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 […]
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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 […]
For anyone interested in reading about how the deluge in Levanto went for us, here’s a link to my wife’s blog post about it in Italian and in English. The photo above should at least give an idea of what it was like on our property (though it was taken […]
My brother-in-law Marco was telling me the other day about his experience drilling through new tiles in his house. He was having a hell of a time getting through them, and given how much he and his girlfriend had spent on remodeling the house, he wasn’t interested in cracking any […]
After five weeks of straight sunshine, a cloud bank settled in over Levanto this morning, and we have had our first gray day in ages. No complaints, though – after all, the seasons and rhythms of the sun are as important for us as they are for any other animal, […]
A few weeks ago, my daughter Julia and I discovered our black cat Bagheera in one of her new hiding spots – a bare space between two thick bushes from which she had a great view of what was going on, but where she was practically invisible. As soon as […]
I just finished reading Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a classic weighing in at a relatively modest 682 pages. I don’t remember when I started it, though at best guess it was sometime around April or May. That’s a good 5 plus months, though I must subtract from those the six weeks […]
Last night, our typically Ligurian shutters started banging about, heralding the arrival of a change in weather. September and now October have been amazingly warm and beautiful, with hardly a drop of rain, but we knew it couldn’t last. The wind was bringing Autumn in. Or so I thought. For […]
My grandfather, whose nickname was Fish, had his origins in a fishing village in Norway and spent much of his free time on the waters of Lake Michigan near Charlevoix. Two of his brothers moved East and worked the fleet out of Gloucester, Mass. My father is an avid fisherman […]
Here in Levanto, the summer tourist season is tailing off (though the weather is still quite summery) and people are gearing up for the next big event: the ASP World Tour Longboard Competition, the first international surfing event ever held in Italy. I’ve tried surfing twice in my life, once here […]