Photo credit: Carol Madigan The 10:26 Frecciarossa to Rome     All roads lead to Rome, and all roads in Rome lead to the Colosseo. There’s little sense in going to Rome and not putting this, the Forum and Circus Maximus on your itinerary. The problem is every American in Bermuda shorts and legs like golf tees […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    The abrupt passing of my birthday having exhausted my supply of get-out-of-sightseeing-free cards, the remainder of our stay in Venice would be focused on seeing things. I was fine with this setback for two reasons. One, I could see the joy rise in Carol’s face as she saw the things she […]

  Photo credit: Carol Madigan  The remaining two days in Milan were to be framed by sightseeing, namely the Duomo de Milano, or the Milan cathedral, a castle and a basilica, neither of whose names I’m not bothering to look up. I’m not whining, mind you. I am quite happy to sightsee with Carol, because I […]

   I’m not sure the precise moment when I knew I was being hustled by “Giovanni” (if that was even his real name), but by the time he’d steered Carol and I away from Naples’s Castle Sant’Elmo that we were looking for and he had promised to direct us to, I knew we were being hustled.

 Writing in 1807, a French travel writer claimed Trieste reminded him most of Philadelphia, PA. Maybe it was the cholera epidemics every summer, or that the streets of both doubled as sewer systems. I’m not sure. I would imagine just about any sizable city in the world in 1807 would be comparable to each other in terms of pestilence, sanitation and starvation.

I first experienced it courtesy of the taxi driver in Ancona. In Jan Morris’s Trieste, she quotes someone offering oversimplified descriptions of the various nationalities living amongst each other in Trieste. To Italians, the observer ascribed “harmony.” When my driver arrived at my apartment on a hill overlooking the Adriatic and the town of Ancona below, he told me he would wait until the landlord arrived to make sure I wouldn’t be stranded. My only regret was that I didn’t have enough coins to make a more generous tip.