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 […]

[Read more →]

Anyone who has run a newspaper sports section knows that eight months of the year, maybe even nine or 10 … you do not have to worry about a section having a newsy feel. News just happens, in the form of scheduled events. Might be news in addition to the scheduled events. Might break your […]

[Read more →]

We will keep this short. Jurgen Klinsmann‘s personal animus towards Landon Donovan, the greatest soccer player in American history, is plain for all to see, and the longer he carries on his one-way feud, the worse it will be for the 2014 World Cup campaign. But this latest bit of U.S. squad maneuvering by the […]

[Read more →]

You could come to the UAE in January to have a look around. The temps would be in the 80s Fahrenheit, and if you hailed from the northern halves of Europe or North America you would be quite grateful for the sun and the warmth and perhaps even for the sheer number of fellow snowbirds […]

[Read more →]

Time to catch up on some Landon Donovan news. This broke while I was in the U.S. soccer-news vacuum known as “Italy” … and shows that Jurgen Klinsmann continues to nurse his hard feelings towards the leading scorer in American national team history. Klinsmann did not invite Landon into the national team ahead of some […]

[Read more →]

  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 […]

[Read more →]

  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 […]

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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, […]

[Read more →]