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Siamo qui!

One flight up

Watching Irene from the window of our empty apartment

We were supposed to move to Italy this weekend. All day Friday, while the packers were realizing they'd understaffed our move, and I kept running here and there to get them drinks and takeout, an Irene-shaped cloud hovered. Would our flight make it out in time, or not? Would our furniture make it to the warehouse? More specifically, would the sofa make it out the front door? We couldn't find the super to remove the hinges.

In CZ's empty (except for her piano) room, I heard my voice echoing as I called Alitalia--will you cancel? Can we reschedule? Call tomorrow, call tomorrow, they said.

The movers spent until 10 p.m. packing (against the building rules), and then said they'd have to come back on Saturday to finish (also against building rules). My revised plan was to clean the apartment for the tenants around the movers' efforts to get the sofa out, and leave for JFK by three. Thankfully, our neighbors had offered us their furnished rental apartment through the end of the month, so we were staying only one flight upstairs.

I got up around 2 a.m. on Saturday, sleepless--how to stock up on storm groceries just in case when I'd just emptied the pantry for an international move? And how to explain the extended move to the co-op board? I checked e-mail, and there was the cancellation.

I sent CZ out early to get some grocery staples (thus avoiding lines out every grocery door by 10 a.m.), while I supervised and cleaned downstairs. Bob spent three hours on hold with Expedia on his Blackberry, only to get disconnected. When the movers finally left at noon, the subways were shut down and there were seemingly no groceries left in the entire city. We didn't have much to cook, but we had tons of oil and vinegar that the movers had rejected, so we were good for salads until 2012. Bob and I doubled our phone efforts via Skype, and I called Alitalia. After four hours on hold, we finally got a rescheduled flight--for September 5th. But the customer service rep was very proud of the fact that the plane was brand new.

Once we got over our initial dismay (CZ would miss a camp with her new violin teacher in Italy), we started to see a silver lining in the cloud, so to speak. We had been wanting to say a proper good-bye to our city all summer, but we didn't have time. Now we would. Besides, after a week with an international move, an earthquake, and a hurricane, all I really wanted to do was sleep. So I did. I slept soundly all through the hurricane's approach!

Of course, this storm, just like the earthquake earlier this week, was more notable for disrupting regular New York life than for any destruction here. But I think it made the week memorable. This is the week the curtains shook from side to side, the rain broke the subway, and we didn't move to Italy. I wonder what will happen next week?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra visa

This time two weeks from now we'll be spending our first night in Torino. Exactly where, I don't know. There's no one left in Italy to ask, because everyone is on vacation. Bob imagines a cartoon scenario in which we call a number beginning in +39, and a voice answers, "You have reached Italy. We're not here to take your call right now, but if you'll leave a message, we'll get back to you in September when we return from vacation."

And besides, we don't have our visas yet. I could explain the whole drawn out and nonsensical process of trying to get them, which has grown especially intense during the last two weeks, but I promise you don't want to hear the details. I'm not even sure I understand them, because they're in Italian, and besides that, they are Italian. But the upshot is that by some miracle we have an appointment on Thursday for the immigration equivalent of the Last Judgment. We'll sit on one side of a desk on Park Avenue handing over a series of notarized and apostillized documents, and a woman with a box full of rubber stamps (which clearly represent power) will either accept our application, or not. I'm thinking of taking some cookies.

That leaves us a week to get ready for the movers!

Last spring, I'd had thoughts of saying a proper goodbye to the city, perhaps visiting places we've loved for fourteen years for the last time, having long visits with friends, and even going to some of those museums and interesting stores we never got around to seeing. Now I see that this isn't going to happen. Instead, I'm living in a kind of blur, running papers down to Fed Ex, grouping things for packing, carting belongings to the thrift store, spending all my American change, eating down the pantry, calling insurance companies. I've made my last Amazon order. But I also find myself staring at people on the subway, with a sideways, New York glance. Such variety, such eccentricity! Every now and then I realize that I'm leaving, and I catch my breath. But there's too much to do to think about it very long.

And yet, this too is a part of life. It's not what I would have chosen, but it can be lived well, and it certainly calls for character; more than I have, in fact.

Detail from a Florentine fresco of Dante. The book is open to "Nel mezzo del cammin..." The people on the left are waiting in line for visas.

Last Monday I was having a bad bureaucracy day, which made me feel especially satirical. So I began imagining the famous first terza of Inferno as applied to immigration:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra visa,

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che' la diritta via era smaritta.

In the middle of the pathway of our visa

I found myself in a dark wood

the straight way lost.

Yes, this is the perfect allegory to describe our situation! We really don't know what we're doing. Without our Italian Virgil, Michele, we'd never have gotten even this far. Even the phrase written jokingly above many a bureaucrat's desk, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," comes from Inferno.

But the words of the first terza are really "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," not "visa," which isn't really even an Italian word, and that's where the truth comes in. I'm in the middle of the pathway of my life, and this rather tedious and stressful process, however annoying, is a part of that life. Today, and not tomorrow, is when I live.

And perhaps, in about two weeks (or maybe a little later, after our obligatory visit to the police station), I will emerge in another hemisphere, on what seems like Easter Sunday, to find the sky studded with stars. Or I'll start exploring my new home, at least.

