel certainly wasn't part of my childhood the way it is for Lumina. In fact, I didn't make it to Italy until I was twenty-seven—before that, I simply didn't have the resources to travel. In the decades since that first …
Bookshelf
The Venetian Masquerade
After enjoying Philip Gwynne Jones’ memoir, To Venice with Love: A Midlife Adventure, I immediately ordered his novels—mostly out of curiosity about how Jones accidentally fell into a career as a novelist. If there were a word for feeling simultaneously jealous of, impressed by, and happy for …
To Venice with Love: A Midlife Adventure
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to pack up your entire life and move somewhere absolutely magical? Ever half-jokingly contemplated moving to Italy as you adjust to life back home after a trip to the bel paese? Or maybe you have real intentions of making the move someday (I do), and are …
How to Talk to Children About Art
When Lumina was five, I brought her to the Capitoline Museums in Rome. My plan was that we’d only stay for about an hour, and that we’d stick with just the Palazzo dei Conservatori—especially the courtyard, which I knew would make quite an impression with its Marforio fountain and its fragmented …
Incontinent on the Continent: My Mother, Her Walker, and Our Grand Tour of Italy
I was just out picking up a few groceries. I didn’t expect the bookstores in my neighbourhood to be open; all non-essential businesses had been closed for months. (Though how bookstores can ever be considered “non-essential”—especially during a lockdown—is a mystery to me.) But there it was: a used …
Madeline and the Cats of Rome
In 2001, Rome officially declared its feral cat population, which numbers around 300,000, to be an integral part of the city's historical and cultural patrimony. Whether they are casually sunning themselves on 2000-year-old plinths in the Forum or prowling around the ruins of Pompey's Theatre, the …