L’Americana

Once upon a time, as a young American in Rome, columnist Kristine Crane stood out from her housemates in more ways than one.

Every year when I clean out my closet, I think about giving away a green dress that I bought one summer in Umbria. My friend Jyl was visiting me from [...]

Good hairdressers are like good editors. They accentuate what you've written and smooth any mishaps. My newest stylist, Gina, gets this. She didn’t criticize my previous haircut, which I thought [...]

I never got sick when I lived in Rome. The occasional cold, and one New Year's Eve I couldn't hold down a meal of lentils and zampone, stuffed pig’s foot. [...]

Recently I gave my students a lecture in the history of journalism. I told them it’s important to have a sense of their professional lineage. I’m also partial to history. [...]

A few years ago, when I visited Rome for the first time since living there in my twenties, it was disheartening to be called signora. I had always been signorina. [...]

A decade ago, columnist Kristine Crane met a man on an Italian train and felt a pull. From this came an email bond forged of grief.

One of my missions when I visited Rome a few years ago was to find out about mamma, the mother of my Italian boyfriend. Mamma was born in 1917, the [...]

My good friend Jyl put it to me well some years ago. “It’s like you don’t quite get America, and America doesn’t quite get you.” We were in our early [...]

I learned to play piano from the woman we knew as Mrs. E. Her real name was Charlotte, and her married name was a long German word that started with [...]

Some years ago, I was a model for Halloween. In real life, I am pretty and petite, but not model material, apart from perhaps my piano hands and my soulful [...]

Recently, I played “Bella Ciao” for my students. I first heard the song as a college student in Bologna. I would ride my bike through Bologna’s streets, alongside the porticoed [...]