Guest post--Bob talks about why we're moving to Italy and other stuff

Bob, eating lunch in a Garfagnana restaurant last month

A week ago, my husband Bob gave a lunchtime talk at his law firm. The talk was part of a series in which the different attorneys have been talking about their practices. Bob used the opportunity to explain how he ended up taking a job in Italy. But before that, he took a long running start which goes back to a few years before our marriage, from an educational and work point of view.

We were married twenty-four years ago yesterday, by the way. At that time, Bob was in his last year of vet school.

What follows is more like a transcript than an essay. It has a lot of "inside" references. It lacks full written polish, more than rudimentary punctuation, and of course, the je ne sais quois of Bob in a room. But it should, include, at least, some of "the rest of the story" behind the events I describe in this blog.

And although perhaps it goes without saying, Francine was the attorney who introduced Bob at the beginning of the talk:

* * * *

Thank you, Francine.

Good afternoon. Let’s start with a joke. How do you know if a patent attorney is extroverted? When he talks to you he looks at YOUR shoes.

I'd like to make this payday lunch talk very informal so please feel free to ask questions or comment on anything I say over the next few minutes during which I will briefly discuss (1) my educational background; (2) my 14 years working in New York; and (3) my plans going forward in Italy. Past, present and future, as it were. As a bit of incentive to make this talk more interactive, on my first visit back to New York from Turin, Italy in October, I’ll bring a box of famous Turin chocolate and give it to the person who asks the best question or makes the best comment as determined solely by me.

Point 1. I grew up in the South, mainly in the Atlanta, Ga. area. I speak fluent Southern. [Repeat in Southern.] I went to the University of Georgia as an undergrad, also for vet school and after deciding not to be a veterinarian, I went to the University of Georgia law school. I've occasionally thought that the University of Georgia should name a building after me given all the time and money I've spent there. Ok, we're already done with Point 1.

On to Point 2, the New York years. After graduating from law school in the spring of 1997 and dealing with some goofiness from a mysteriously vanishing first job offer, I was left scrambling to find permanent employment. I was fortunate to meet a patent attorney in Atlanta who gave me the names of 10 people at IP firms throughout the U.S. By the way, up until the meeting with this guy, I had never considered for a moment working or living outside of the southeastern U.S. or even outside of Atlanta. But I wrote to all 10 people on my list who were in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Boston. I got one response. And this was from a guy named John White at a firm called Cooper & Dunham, here in New York.

John White asked me to fly up to New York later that week for an interview and so I did. This was the first time I'd ever been to New York. I was basically offered a position on the spot. As I later learned, I got the job because a senior associate at Cooper & Dunham had just given notice that he was leaving. This associate was responsible for, among other things, a portfolio of cases related to recombinant DNA technology for veterinary vaccines. My resume came across John White's desk within a couple of days of this associate giving notice and my background in veterinary medicine was a perfect fit.

By the way, the name of the associate who had just given notice at Cooper & Dunham: [pausing for effect] Mark Cohen.

(Laura's note: The pause for effect is because Mark Cohen is now a named partner in his current firm.)

So my wife, Laura, our 3 year old daughter, Sara, whom we call Sarie, and I drove a U-Haul from Athens, GA to our new home on 72^nd and 3^rd Ave. on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We planned to live in New York for about 2 years and then return to live and work in the Atlanta area. Well 2 years somehow became 14 …. and our 3 year old somehow became 17. As Woody Allen once said: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Indeed.

So what have I been doing the last 14 years? I'll tell you very briefly and I'll limit my comments to work-related activities. Marathon running, bicycle racing, snow skiing and gelato eating, while certainly more interesting, are beyond the scope of this talk.

I started by suffering through 14 months at Cooper & Dunham. Anyone who knows John White understands that when you work with him, time is measured in something more akin to dog years.

So after 14 months or about 8 dog years at Cooper & Dunham, I took a position in the IP group of a big general practice firm called Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel. There my IP experience expanded greatly beyond patent prosecution for veterinary vaccine technology. Over the years at Kramer Levin I had the opportunity to work in almost every area of IP law: patents and trademarks; prosecution and litigation; opinions, transactions, counseling.

I developed somewhat of a specialty in ANDA-related matters (ANDA refers to the process by which pharmaceutical companies get approval to market generic versions of branded drugs) and I often worked with technical experts on their expert reports and taking and defending experts in depositions. A couple of these experts have actually become friends. One, a guy named Sandy Bolton, interestingly (at least to me), played Bobby Fischer to a draw in a chess match in the mid-1960’s.

Probably the most high profile matter I worked on at Kramer Levin was the fairly well-known ANDA case, Purdue v. Endo, both at the district court and for the appeal to the Federal Circuit.

As the economy started to falter in 2008 and some of my own clients started suffering, I began looking for an exit strategy from the big firm life and lifestyle such as it was. So I began seeking alternatives and was successful in getting 3 separate offers all of which were available for me to consider at the same time side by side by side. One offer was for a position with an Atlanta based firm called Troutman Sanders which was starting an IP group in their New York office. I was also offered a position in beautiful Portland, Oregon as an in-house patent attorney for the technology transfer office of Oregon Health and Sciences University, and finally, I was offered a position in a grubby little boutique firm tucked away in the southeast corner of midtown called Lucas & Mercanti. I also had the fourth option of staying at Kramer Levin.

