I have reached a point where I read nearly everything I like twice. Three times, even. Talking about books here. I would rather go back and reexamine something I consumed a year ago, or decades ago, than take a chance on something new. (Unless it comes with overwhelmingly enthusiastic recommendations from people I trust.) I […]

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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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Traveling from the UAE to California is not a journey to be entered into lightly. One is divided from the other by 11 time zones. (Twelve time zones in the winter, when California goes off daylight savings time.) Only one nonstop exists from the UAE to California. (Emirates, from Dubai to Los Angeles, for 16 […]

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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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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 […]

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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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