30 Thursday Dec 2021
Another year very nearly gone, you see? Another year in this strange, unsettled era of ours. Another plague year…
Did you do what you had set out to do this year, o Readers? I find that I hadn’t set out to do too much. Well yes, I hazily meant to write more, to step into my new director’s shoes, to move a little – oh yes: and to write one cheerful thing. I suppose that, at some level, I found it safer to play it by ear? Continue reading
24 Friday Dec 2021
07 Thursday Oct 2021
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Like most people in Italy, I studied some Art History for three years, back in Grammar School. A couple of hours a week or so, starting on the third year…. and I remember that I’d been looking forward to it – if in a rather hazy way. I didn’t quite know what to expect – but, at fifteen, I had no doubts that a subject with “history” in its name just had to be wonderful.
Still perhaps some little doubt would have been in order… Continue reading
31 Thursday Dec 2020
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So it ends, at last, this strangest of years, this near dystopia with the world turned on its head, and the plague, and the fear, and the measures of containment, and the uncanny parallels with Shakespeare’s London and Manzoni’s Milan… Continue reading
25 Friday Dec 2020
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There isn’t much that is merry about this Christmas – but still… One can wish light, and warmth, and hope…
17 Thursday Dec 2020
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I was looking for my little stash of those tiny bulbs you have on old fashioned strings of Christmas lights, you know what I mean – and instead I found, of all things, the ticket of my first Don Carlo. Continue reading
10 Thursday Dec 2020
I don’t know about your corners of the world – but hereabouts these are days for trimming the Christmas Tree.
As a matter of fact, most people in Italy seem to do it on the 8th of December, a Marian holiday and, usually, a first taste of Christmas vacations. Others do it on the 1st of the month, and I have a friend who used to hold that a Christmas tree should, by definition, be trimmed of Christmas Eve, and taken down the day after the Epiphany. Now he has two young daughters, though – and the tree goes up as early as the girls can wear down their parents’s patience. In my family, for some old reason no one quite remembers anymore, we keep a tradition of trimming our trees on the Eve of Saint Lucia, on the 12th – the day after tomorrow. Continue reading
08 Thursday Oct 2020
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Rant ahead, I warn you.
Because the fact is, I do hate the new WordPress block editor… loathe it with a passion. Continue reading
30 Thursday Jul 2020
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Oh dear… it’s that time of the year again! July is almost gone, and August right around the corner, and, and, and…
And of course, family and friends are beginning to ask: when are you going to take a few days off? Where are you going? Shouldn’t you be booking somewhere nice for your days off? Why don’t you go to the seaside? Why don’t you go to the mountains? … and so on. Continue reading
02 Thursday Jul 2020
Am I very wrong in thinking that make-believe must be the most universal of all childhood games? We all traveled to far-away worlds, didn’t we? And made-believe to be this or that in castles, jungles, and star-ships? With or without dolls, toy soldiers or plush animals, alone or with other children, recreating stories heard, or making it up, rehearsing work, motherhood, war, fear, society – always halfway between a technical test of life and unbridled What If… Continue reading
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