For reasons I’m still not quite sure about, although I believe autonomy played a significant part, I chose the grubby little boutique firm. My Kramer Levin clients followed me over to Lucas & Mercanti appreciating, I’m sure, that my billing rates went from close to $700 down to about $400 per hour.

Now at this point my story should end with me working through the years at this little firm, enjoying relative autonomy and a reasonable income. So what happened to interfere with this happy if somewhat dull ending?

Last summer - summer 2010 - my daughter was signed up to participate in a music festival in northern Tuscany. She’s a very talented classical violinist by the way. We decided to make it a family vacation. Since the festival would take place over a 3 week period I agreed to visit some of Lucas & Mercanti’s Italian clients, especially some of the satellite offices of the big Italian IP firms based in Rome and Milan. Lucas & Mercanti gets a substantial amount of work from Italian law firms and people from the firm pay frequent visits to offices in Milan and sometimes Rome, but never the smaller offices in between. So my task was to spend 1 of my 3 weeks in Italy speaking with IP professionals in smaller towns like Parma, Bologna and Florence, all places relatively close to the location of the music festival. And aside from all of the parking tickets, it was actually a lot of fun. By the way, the Bolognese sauce in Bologna is excellent.

So we now arrive at the fateful day – Thursday, July 1, 2010 - 13 months ago today. I had a mid-afternoon appointment to meet with two patent attorneys in the Florence office of a firm called Notarbartolo & Gervasi. Their office is in a beautiful 18^th century building near the center of Florence. I met with the attorneys there and spoke with them about several U.S. patent issues. They told me a little about what it was like to work in Florence, including their commutes to and from work by Vespa. The following moment I recall like a dream. As our meeting was winding down one of the attorneys, Livio Breghenti, said something like the following in a typically mellifluous Tuscan accent, which I’ll not try to imitate: Wouldn’t it be great if we had a U.S. patent attorney like you working in our office all the time. While he was saying this, the other attorney, Silvia Valenza, opened the shutters of a large window revealing a framed view of Florence’s main duomo. And as I recall it a choir of angels was singing too.

Thus an idea was born.

After returning to New York and convincing myself that I hadn’t been hallucinating that afternoon in Florence, I spent a few weeks writing up and refining a business plan listing all of the benefits I could think of that a U.S. patent attorney could provide to an Italian IP studio. In October – just a little over 9 months ago – I sent my business plan to 8 IP studios in Milan, telling them that I could meet with them in November. All 8 studios contacted me stating that they would very much like to meet with me. That was the first big indication that I was on to something. 8 out of 8.

All of those meetings went very well and everyone agreed that my business plan was right on target. I narrowed the 8 firms down to the 3 largest IP groups in Milan and met with those 3 again in February – less than 6 months ago. I received offers from 2 of the 3 firms while I was still in Milan. I ended up agreeing to work at the largest IP firm in Italy – Jacobacci & Partners – in their Turin office beginning September 1st, one month from today. I chose Jacobacci for a number of reasons: One, it’s the largest IP firm in Italy. Two, and related to the first point, Jacobacci is capable of handling all technical areas and is not over-specialized in any one area to the detriment of other areas.

Besides the personal logistics of moving from New York to Italy there were a few other things to consider. One part of the business plan included selecting a single U.S. firm, preferably in New York, to develop a nice reciprocal relationship with. While I could do some U.S. work for Italian clients on-site in Italy, certain matters I would need to send to the U.S. At the same time, the firm I selected could send European work to me. So I began considering which firm might be the best fit.

On my list of people to contact was Caleb. Caleb and I had both worked at Kramer Levin in the early 2000s just prior to Caleb leaving to work in Israel. Caleb thought the idea sounded interesting and suggested that we speak with Zeev. So Caleb, Zeev and I met a few times and it seemed like this firm would be a good fit. It also made sense that I should come over here for a few months before heading off to Italy. Among other things this would allow me to meet people here and also would allow me to bring my clients to Pearl Cohen and to continue working with them to some degree as I will continue to be Of Counsel to this firm. This type of arrangement would not have been possible at Lucas & Mercanti.

Several things make Pearl Cohen particularly well-suited for this overall arrangement. First, as you all know, Pearl Cohen has offices in the U.S. and in Israel so reciprocity can work in multiple jurisdictions. Second, and related to the first point, this firm has an international outlook. Third, the U.S. office is in New York but the rates are very competitive. So you get the convenience of New York without the typical New York big firm fees. Fourth, I've come to appreciate this firm and the people here very much. From what I can tell there are no oversized egos. People here seem genuine and this is actually quite rare for a law firm, at least in my experience. And finally, it may be a bit odd, but it’s probably a good sign that the managing partner here uses smiley faces in his emails.


So I decided to cast my lot with Pearl Cohen. I walked away from Lucas & Mercanti on Friday, April 1^st and walked into Pearl Cohen on Monday, April 4^th.

