A significant percentage of the movies I have watched in the past two months has been while flying. In part, it’s because so few films I am interested in seeing have come out during that time. But a big part of it is the array of movies-on-demand available for viewing on the big and modern […]

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I love the Mediterranean climate. Who doesn’t? Almost never really hot. Almost never really cold. Not much rain. Like here in Long Beach, California. Like in Sydney and Perth, Athens and Istanbul, Algiers and Barcelona, Cape Town and Santiago. Like nearly all of Italy. Consider the description:

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Mexico fans are probably gloating a little. El Tri is representing North America at the Confederations Cup, the quadrennial continental championships, in Brazil, a nice little tournament that doubles as a test run for the host country a year ahead of the World Cup. Four years ago, it was the U.S. national soccer team at […]

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One more thought about Italy, after two weeks there this month … Maybe we were not looking hard enough, or we did not recognize the signs, but we did not see or feel the economic distress going on there, like many areas of the Eurozone. No bums under bridges, no one rooting around dumpsters, almost […]

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  We spent barely 18 hours (the cretins!) in Florence, and then it was right back out of town, south to Fiumicino Airport, near Rome, for the final two events of a visit to Italy. We did not return via the A1 autostrade, Italy’s most-traveled highway. Instead, we detoured south and a little west to […]

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  We spent seven days in Rome last week and were alarmed by the crowds, the worst we had seen there. We were concerned/convinced that the half-day we had planned in Florence, here at the end of our Italy visit, would be an even-more taxing experience. Florence is Ground Zero of global tourism, which pretty […]

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Weather. What a refreshing, interesting concept. We have it, halfway down Italy’s coast. All sorts. In the same week.

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How hard can it be to solve a menu in Italian? The names of the various pastas (pasti?) transfer directly into English. Spaghetti is spaghetti and rigatoni is rigatoni. And we should be able to recognize basic Italian dining words, like “funghi” or “prosciutto” or “pollo” or “porchetta”. What could go wrong? As it turns […]

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In the 1950s and into the 1960s, Gina Lollobrigida was one of the planet’s premier screen sirens. She was a bit older and a bit less voluptuous than the other hugely famous Italian actress of roughly the same period, Sophia Loren. But each of them could bring conversation to a halt by entering a room, […]

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A potential downside to the Grand Hotel Le Rocce, here outside the city of Gaeta, in the southern half of Italy … is the stairs. The hotel is built into a cliff. Ingeniously so. The builder(s) took advantage of every bit of semi-flat area to build a pavilion or a little garden and, eventually, five […]

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