Posts

Vignettes From Long-Ago Travels

Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon, from my 1971 visit to Burma As anyone who has followed this blog is surely aware, I did a fair amount in international traveling in decades gone by. In this episode I’m presenting a few recollections from some of those travels. Today, an odd pairing of destinations: Italy and Myanmar (formerly known […]

‘No-Crash’ Courses in Driving in Italy, England and Japan

Our tiny Fiat The experiences I recounted in last week’s post about driving in Brazil were hardly the only adventures I’ve had behind the wheel. My first encounter with “crazy foreign drivers” took place in Europe in 1965, on the same trip when my friend Arlee and I drove our car — a Fiat so tiny […]

The Power of Supercortemaggiore

Back in the summer of 1965, my friend Arlee* and I drove through several West European countries. We picked up our car – a Fiat so tiny it made VW bugs look like whales – in Milan and headed south. Driving in a new country was exciting. I remember the amusing (to me) name of […]

The Liberation of Rome

On June 5, 1944 – 72 years ago today, and one day before the D-Day invasion of Normandy – American troops, advancing north in Italy, liberated Rome from the Nazis. I am lucky to have had a personal glimpse of Rome’s liberation from one of my professors at Yale, the late Ivo Lederer.* Fourteen years […]

Seven Centuries of ‘Sex, Lies But No Videotape’

A book whose contents I’ve been editing on and off over the past year and a half has now been published. Pancheri – Our Story is the life’s avocational work of an extraordinary guy, now a friend, Gene Pancheri, a retired chemical engineer living in Cincinnati, who discovered his family’s roots in a sub-Alpine valley […]