As I mentioned earlier, when we first arrived in New York, we thought we would be here about 2 years before returning to the Atlanta area. As it turns out we have been here nearly 14 years and we’re not moving back to Atlanta - we're moving to Italy – and in less than 4 weeks.

So that’s the story of the last 14 years, also known as Point 2 of my 3 points. Point 3 – Italy and the future - will take much less time to discuss. In fact, we’re nearly done.

By the way the country of Italy was unified in 1861 so it’s celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. And the firm I'm going to, Jacobacci & Partners, was founded just 11 years later in 1872. And even though Jacobacci has been around for 139 years, I believe I will be the first U.S. patent attorney born in Knoxville TN to ever work there - or in any Italian IP firm for that matter. I may even be the only person born in Knoxville TN to ever visit Italy. Anyway.

Over the past year or so I’ve learned a lot about the inferiority complexes of Italian IP professionals. They seem to look at themselves as the red-headed step children of Europe. And it's somewhat understandable. For every 10 cases they send to the U.S., they may get 1 case back for filing in Europe. Think how frustrating this must be. 10 cases go west to the U.S. and they wait and wait and wait and finally one case comes back east to them and they continue to wait and wait and wait. And that's it. The other 90% of cases go instead to Germany and the U.K. even though costs there are much higher. And the Italians are so emotional - the stereotype is basically true - so this must feel like unrequited love to them.


So Jacobacci has hired me to make things right, at least for them. How will I go about doing this? They want me to do 2 main things. First, they want me to work on certain U.S. matters for their European clients directly on site in Italy. If they don't send a case out, they don't have to worry about getting one back – no unrequited love problem there. Second and most importantly they want me to use my connections in the U.S. to generate more European filings. By the way, a substantial performance bonus is tied solely to this second point – new European filings.

And now I have to apologize for sounding like a Jerry Lewis telethon, but I do need your help to make this venture successful. I can't do it without you.

I’ve brought a number of clients here from Lucas & Mercanti. I believe that number is 12 – some little, but some big. For example, Abon is a start-up pharmaceutical company in New Jersey co-founded by Sandy Bolton (the guy who played Bobby Fischer to a draw in a chess match). Dyna, is a Brazilian company that makes windshield wipers. Bracco is an Italian-based company which develops contrast agents for ultrasound, MRI and other modalities. Schott is a German company that makes different types of glass for many different products. Baumer Electric, a Swiss company that makes high tech sensors. And from Italy I will send you U.S. work whenever I can, both to the New York office and to Israel.

In return, please remember me, [plaintively] please, when you have clients interested in filing European patent applications, especially for your clients with budget concerns. Fees in Italian IP studios are about 20% less than in Germany and about 40% less than in the U.K. and the quality is very, very good. The Italian IP attorneys, at least in northern Italy, are very competent. In fact, Italian practitioners are regularly beating German and English attorneys in opposition proceedings in Munich, for example. Low price plus high quality means value, right?

But not just new European filings. Any matter – patent or trademark, prosecution or litigation, even validations.

Finally I want to let you know that Fabrizio Jacobacci (the great, great, great, great grandson of the founder) and I will be in New York on October 17^th and 18^th - I'll be here a few extra days. He and I will be happy to speak with you about the various things Jacobacci can do for you. And I will honor my commitment to bring a box of chocolate to one of you.

I have now reached the end of Point 3 which is also the end of my payday lunch talk. Grazie mille per la vostra attenzione. Thank you very much for your attention.

La gioia del Signore

Goji Bear, Splot and Schu-pin climbing our host's refrigerator in Torino

We're back in the US for a month or so before our move. Oh, there is so much more I'd like to tell about our trip, but I need to take care of finding a mover and packing, finding at least a temporary apartment, and handling a letter from the IRS before the middle of August. So it might be a little while before I blog again.

I'll just leave it at this for now: The trip renewed my faith in the country of Italy. Despite the bureaucracy, it's a lovely place, and I do think we'll like living there. And I can think of no better symbol of our transition than the three little animals in the photo above.

As I wrote before, we took two teens along with us on our trip to Garfagnana and Torino, a sister and brother. By the end of the trip, they and CZ had bonded to the point where they had their own inside jokes, and knew the others' pet peeves. And despite having to deal with various travel inconveniences (namely lugging suitcases on trains, traveling in full sun, and keeping enough clean laundry in these conditions), they really got along beautifully. I think they helped CZ realize that she liked Italy. And I can honestly say they never met a gelateria they didn't like.

The last day in Torino, while I was looking at apartments and Bob was visiting his new employer, the three of them explored the center of the city together. They had intended to do some shopping, but most shops in Italy are still closed from Sunday on Monday morning. So mostly they window shopped.

At the end of the day, they went into some little IKEA-like store where everything was cheap, which suited their budgets just fine, and bought the three little "friendship animals" above. Their names are Goji Bear, Splot and Schu-pin, which are all inside jokes and I can't explain them except that someone was very tired once and combined Schubert and Chopin, resulting in the third name.

The other item in the photo is a little card that was on our host's refrigerator. It says, "La gioia del Signore e' la nostra forza (Neemia 8,10)." The joy of the Lord is our strength. Italians are to skilled at doing much with little, and for the most part, they are full of joy. And I've met some who are full of the joy of the Lord. What better thought to take home for our last month in the United States?

