Sailing against the tide
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande, che per mare e per terra batti l’ali, e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande! (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVI) The Americans After Spain, I came to Florence, for a brief course. I’m staying in a monastery of benedictine nuns that rents rooms, located right at the edge…
Some people say I am too harsh on the modern world. That we have wonderful technology and people live in comfort and we have so many ways of amusing ourselves and we can find any ethnic restaurant we want in any town on Earth. Fair enough, I guess. But why is so difficult to make…
We live in an age that, for the most part, doesn’t believe in miracles or in any form of transcendence from the material world. Some believe in the miracles of “science” — although I suppose that has also taken a hit in the recent “Covid” years — but, other than that, I think most people…
I am currently reading the souvenirs of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, or, rather, a part of it focusing on her travels in Italy after having escaped the French Revolution. Madame Le Brun was no Raphael or Rembrandt, but she was a talented painter, mostly famous for her portraits, in particular for the several portraits she…
An investigation into Caravaggio’s earnings And now for something completely different. According to historical records, the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio signed a contract in 1600 to create two paintings (which ended up being “The conversion of Saint Paul” and “The martyrdom of Saint Peter”) during a period of eight months, for 400 scudi —…
Getting a flu with heavy cough just as I was preparing to travel from Italy to Spain, I bought a pot of delicious “linden honey from the tuscan hills” to sooth my throat, but it was confiscated at the Amerigo Vespucci airport on Uncle Sam’s orders. Apparently, even solid-type honey counts as a “liquid” and…
Gemma Saint Gemma Galgani was born in 1878 into a poor family in a small village near Lucca, but they soon moved to Lucca as her father, a pharmacist, found work there. She was the fifth of eight siblings, only two females, the rest males. As it happened to other poor people at the time,…
Language as a home “The Russian language is my homeland”, wrote the great poet Anna Akhmatova. She was born in Odessa but lived mostly in Saint Petersburg. She descended from Ukrainian cossacks on her father’s side and from Russian nobility on her mother’s side. She could have escaped during the 1917 Revolution, as friends of…
Source: Ansa, Corriere The province of Milan was confirmed at the top in a recent 2022 Crime Index among 107 Italian provinces. It is the territory with the most thefts for every 100 thousand inhabitants, especially in shops and parked cars; the metropolitan city is also the seventh in reports of sexual violence, second for…