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…”

I’ve been in Italy for 25 years. For 25 years I’ve been reading the same generic “Italy problem” article. It goes something like this: Gee things are bad in Italy. It is depressed or “underperforming.” Ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence were glorious. Italy is a young country, unified only in the 1860s. Trains once ran on time, but that had a political downside. Recently in … Continue reading Adesso Basta

One day last week, I wasted a lot of time. I’m a pro at time wasting and can avoid gainful work many ways, whether it’s taking on home-improvement and sewing projects or getting lost in online diversions. But that particular day I dawdled on my bike. I was doing errands and “October’s bright blue weather” bathed Milan in sun. Lingering was irresistible. Tired of dealing … Continue reading Hope in Milan

Fall is officially here. In Italy, this brings the cambio di stagione, a national and seasonal ritual in which the previous season’s clothes are moved to the closet high bar while those for the months ahead are pushed down to the more accessible lower one. Anyone can benefit from such a twice-annual exercise, a useful if sometimes painful taking stock of every item in their closet. … Continue reading Cambio di Visione

Sometimes, the best words to describe an event are in a language that is not yours. Take the Italian phrase, E andato storto and how it relates to the Boston Marathon bombings. Possible English translations don’t quite capture the sense of a phrase that translated literally means “it went awry” or it got “twisted,” “bent,” “deviated” or “perverted.” In English, you might translate the phrase as “it … Continue reading È Andato Storto

Ferragosto is over. Little did I know when I arrived in Italy more than 20 years ago that August 15 was not just a random date but also represented the apogee of Italy’s collective summertime dream and ushered in the country’s migration from one vacation pole — the sea — to another — the mountains. Eventually I, too, joined the migration, and when the tone … Continue reading Hill and Dale