A quick post about chocolate and coffee

During last year's festival in Castelnuovo, our family became big fans of the macchiato at the pasticceria in the center of town.

We're still big fans of macchiato, but this morning we tried something new, and it definitely gets added to the list of favorites: caffe fondente!

Caffe fondente is a coffee with steamed milk, but it also has dark chocolate sprinkled in it and a bit of steamed milk in a little cup-shaped chocolate on the side. Ours were delicious and attractively presented. The saucer was even slightly assymetrical to hold he spoon and tiny chocolate.

While at the pasticceria this morning, I also took some photos of the other chocolates the pasticceria hand crafts, including a set of tools, a Bialetti moka pot, and a sheet music cake (for the festival CZ is participating in). The owner greets us familiarly now, so I figured it wouldn't be too obnoxious to take photos of some of our favorite items.


Perfectly detailed paint brushes, wrenches, locks, and scissors, all made of chocolate. They even look a little rusty.

A chocolate Bialetti Moka pot, one of the symbols of Italy. It's a little hard to see because it's wrapped in plastic, but inside the plastic, it's perfect!


A special display window for the music festival, showing a mannequin in a pink feather boa, playing a masonite violin while sight reading from a chocolate sheet music cake.


A typical morning macchiato, about to be gone.

(At the top: caffe fondente.)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, Italy

Roving Reporter post: We return to Castelnuovo

I am sitting on the gazebo of Il Palazzetto at the Bertolanis' house, perhaps my favorite place in all of Italy. I am listening to the disorienting, but happy sound of a violin, a viola, and a cello all practicing different scales and etudes at the same time. We have brought two friends with us to the music festival this year, and though CZ and L have been practicing for two days, M has just picked up his rented cello. Once they get warmed up, they can start practicing together. (Which they did, after lunch, of course.)

This morning we walked down the hill and into town for a morning cappucino and a trip to buy groceries. But we couldn't find just the right kind of zucchini for tomorrow evening's dinner, so we came back empty-handed, thinking we'd try again tomorrow. When we got to the top of the hill, Sig.ra Bertolani was just walking around the corner of the house where she had been talking to the kids.

"Ecco la mamma," she said to me. "Here's the mama."

"Lentemente," I replied, smiling, because no matter how hard I try, I'm always about 25 yards behind the others when going back up the hill.

Sig.ra Bertolani had just delivered a gorgeous basket of vegetables, with just the zucchini we had been looking for, zucchini blossoms (which she told CZ how to fry); green, purple and white beans; a bit of basil; and two kinds of greens, one bitter (a type pf arugula, perhaps?) and the other sweet. With three days worth of four people carrying groceries up the hill, and now this gift, our small refrigerator is delightfully full. This year I'm cooking off the New York Times pasta section and a Mark Bittman cooking app, plus a few recipes from home. With no measuring devices in either English or metric, I'm improvising, but it works.


All the kids are very helpful, and after dinner they play cribbage, chess, and, last night, Settlers of Catan. When the sun goes down at 10 p.m., it gets cool enough to put on a jacket. Then the stars come out (so many more than in New York!) and we watch the town's lights glittering down below. It's so delightful that we can't seem to go to bed before midnight. Thank goodness for siesta!

Unfortunately, there are some things I can't do well from the iPad, and fixing photo margins and inserting links are among them, so I trust that if you have no idea what I'm talking about and somehow want to, you can find my posts from last year's music festival in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, Toscana, Italy

A lot of water has gone under the bridge this year...

...but at least now I know the name of the river. It's the Po.

Perhaps I should explain?

My frequent absence during the past several months is because we're moving to Turin, Italy. That's also the reason for the two trips we took this fall/winter. Bob has gotten a job with an Italian law studio promoting reciprocal relationships between law firms in the US and Italy. We should move in August.

For months, I really couldn't tell anyone what we were doing. For one thing, we didn't know what was going to happen ourselves. And perhaps that was just as well, because it took a while for all of us to get used to the idea. But now it's pretty much a certain thing.

How exactly will this move work? On many of the logistical questions, your guesses are as good as mine. This move is a big step in the dark. But I trust that, whatever happens, the Lord directs our steps. And we hope to find out more as we go along.

So, I guess we'll be a Torino family now.

Photo of Turin from Villa della Regina, by Ricktosko, Google images

An Update

Time for an update on my lately-neglected blog. It's not apathy that is causing the neglect, but a concrete development, which I hope to post about soon. Meanwhile, here's a little about what's up around here:

View from the farmhand's house in Garfagnana, Italy

• We're going to the music festival in Garfagnana again! This time, we're taking two teenaged friends along. I really like these friends, so they should be a fun addition to our trip. I'm looking forward to the same small town, the same refurbished farmhand's house owned by the kindly Bertolani family, the same town square with its small shops, proprietors, and medieval castle, the same great faculty, and the same slightly wacky concert schedule with a delayed grand finale across the street from our favorite restaurant in town.

A seasonal produce list from a previous spring.

