Efthimios and Amanda, we’re so very appreciative of the comment you wrote about your January stay in our Assisi countryside apartment: “Thanks for looking after us like family, Annie and Pino! We had a beautiful time and were very grateful for all the treats!.….. Stefanos, we loved your note, too: “The best time here was…
When asked to comment on the twenty works she’d donated to Todi, the ninety-seven year old sculptor, Beverly Pepper, had said, “Many of my monumental works reach to the sky, seeking a tie with the landscape..” I reflect on those words now as I look at my photos of inauguration day, September 14, 2020 of…
….and if you don’t have a good appetite, you will as soon as you walk into Peppa’s kitchen and take a whiff of that tomato sauce simmering on her stove. On a winter noontime, she was cooking spaghetti in her big battered aluminum pot. With a fork, Peppa pulled one boiling spaghetto out to see…
Our Giulia wrote these words shortly after learning about the death of sculptor, Beverly Pepper on February 5, 2020: “I always referred to Beverly as an ‘incredible’ woman. A word often used lightly but not when referred to a woman and artist like her. It was hard to believe many of her stories and achievements.…
I couldn’t remember the exact location in Assisi’s cemetery of the burial vault of Clara Weiss, an Austrian Jewish refugee who had died (of natural causes) in 1944 while hidden in Assisi. I was looking for it on February 2nd before the ceremony honoring Don Aldo Brunacci, instrumental in the successful hiding of over three…
On January 29th – the Feast of San Costanzo (Perugia’s first bishop and one of the town’s three patron saints) – I headed to Perugia for the traditional fiera (a grandissimo outdoor street market on a saint’s feast day – or the day following) and the celebratory events highlighting il torcolo (the sweet linked to…
All over Italy on January 27th, a myriad of events in the schools, theaters, and museums commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by a United Nations General Assembly resolution in November, 2005. Assisi’s Giorno della Memoria events started on the 25th and continue into February, 2020: On the afternoon of January 25th, a good group…
On January 19, 2020, there was no water in the Bologna piazza –and certainly not desired by the forty-thousand sardines there. In Bologna, Pino and I joined the protesting Sardine who have been filling Italy’s piazzas since November, 2019. Who are these Sardine? Where did they come from? The movement started with the Internet-solicited flash…
Pino and I were grateful for invitations to the annual mid-December Assisi Christmas concert in the upper level of the Basilica di San Francesco (always televised nationally on Christmas Day). In anticipation, we walked quickly to the entrance on that icy night, passing the crib scene with nearly life-sized figures backdropped by the glorious white…
No, not quite. Not a Peppa pig but Peppe‘s pig stars in this note. When Peppe told me the December date for the transformation of his butchered pig into prosciutto, capocollo, sausages, salami, coppa and lard, I knew I’d be there. At eighty-four, Peppe is the oldest of our rural neighbors to continue this winter…