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…
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.…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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,…
The late December days were icy cold in Orvieto – but jazz, blues, soul and Motown warmed up the Umbria Jazz Winter appassionati gathered in this Umbria medieval hill town gem perched…
In late December, icy lips blow into trumpet mouthpieces while chilled fingers grip drumsticks, fly up and down the keys on many a sax and clang cymbals as musicians in jeans, navy…
On December 14th in Rome, we met our first Sardine heading up the escalator from the San Giovanni Metro stop. A woman in a red jacket – from Parma and in Rome…