The lunatic
I am the madman of my apartment block. I have this propensity that is entirely un-Italian: I leave my front [...]
The basement war
In June 1967, I was a scaled-down Moshe Dayan in my bunker-like basement. Like the Israeli commander, I wore a [...]
A shell game
As a child, I collected souls (but it was only when the deities slumbered). It mattered little that I [...]
The great Great Falls mystery
I am not Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, or Philip K. Dick, writers who contemplated the imagined as a matter of [...]
Humoring depression
Like a lounge lizard on mean-street rounds, depression makes itself at home with carcinogenic panache. Panache inverted to suit goblets [...]
One man’s “ferragosto”
No European capital sheds its August citizenry as decisively as Rome. The exodus is a literal rite of passage. [...]
Tiger and snake
During my first decades in Rome, which began in earnest almost exactly fifty years ago, I kept a cellophane scrapbook [...]
In real life
Some weeks ago — my sense of time these days is admittedly fragile — I received an email from a [...]
Heaven in the heavens
I once fell for a girl who loved telescopes. Not astronomy or even the cosmos in some youthfully existential sense, [...]
