2012
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a, e, i, o, u
Give each letter the character it deserves. My penmanship teacher worried about my hand’s mistreatment of the letter “o.” My…
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Gashed Concordia
Much too close… Steering a massive cruise ship anywhere near rocky shoals is a very bad idea. It is also…
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Vai terrone!
Commandante Non Mollare, or “Hang Tough Captain” Under the dirty dermis of the ship-to-shore telephone call that has turned the…
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He lies!
A December 2011 ad by gun company USAAmmo warned of impending gun control laws and compared President Obama to Hitler…
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Challenged
The youth unemployment figures may be high, but they were just as high in the 1990s. Last fall, then-Education Minister…
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Papoose
Mother and papoose. Iwas born papoose; a chunk of flab soon cottoned into a husk of white. My tiny splayed…
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Wired for sex
A world blown apart. In 1964, Berlin-born Barbara “Babette” March posed on a Mexican beach for Sports Illustrated magazine wearing perhaps the…
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Mente meccanica
Until the postwar, most urban Italian households lacked refrigeration. Forty years ago the butler replaced the gnome. I know because…
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Jesterville
Suddenly, it’s 1955 again. But for how long? Rarely has political Italy endured such a nuclear winter. Talk shows have…
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Terrible T’s
Triceratops was forever seen as T-Rex’s adversary. The two Ts, Triceratops and Titanic ruled my early teenaged life. One was…
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Talk to me
TV shows increasingly depend on interrupted characters. I’m on the phone with a friend discussing the end of the print…
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Buon lavoro
General strike in Turin, 1969: Major labor reforms followed a year later. European economic modernism puts Italian Prime Minister Mario…
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WWII
In the real World War II, an American officer and a French Resistance fighter in a street battle with German…
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Marvelous
Obama: The socialist pox endures. Some concepts are too difficult to explain in everyday speech. Look up Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl…
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Alda
I hated the scheme but I understood its maddening adult logic. In recent years, good parenting has become the star…
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Encore
Giscard: The first-round winner was considered aristocratic and aloof. The French president was haughty, or so we were told. In…
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Gagging
Shifting numbers. In 2008, the West’s favorite bogeyman, Silvio Berlusconi, delivered on a campaign pledge by abolishing property taxes on…
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Talkin’ bout a…
Meet real revolution: Robespierre executes the executioner when there’s no one left in France. According to Webster’s, a revolution is…
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I am
Treaty of Rome signing, 1957: Intellectual ideas. You cannot herd people of different traditions and backgrounds into a happy playpen…
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Old men
Alexis Tsipras: The Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA, is now a leading Greek force. The stubborn, charismatic leader of…
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Rhymes With Congo
Lawsuits tied to property can take generations to resolve. Across the Tiber River from the palm-rich Baroque behemoth that houses…
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Go figure
Remnants of the Duomo in the town of Mirandola: Not unprepared. Language is a values system whose public usage shapes…
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iMind
Now, unmanned shots are the norm. Boredom informed the adult goals of my 1960s boyhood. Ocean liner builder followed dinosaur…
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Damages
VE Day in London. The end of World War II in Europe elicited a soothing fantasy: that the presence of…
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Ammazzare il tempo
No cure for the void. The words of poet Eugenio Montale popped up on Italian high school finals this year.…
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WSJ
Elisa Fornero: “A job isn’t something you obtain by right but something … for which you may even have to…
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Camp Olympic
Be Prepared, read the medal. Here I was at Camp Olympic. It was the summer of 1962. My parents needed…
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Fleets
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat meeting Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1971. Countries often yearn for what they lack, and Russia…
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Gunners
No portrait will ever fit. The gunner within us is angry, downbeat, sure. He’s mad as hell. He’s impressionable. He’s…
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Insatiable Ear
The Insatiable Ear craved… Through most of the mid-1960s I suffered from a rare and compulsive brain malfunction known as…
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No man’s land
Paterno: First the blanket, then removal. No nation takes punitive revisionism more seriously than the United States. Heroes who betray…
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I
