Last week my daughter donned a laurel wreath with a violet ribbon running through it and grinned from ear to ear as her friends chanted “Dott-O-Ray, Dott-O- Ray” – followed by some silly, lewd phrases that are not repeatable. It is all part of the university graduation tradition in Italy. To graduate from an Italian …
Dear Blog Readers, If you are thinking of coming to Italy, forget “Under the Tuscan Sun” and lounging around olive groves sipping white wine, eating pasta and dipping your bread in fragrant olive oil. That’s for namby-pambies. It is time to get yourself a few goose bumps and an adrenalin high UNDER the Marmore Falls. …
Last weekend I took a trip to the Amalfi coast with some friends and, at the suggestion of a colleague from the foreign press association, we decided to try and find Salvatore Aceto and his lemon farm. After landing in the port of Amalfi, teeming with tourists dragging trolleys and buying trinkets, we pushed past …
My brother Stephen and I, walking awkwardly on snowshoes, tramp across a large snow-covered field. At the end of the expanse of white are woods of snow-laden pine trees and, above it, the sky is turning pink, yellow and violet as the sun sets. Animal tracks interrupt the smooth surface of snow and we stop …
Dear Blog Readers – Last week I spent bouncing around Burkina Faso, most of the time in a 4-wheel-drive vehicle with seven people, a ram, several chickens and huge bags of peanuts. We shot over potholes, barely missing pigs wallowing in the mud, spent hours on vertebrae-crushing rural dirt roads with orange-colored dust caking itself …
Working in the news business I feel so bombarded by news events that, sadly, I sometimes turn off and become indifferent to it all – earthquakes, planes crashes, floods, bombs, terror attacks, ships sinking… Then there is a news story that unexpectedly jumps out and hits me…the death this week of Sudan, the last male …
Dear Blog Readers, Tiffany Parks, my fellow Roman-American blogger Mamma buddy, has just written a marvelous new mystery for 8-12-year-olds about one of my favorite fountains in Rome, the Turtle Fountain in the Jewish Ghetto. The protagonist is a 13-year-old American girl named Beatrice Archer who moves to Rome from Boston with her historian father …
Dear Blog Readers, Over the years I have been known to complain once in a while about being a working mother of three, juggling the demands of my job and the needs of my kids. Well, no more. Now that I have heard about the demands on Barbara, I will be quiet. Think about this: …