• It's almost time for the farmers' markets to start selling good produce again. Presently I find myself in something of a culinary no man's land. I stare blankly at my little chalkboard, looking for ideas from the list of seasonal foods that are currently in my refrigerator, but there's nothing on it! Eventually, I shake out of my trance, get out my old recipe file or my Asian cookbooks, and find something perfectly suitable, but not necessarily seasonal.
  
  This somehow means that the checkout girls at the corner grocery see me daily at about 5 p.m. Not my usual way of planning a meal. But yesterday I did run into a woman speaking Italian to her baby in the store and had an entire conversation with her. As you can imagine, given my Italian skills, it was just chit chat, but I was glad I took the risk, and the baby smiled at me! Good practice for Garfagnana.

One of CZ's photos from last week. Blooming trees on a cold, gray day.

• Spring is finally arriving, however much delayed, in New York City. The tree outside our window is starting to bloom, and the robins have arrived and are singing enthusiastically. I can hear them all the way from Riverside Park!
  
  These first warm days always bring out the contrasts: A young woman in a pink and green strapless sundress walks down the street in one direction and old one in a heavy coat and wool scarf walks up it in the other. One day this week it got up into the high seventies and CZ and I took a walk along the river. There was the usual good weather sea of humanity surrounding us--on skateboards, bikes, walking and running--as all our fellow New Yorkers, like us, crawled out from under their metaphorical rocks, soft and pale as slugs. Favorite sight of the day: A young woman in a strapless sequined gown and high heeled mules, walking across the street by the park. She had a beat-up backpack over her shoulders, and carried a bicycle pump in one hand.

• Film trucks are on our street today, filming Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. They seem to be using the building next door.

• I finally activated my blank, dormant Facebook account. I have ambiguous feelings about Facebook. On the plus side, I now know what some of my extended family members are up to, especially the younger ones who are newly out on their own. And I like my brother-in-law's photos. On the downside, the medium promotes fragmented thinking and it tempts me to keep up with the pace of the newsfeed. I'm sure I'll come to peace with it eventually, likely by using it for what it's worth, and mostly ignoring it.

• It has been a challenging winter. I am being honed, taught by God, and pushed outside of my comfort zone. I have learned a lot about myself, not all of it pleasant. I've learned how very important it is to stay positive, even when everything inside screams the opposite; staying positive gives room for grace to grow. I've learned that thankfulness is often embodied in small things, but it's not just about the things themselves. It's about what they represent in concrete form, that God cares for us, and that we can use small things to care for others. Whenever we are still trying, still learning, there is hope. Joy comes in the morning.

More soon!

Screwtape on education

More C.S. Lewis from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in The World's Last Night and Other Essays. I promise I didn't copy this idea from Cindy, as I've been meaning to post it for two days, but it certainly is a striking coincidence, and if you read it, really does remind me of the current attitude towards education:

I hope, and believe, that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be--as Mine was--one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as a lash and spur to your endeavors. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep!

After that welcoming introduction, which reminds me of the way we treat our high school juniors, Screwtape gets down to details about the reason why souls in Hell these days are of such poor quality:

It would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality...The difficulty lay in their very smallness and feebleness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible...They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur...

Of course, Lewis eventually gets around to explaining how these muddled souls finally became capable of making a choice worth damnation, but that's a much more serious subject that makes me instead want to quote his book The Great Divorce. My point in posting these was merely to point out some parallels with education.

Il stile italiano

Italian style tends to come in two main branches, the traditional and the modern. Sometimes they are combined, as in this hotel room in Milan. We only stayed one night at this hotel, because it was more expensive than an apartment, but it certainly was a nice place to rest. (Note dark-colored blob to the right of top photo, a.k.a, Bob sleeping off jet-lag under his pea coat.) It had a traditional beamed ceiling and white linens, but also some glowing plastic cubes that reminded me of a science fiction book I read as a child.

The last three photos are of the apartment we stayed in in Turin. When you get up close, the furniture is IKEA, but still, it's artful what the owner did on a low budget. And it helps, of course, that the building is 18th century.

Qualcosa da mangiare

By the time I post this, I will back home in New York (on the plane now), but no roving reporter worth her salt would go to Italy and not post something about food, davvero?

Our find on this particular trip was a ubiquitous item, but new to us: bugie (BOO-gee-ay). Bugie are sheets of crisp pastry sprinkled with powdered sugar. They're usually a bit rippled from air bubbles, especially the best ones. They're sold in most supermarkets; in fact, I discovered them because the man behind the meat counter put some in a bag and told me I needed to try them. They're also pretty cheap, about 1€ per a bag that provides a generous coffee snack for four. But the best ones we ate this week came from a paneficcio (bread store) on the hill on the other side of the river in Turin, the same hill I wrote about in my last post. I also picked up a pizza with prosciutto for lunch and some rolls for the next morning's breakfast.

Bugie!

Breakfast rolls, each spiraled in a different direction

Just down the hill from the paneficcio, we had seen well-dressed women in a pastaficcio (a pasta store) buying things for dinner. I saw the line as a sign of popularity and decided to stop in on the way back to buy something. CZ and I quickly agreed on some spinach gnocchetti, and I was pleased when the woman behind the counter confirmed my choice of walnut sauce to go with it. I make walnut sauce at home, but this was way better!

