About a month ago, I landed at the Delhi airport late at night. As I stepped out of the anonymous nowhere-land that is that city’s modern international airport, a thrilling wave of heat broke across me. It was the promise of new adventure and with it the memory of previous trips, or perhaps — since this was India — of previous lives. I love arriving … Continue reading Something in the Air

Frugality has become almost trendy since the financial crisis. Hipsters trade canning recipes. It wasn’t always this way. When I was growing up, frugality was anything but cool, particularly the orthodox variety of Extreme Frugality practiced in my home. Extreme Frugality peaked with The Incident of the Tomato in Paddington Station, which occurred in London in the mid-1970s. While visiting British friends in London, rush … Continue reading The Incident of the Tomato in Paddington Station

It is hard to choose which viscera-turning scenes in Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary “Shoah” hit the hardest. A memorable one features two Polish crones pointing out the homes and shops of their town’s now-disappeared Jews. The scene’s power might suggest Lanzmann’s hard glare said all there was to say about Jew and Pole, Jew and Catholic and the poison of collaboration that was … Continue reading Ida

Dear Mr. Editor: I bet you don’t get much mail from dogs. But The Lady, that’s Madeleine Johnson, wasn’t getting anywhere on her column, which she says is my fault because I want attention and ask her to throw my ball when she’s trying to write. (Jeez, some excuse!) The topic was dogs in Milan, so I figured I’d handle it. She was slacking, and … Continue reading It’s My Ball

“On the internet,” went the New Yorker magazine cartoon showing a dog at the computer, “no one knows you’re a dog.” In Pakistan (and most Muslim countries) — as I discovered during a recent trip — no one knows you have cellulite. Or that you ate too much the night before. Or that you’re having a bad hair day. Or that you’re behind on waxing. Or that … Continue reading Rethinking the Wheel

A few days ago, I spent a pleasant evening solving the world’s problems over a well-cooked dinner. My companions were cosmopolitan and well educated. They represented the kinds of families who produced illuminated professionals, landowners and businessmen whose skills and civic-minded spirit created social reform and economic growth that drove progress between 1850 and 1950. As a class, these people have lost influence in recent … Continue reading Tangled Cultures

About a year ago, I moved into the Porta Venezia neighborhood on Milan’s east side. It wasn’t entirely new to me since I’d stayed nearby when I first came to Milan in the 1980s. At the tine, my acquired Italian cousin saw the area as a dangerous “casbah.” But the busy Corso Buenos Aires and the local ethnic mix reminded me of New York City. … Continue reading East Side Story

Milan has two major canals, the Naviglio Grande and Naviglio Pavese, which run through the city’s Navigli neighborhood where bars and restaurants thrive along their banks, helping to liven up the city’s movida, or street-life. The waterways are part of an extensive, 1,000-year-old canal system that once ran from Lombardy’s northern lakes and rivers to its southernmost agricultural basin. In fact, Milan was once labeled as … Continue reading Gianfranco Colitti

A boy’s hopeless romantic crush, former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, ricotta-filled pastry typical of Palermo and two decades of Cosa Nostra violence in Palermo do not make easy cinematic bedfellows. But Italian TV star turned director Pierfrancesco Diliberto, known as Pif, pulls it off delightfully in “La Mafia uccide solo d’estate” (“The Mafia Kills Only in Summer”). The title alludes to the persistent Sicilian … Continue reading La Mafia Uccide Solo d’Estate

With the collapse of the Russian front in 1917, German troops moved against Paris in a massive, last-ditch spring offensive intended to break French and British resistance before newly arrived American troops could fully respond — the U.S. had entered World War I in April of that year. The Germans methodically swept aside the British 5th Army until reaching a forest outside Belleau in Champagne, … Continue reading “Us Pore Geezers…”