Latest work
-
The mean season
Read more: The mean seasonRome is capable of lining up a 100 straight nearly identical (and rainless) summer days. This is Rome’s mean season. Every day is Groundhog Day. Weeks resemble the ones just past until the torrid contagion spreads to months. It doesn’t rain during the mean season. Clouds and breezes come and…
-
Navarro- Valls
Read more: Navarro- VallsPope John Paul II, the former Archbishop of Krakow, and Spanish journalist Joaquín Navarro-Valls when he was named Vatican press spokesman in 1984. Two small and often overlooked events had a major impact on the ways and means of the modern papacy. The first was John Paul I’s decision to…
-
The visible boy
Read more: The visible boyEllar Coltrane in the movie “Boyhood.” Iwas once a mischievously contradictory schoolboy. Sent to a prestigious Washington academy founded by French nuns, I learned English but little else. In first grade I found arithmetic offensive and refused to add or subtract, let alone divide. Things worsened the next year when…
-
Grins from below
Read more: Grins from belowSaddam Hussein in 1980: “Après moi,” le deluge, or close. In their waning days, two tyrants spun Louis XV-style foreboding mocked by enlightened mass media at the time as both self-serving and pathetic. Iraq’s invasion-imperiled Saddam Hussein warned his country, if occupied, would become a cradle for extremism and regional…
-
Requiem for Via Veneto
Read more: Requiem for Via VenetoIn the 1950s and 60s, Via Veneto was a madcap traffic by day and packed bars by night. Terry Thomas! There he was in person. At the table beside us no less. It had to be. It was June 1967 and my father had flown me to Rome where one…
-
To love or detest
Read more: To love or detestThe Curva Sud, home to Roma’s most ferociously militant fans, tends to see civility as a sell-out. Ionce knew a man called Mr. Loveable. He had a son called Ercole, Hercules. In the late 1980s, Mr. Loveable was a Rome carpenter and Hercules his assistant and errand boy. Each time…
christopherwinner.com 