Here comes Susie
When I was a kid we lived in the Pomonok housing project in Flushing, Queens, a half hour's subway ride from Times Square. This [...]
Bargain-hunting roulette
My patient Gayle lived hand to mouth with an Italian mechanic boyfriend, her sole income selling homemade preserves at the weekly village market. [...]
Hospital histrionics
Fraud is a global sport, but in Italy, land of Verdi and Puccini, melodrama can intercede to embellish it. Some years [...]
Bodies and bodywork
Date: December 24, 1994. Place: Indian Springs Spa, Calistoga, California, two hours north of San Francisco. My second husband Alvin [...]
The great adrenalin sweepstakes
Allergy emergency, take one: Charles was on vacation in Tuscany when he got stung by a bee, felt his throat [...]
Germ warfare all’italiana
Vaccinations have grown in scope throughout Italy but gaps remain, writes Susan Levenstein.
Rules, Italian-style
After a decade of widowhood my ex-mother-in-law, Mariada, finally made a visit to the Italian telephone company offices to change [...]
Mario and Nikolas
An unstable man in Italy can go mad and kill. But unlike the U.S., slaughters are out of reach. Why? Laws.
Reading the tea leaves
Until a few decades ago, doctoring in Italy was half-sorcery, with inked lab results seen as the most arcane of mysteries
Musical drugs
What's available in Italy and what's not can be difficult even for a working doctor to track, since some drugs vanish only to reappear.
In the beginning
When a New York doctor moved to Rome in the bleak days of 1978, it was the start of a really big adventure.