Featured
Film: “It Ain’t Over”
Summertime sports compel fans around the world to talk about events such as the Tour de France or Wimbledon. Some summers, it’s the FIFA [...]
Try this at home
I have spent the summer in my New England outpost, where it has rained so much that my yard has been invaded by very [...]
Humoring depression
Like a lounge lizard on mean-street rounds, depression makes itself at home with carcinogenic panache. Panache inverted to suit goblets of flair sunny-side down. [...]
My tender bar
I spent my childhood and adolescence in a small village. It was not one of those one-bar places you sometimes came across driving along [...]
Boyhood Empire
19. Spain: The End of the Affair
Ah, girls. What little boy under age ten, however partisan to his lizardly reptilian tribe, could simply pretend they did not exist? I certainly [...]
18. Spain: General Ohio
We first visited the American air base at Torrejón in the weeks following the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was an edgy time for many, [...]
17. Spain: A word on bikinis
A critical part of my father’s job in Spain was to promote tourism using the many contacts he had accumulated in decades of newspaper [...]
16. Spain: Telefonica
The road to Telefonica began with a seemingly benign afternoon walk. My father, restless on a Saturday in September in Madrid, insisted I detach [...]
In Case You Missed It
One man’s “ferragosto”
No European capital sheds its August citizenry as decisively as Rome. The exodus is a literal rite of passage. Residents [...]
Almond’s conquest
Staring into his green-gold eyes, half closed in contentment, I stroke the top of his head and say to him, [...]
Amedeo Ciaccheri
What is literature without politics? What is social study without politics? The word speaks for itself, at its heart polis [...]
Brave new verbs
Long time, no see — or something like that. What happened? We moved. And moving takes all the fun out [...]
Love in the Isle of Capri
We were walking in Capri, in the wilds of the island, when the inevitable smells of lunch, along with fragrant [...]
Books: “Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome” (revisited)
My esteemed colleague at “The American Magazine” is the author of a book many readers will find especially compelling in [...]
Tiger and snake
During my first decades in Rome, which began in earnest almost exactly fifty years ago, I kept a cellophane scrapbook [...]
In the heat of the moment
It is 11 a.m. on what has for days been billed as Rome’s hottest summer day so far. This is [...]
Dad’s heroes
My father was born in 1918. That birthdate put him squarely in what journalist Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation. [...]