Muhammad Ali: Purveyor of a brazen “I,” which stuck. In a recent book review published by the New Yorker magazine, the critic…
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Confidante
Better the human touch… Much of my life has been spent as a confidante, a bystander collecting people’s thrills and…
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Debt
Too much spent, too little payback. Italy’s most disheartening economic news has less to do with euros and bonds spreads…
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Pipe-tamer
The plumber’s approach to water’s quashing combines the headstrong with the instinctive. The Rome plumber has a theory about global…
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Springboard
Those surprised by the recent wave of Islamist protests need to remember back to 2005. President Barack Obama often labels…
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Flemish Cap
What was once done dozens of times a year was long ago reduced to a trickle. Leave behind a bungled…
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iLine
Irony of ironies: feeding iPhone-waiting customers in line in London. Before consumerism, lines of people — queues the British call…
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Pollice verso
The Atlantic magazine notion of the debates may have been too kind. Aradio tidbit, a newscaster quote, and a Rome…
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Hubbub
Nixon-Kennedy, 1960: But men were uneasy but only Nixon broke a sweat. American politics has always invited hyperbole. Reaching distracted…
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Feel for the palm
Be as quiet as possible when you cough, sneeze, sigh, or yawn. Refrain from speaking when yawning; cover your face…
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Two sides
Honoring injured Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai. ATaliban gunman recently boarded a bus in rural Pakistan and fired a bullet into…
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Lanced
Armstrong and Pantani battling during the 1998 Tour de France, won by the Italian. He died cocaine overdose in 2004.…
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Han Solo
China is no stranger to the world cantina and its non-linear players. The irony of global communication in a U.S.…
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Sweat
President Ronald Reagan on a whistle stop train tour in 1984. He defeated Walter Mondale in a landslide. The final…
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Frankenstorm
The blasting: Hurricane Sandy in Cuba. Satellite imaging has made great storms into celebrities with built-in publicists. Their run-up has…
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Obama + 4
Reality and expectation are not one and the same. After his 1992 defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton, outgoing…
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Roll credits
We have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back. The curtain has fallen on the yearlong theatrical run…
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Kats and dawgs
Burt or Snort or Yurt made the announcement that would change my life. Born into French, the first menace posed…
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La raccolta
Barrenness where colors were. In the early 1970s, a man named Giovanni Scanga began a stream of civil suits against…
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Gaza
Scowls escalate, and the rest is history. I built my first fort in class enfantine, French nursery school. It nearly started…
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Yuan
Looking for a picture can lead you to 11 lapdogs and Jack London. Here’s a little story about a model…
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Blind copy
Bersani, left, and Renzi: Room for debate. Few Italians know the details of their constitution. Italy’s father figure president and…
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Ushered
Austerity? An usher in Rome’s Senate building. Juxtaposition means how different things look in relation to each other. But put…
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Mad men
Gettysburg: It has been more than 150 years since North America endured true scorched earth. Rarely mentioned in the American…
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Timeless
Lions, and tigers, and bears, and… dragons. Time standing still is for fables. The tower-bound princess remains frozen in her…
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Adam Lanza
The mind of a loner incubates a self-indulgent tyranny of self over self to the exclusion of all around it.…
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Complotti
When unreasonable suspicion overturns reasonable doubt. Italy treasures conspiracy theories. Groups of people, not individuals, cause big events to occur.…
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Immaculate anxiety
The author and Enzo Ferrari. Below, his signature. Dim light gives you the meat of a face. His was amber…
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It’s nevicating!
Via Tuscolana near Piazza di Cinecittà in Februrary 1986. In all, 15-to-25 inches fell on the city, slightly more than…
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Long John
Long John Chinaglia scored 24 goals in the 1973-74 Seria A season to bring Lazio a title and make his…
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Maximum funness
The iAll Lifespan 11.0 has both washer-drier and maid service function. Meet the iAll. All new design. All new features.…
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Rudge’s time
Rudge and Pound: Lifelong partners. Olga Rudge was poet Ezra Pound’s companion for half-a-century. She met the Idaho-born writer in…
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