World War I is America’s forgotten war, overshadowed by World War II and remote from living memory. In early November, I set out to find it. With my dog as co-pilot, I drove from Milan to France to retrace the footsteps of my great-uncle, Lothar R. Long, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps’ 6th Machine Gun Battalion. First stop was Nancy. After breakfast in a … Continue reading Hello to “Over There”

German is a notoriously difficult language with labyrinthine sentences and confusing grammatical cases. As Mark Twain pointed out: “Some German words are so long that they have a perspective.” But Twain was on to something. One of German’s most attractive features is the compound words whose wholes express more than their parts. Think of “Weltschmertz” (literally “world” + “sick”) or Zeitgeist (“time” + “spirit”). During … Continue reading Denkmal in Berlin

Last week I took a road trip with a friend. The original idea was a boat trip along the Mincio River, from Mantua to the Po via the lock conceived by Leonardo da Vinci. I added a day in Treviso to visit old friends and buy a table, then adding a second day in Padua — again to visit a friend — and purchase a … Continue reading Mondo Paese

I’ve never been one to single out historical dates but the signing of the Treaty of London happens to fall on my birthday, April 26. On that day in 1915, with World War I already in full swing, Italy became a French and British ally. Popular imagination is so ingrained with the horrors of French trench warfare that Italy’s war role rarely comes up. What … Continue reading Domino Effect

At a recent dinner in New Hampshire, the conversation turned to presidential hopeful Donald Trump: “He won’t become corrupt because he is already rich.” “As a businessman, he understands how the real world works and how to run things.” “He’ll get the government out of business and streamline red tape.” “He speaks his mind.” “He’s a political outsider, who doesn’t owe anyone anything — a … Continue reading Loud Men

Opening my New England house for the summer — a ritual that included extracting a dead squirrel from my dishwasher’s innards and a war against carpenter ants — my daydreams turned to the ironies and twists that speeded the summertime genesis of World War I, an event that closed out the August 1914, and with it an era. Ironically, the pre-war world was more “globalized” … Continue reading Daydream of the Before

Last Saturday, some friends included me on their weekly shopping trip to Milan’s mercati generali , the city’s teeming wholesale produce market. I’d shopped for parties at the wholesale flower market, but the idea of buying produce by the crate intimidated me. Transforming a crate of asparagus or a flat of baby lettuce into a week’s meal plan was daunting even when I still had children at … Continue reading Market Watch