I was sitting quietly at a family dinner recently, when Carol’s older daughter April sat down next to me and said, “I know you don’t like to talk at these things, but I want to hear about your Lisbon plans.”    And so it was on one of our final days in Rome, Carol and I […]

  My first experience with the wine from the Frascati region outside Rome was way back in the 1980s introduced by a work colleague in upstate New York. I remember it as crisp and clean; the colder it was, the cleaner it tasted. Forty years later, Carol and I were in a van being driven to […]

  I believe most tourists to any place on the globe at one time or another, confront the same question: what would it be like to live here full time. A number of these tourists went on to do it and then write about it. I’ve read several of these well-written memoirs (Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence always comes to mind first). They’ve all taken me on amazing journeys, but have wound up at the same terminus for me: Don’t do it.

  Maybe the reason I gained weight on this Italy trip has to do with what I did in between walking and eating. What I did in that in between time was sit. I did a lot of it, too, as I recall. There was no walking we did (unless it was to a restaurant) where I didn’t keep a sharp eye out for a bench, a bench with a good back too.

  The task this day was Salerno’s botanical garden known as the Garden of Minerva. I say “task,” because that’s what traditional sightseeing is to me. But this wasn’t as stultifying a sightseeing task as, say, a museum, cathedral, castle or Roman ruin. On the other hand, watching flowers grow is only one step removed from watching grass grow, paint dry or sitting through the start of the 2019 Cubs season. Also, taking a bit of the shine off the endeavor, Carol had armed us with a map and a bus route that would deliver us to the foot of the elevator that would then transport us atop the hill where the flowers and bushes were all blooming. (Now I do like the idea of an elevator.)