Here in Levanto, there’s an apartment building in town with glassed-in balconies. On one of those balconies, the owner has painted over the glass with the paints that you always see used on shop windows. It is a bright, child-like scene of sky, sun, birds, clouds, and water … could […]
Monthly Archives: November 2011
8 posts
If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see the remains of an old construction in the foreground, probably a small stone hut used for storing tools and for getting out of the sun while eating your lunch on hot days. There’s not much left of it now, and […]
No, this is not about hominids, but about the great and glorious Ape (pronounced AH-pay), a vehicle so diffused in Levanto that they should be building monuments to it. Made by Piaggio since just after the war, it is a three-wheeled pickup truck that originally was nothing more than a […]
I think what most fascinates me about the professional surfing world is not the glamorous side of it – great tans, fancy sponsors, chiseled physiques, screaming fans – but the lifestyle they have as professional athletes in a minor sport. If you take away some of the top earners, the […]
Fog is romantic at one precise moment … when walking across a bridge at twilight, hand in hand with your wife, the streetlights wearing halos and the moist air tingling your nose. The rest of the time, fog sucks. It is one of the primary reasons that we got the […]
My father, a born Doubting Thomas, has always been suspicious of the existence of wild boar (cinghiale in Italian) in Italy. After spending three weeks in Tuscany a few years ago, he calculated that based on the number of restaurants serving wild boar in various forms (stew, steak, sausage, jerky, […]
If you are receptive enough to all of the stimuli around you, and experienced or wise enough to filter out the white noise and focus on things of substance, you will frequently find yourself in contact with people of extraordinary personality or character. This morning, for example, I was visiting […]
Last week Tuesday, 8 days ago, just hours before the deluge that brought down an unbelievable amount of water and mud and suffering to the Cinque Terre, I went to take a look at the sea after dropping my daughter off at nursery school. It was a warm morning, the […]