Spinach gnocchetti, before cooking and being tossed with walnut sauce

So CZ and I had a entire day's worth of groceries, all delicious, as it turned out, and requiring minimal preparation, but not nearly as expensive as eating on a restaurant. Abbiamo mangiato bene!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Roving Reporter Post 2

CZ and I have been walking all over the city of Turin today, getting the lay of the land. We took off after breakfast and started walking. We started out near Porta Susa train station and walked towards the Duomo.

At the Duomo, which is where the Shroud of Turin is kept (almost always under a shroud of its own), we were practically commandeered by two old men, some sort of docents, who wanted to explain the Shroud to us in great detail, give us brochures about it, explain some restoration in progress after a fire in the chapel where the Shroud was kept (I think), and point out the offering box. Every word of this was in rapid Italian, only about two-thirds of which I understood, but they seemed delighted that we could understand any of it. They were so enthusiastic that we felt it would be rude not to listen. It really became rather funny, because we'd think they were finished, but back they'd come with some more material or explanation! We noticed, too, that the Duomo in Turin was one of the few places we saw people who looked like they were actually there to worship. We really didn't see tourists wandering around with cameras.

In the area of the Duomo we also found what looked like an old Roman wall (with medieval renovations) called the Porta Palatina, the Palazzo Reale, an enormous square with long views in three directions, the Palazzo Madama, and the Teatro Regio, where operas are performed.


About those long views: Turin is a very Baroque city with straight avenues and lots of grand buildings with ornate windows. It's more like light-colored, elegant Paris than dark, earthy Renaissance Tuscany. Many of the streets, which are all cobblestone, are lined with porticos. There are tiny vendor spaces inside some of the columns along the porticos. And to keep the grid from becoming boring, every so often the streets open up into a vast square. And you need this variety, because unlike gridded NYC, there's not a single tree along any street.


We kept walking down the via Po towards the river, over the bridge, and straight up a long hill on the other side and into a residential neighborhood.
CZ just kept going, past all the appetizing pasticcerias and pizzerias and a place that sold homemade pasta. At one point I called after her, "Where are you going? We can't see the entire city, you know! It's much too big!"

"Not with that attitude, we won't!" she shouted back.

We kept going up 'til we got to a place where there were no sidewalks, turned a corner, and rounded past some apartments. There, beyond a fence, was a panoramic view of the entire city. CZ felt justified. The white we saw all along the horizon wasn't more clouds rolling in. It was all snow--on the Alps.


On the way back, we did stop in the pasta store and a pasticceria. But that's the next post.

Location:Torino, Italia

Roving reporter post, from a train

CZ and I are on a train to Turin, from Milan. It's gray, raining, and bleak out, but warm. We're on a commuter train, but we have luggage, so we're sitting in the wheelchair seats where there's room. The porter said it was okay.

We're going to talk to people in Turin about their conservatory. The people a few seats over are discussing how the program works, and I wish I could understand them better. I love the accents.

My Italian is getting a workout. I'm getting over the fact that my grammar is laughable and my pride in the fact that I think I should be able to speak with a better accent than comes out at any given time. My favorite combination in conversation is to speak with an Italian who speaks some English, but not too well (this is most Italians who speak English). That way I can try to speak Italian until I get stuck, but then I have the luxury of punting. This is how I learned the word for "expire" yesterday--It's scadenza. I was trying to buy minutes for our Italian phones.

We're still a bit jet-lagged. It's 3:30 a.m. EST. We've been here twenty-four hours. But I things are going well and I am quite pleased to be able to write a blog post on a train in Italy.

And though it may sound shallow, I must admit it--the Italians dress much better than we do, and the coffee! Mamma Mia! I'd love another about now...

Ciao!

Location:Non lo so esattamente

Booklist for 2010

After the year ends, I like to take stock of the books I've read and think about which kinds were most worthwhile and which kinds I should probably read fewer of. I like to remember these books, just as I like to remember a good evening with friends. Because a good author is a kind of friend.

I didn't read as much this year as during the last several years. I'm pretty sure that there were two reasons: 1) I travelled a lot more, including three plane trips since October, and 2) This was the year that I started looking into colleges, and that is a very time-consuming activity. You'll notice that I haven't posted as much on this blog as usual, either. The causes are the same, no doubt.

Now, onto the books! This year sort of had a theme--ancient Roman history. The interest in Roman history started because I was researching for CZ's homeschooling this year, but it also had something to do with our trips to Italy. I wanted to understand any ruins we might see, and be able to explain something about them to CZ. While reading about Rome itself, I also got interested in the history of early Christianity and its relation to the later Roman Empire. I'm still reading about that. And I discovered that I liked the author Robert Louis Wilken, who apparently researched himself into belief, if I am reading correctly.

I found out from Susan Wise Bauer that you did not want to be next in line for a throne in the ancient world. Herod's Massacre of the Innocents was very much in character for his day.

