That was the subject line on an email my daughter sent me 14 years ago. “Il Palio is Madness!” Her brief account of the horse race run inside the medieval Piazza del Campo of Siena, which she witnessed while studying in the hilltop Tuscan city in the summer of 2000 … and it put in […]

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It had to happen. In addition to the various and sundry tours of Florence, we have a semi-new option: The Dan Brown Inferno Tour. Not to be confused with Dante’s Inferno. Though in 2014, especially in English, Dan Brown’s “Inferno” might be better known than that other guy’s “Inferno”. The “other guy” being Dante Alighieri, […]

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Let’s be honest. We often don’t know what we’re looking at. The Grand Canyon. The Eiffel Tower. The treasures of Florence. A guide can enhance our understanding and appreciation of what our eyes take in. A good guide can make us see things in an entirely new way. Our group of six spent most of […]

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Modern travel is fairly astounding. When it works, of course, and it generally does.  Far more than it did in the past. Wake up in Abu Dhabi, and two cab rides, one six-hour flight and an 80-minute train ride later … you can be checking into your friend’s hotel in Florence, Italy, in plenty of […]

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This comes up every four years. Or every four years after the U.S. national team has, at least, made the second round of a World Cup. Like this time around. “Is soccer about to make a breakthrough in the U.S.?” Will it be mentioned in the same breath as football and baseball and basketball? Or […]

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As I have outlined on this blog, I cannot bring myself to support the U.S. team in this World Cup, not while it is run by that Enemy of American Soccer named Jurgen Klinsmann. If you clicked on the first link, above, you may have noted that several commenters on that entry seemed ready to […]

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A few days back I posted an entry about how I doubt I will be able to cheer for the U.S. national team at the coming World Cup, because I have developed an animus towards Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach who dumped Landon Donovan. That provoked some reaction, some of it more than a bit tart. “We don’t […]

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I am amused yet oddly proprietary about the World Cup and this Group of Death meme. Has to be one. At every World Cup. A Group of Death. It’s the law. And it’s silly. Cliche, vaguely morbid, overstates the importance of soccer, but it’s what we do. (And according to the link, above, the first […]

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The World Cup intrigue begins earlier than ever. In this case, the pot distribution revealed today, ahead of the draw on Friday, was a source of some controversy. Well, it was in England, anyway. What it shows for fans of the U.S. national team is that the Yanks are likely to be in a tough […]

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I wrote a comment piece for The National today, looking at the United States soccer team, now assured of playing in a seventh consecutive World Cup. On the eastern side of the Atlantic, we must assume the majority of our readers know little or nothing of American soccer. They would refer to it as “football”, […]

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