On the lighter side, I read three Malcolm Gladwell books and two books by Anne Fadiman. The Gladwell books, frankly, ran together, but I got his main idea that one should look closely at a trend, because its causes may not be what you think (and several months after reading them, I'm wondering if they were really what he thinks, either). Outliers was the most memorable of the three books I read by Gladwell, but I also remember the anecdote about the Scots-Irish culture of honor being transported to the Appalachians, perhaps because I am probably at least partly from that background myself. Bob bought the book Albion's Seed, from which Gladwell took his chapter on Appalachian codes of honor.

The Fadiman books were just delightful. I don't care what Anne Fadiman writes about, I just like the way she describes things! But it helps that much of what she writes about has to do with books and words. I loved the essay, in Ex Libris, about long words that have gone out of use, and her game of surveying friends to see if they know them.

I found out through biography that Jonathan Edwards was a much different sort of man than I'd thought--very emotional in his faith, persecuted in his own day for his strong principles, and not the stiff Puritan often portrayed in American history classes. Yes, he is stern, but it's a sternness that arises out of passionate love.

Palace Walk, about an Egyptian Muslim family just before WWI, stood out as a fictional jewel in the middle of a largely non-fiction year. I might like to read the other two books in the trilogy.

I laughed all the way through An Italian Education, written by an Englishman (Tim Parks) who is married to an Italian and has raised his children (by now) in Verona. I had detected some of the curious Italian emphases he describes during my own two trips to Italy this year. Of course, he could have a similar heyday with Americans, and probably would if the field weren't so crowded with books already. My favorite scene was the one in which a German-speaking woman seals his identification with Italy by scolding him for irresponsibility (he's really just horribly sleep-deprived). But I was rather disappointed that the book ended at the beach in Pescara instead of in Verona. Perhaps Parks had to travel a bit to get the national character just right, but I left Parks' Italy feeling as though I had been watching one of those endless bikini shows on Univision.

When I look back over the reading year, my two most memorable books, I think, were Livy's The Early History of Rome, and Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. They are very different sort of books, and Esolen may be included partly because his is the last book I read this year, so it's still fresh.

The Early History of Rome was probably the most difficult book I read last year, not because of the sentence structure, but just because so many Romans shared the same few names! There was a continual parade of heroes and villains (though almost all were at least somewhat mixed in character) in this 400 year history, and I was constantly looking back to keep them all straight. But since I read it during a year in which I spent a lot of time in Italy, and I even read it partly in Italy (following the advice of Anne Fadiman that one should read in situ), it helped me understand what I was seeing, and helped me to connect Italy past and present. Early Rome was not the decadent place that later emperors like Nero ruled over, but it is also very different from the idealized image of the Republic that inspired the Founding Fathers and even a sculpture of George Washington in a toga. It's a sign of the book's value that I still remember exactly where I was (on a bus on Fifth Avenue, about to cross the park), when I read the arguments for and against opening the office of consul to plebians.

Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child is a new book, which I had pre-ordered because I like Esolen's posts on Mere Comments, and because the topic looked interesting. At first, it looks as though the book is going to be yet another one of those what's-wrong-with-modernity screeds that criticizes the status quo without saying contributing anything positive. The title is negative, and Esolen uses a lot of Lewis quotes, both of which are standard fare these days. Esolen even a Screwtape-like say-the-opposite-of-what-you-mean device that gets confusing at times because he seems to forget about it for pages at a stretch.

BUT--somehow in Esolen's able hands, the book emerges not as a strung together, poorly-reasoned rehash of Lewis anecdotes, Chestertonian paradox, and modernity-bashing, but as something positive and brightly inspiring. Esolen is a professor and translator of Dante, so his use of medieval poetry is especially effective. He doesn't just use Lewis's words, but captures a similar sense of longing. What do we have in our bland, flat, modern world that compares with the Brightest Heaven of Invention? Even the uneven Screwtape device ends up being effective, because it gives Esolen a chance to wax poetically on what he thinks used to be, and could be still, right with the world. Through it he shows that the problem with modernity isn't inherent in chronology or even in reform; the problem is lack of moral imagination. Today's anything-goes creativity is a poor substitute. Thus he reopens the window to the best of what the medieval world had to offer, without necessarily saying we have to go back to its (stereotyped) faults as well.

It probably helped that I was reading Esolen at my in-laws' home over Christmas. I'd look up from a chapter about letting boys play outside on their own, and about letting them be boys, and I'd see my thirteen-year-old nephew building a snow fort. He didn't have any other boys around that day (only his sister and CZ), but still, the kids were out for hours without regard for cold or dark, having a blast. A few days later I visited a friend whose seven-year-old son gets to roam around in the woods and spend "shop nights" with some other boys and a generous neighbor. Few boys get to have the sort of childhood that Esolen describes anymore, but our visit to Georgia seemed a demonstration that, even in an imperfect world, there are still opportunities for the sort of freedom that builds imagination.

Here's the full list for 2010:

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry

Night, Elie Wiesel

Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Robert Louis Wilken

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Palace Walk, Naguib Mafouz

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography, Iain H. Murray

Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman

The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Plutarch

At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman

A Student's Guide to the Classics, Bruce Thornton (2nd reading)

Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children

The Early History of Rome, Livy

The History of the Ancient World, Susan Wise Bauer

Cities of God, Rodney Stark

The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (3rd reading)

The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education, Maya Frost

An Italian Education, Tim Parks

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen