An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
Waking in the dark of 5 a.m., I realize I’ve been dreaming of an auditorium where the show has stalled. Behind us rises row after row of viewers equally sitting in the dark. We’re waiting to hear “Moby Dick,” Herman … Continued
An Italian-American who immigrated to the U.S. when she was twelve recently returned from visiting long-time friends in Rome, Milan, Parma, and Bologna. “They don’t remarry,” she said, “because they don’t divorce. They find ‘un companio’ and have children together.”Though … Continued
When my map of the world expanded across the Cooper River from downtown Charleston, South Carolina, to the tiny hamlet of Mount Pleasant (was there even a hill in the place?), my mother was building us a bungalow. She bought … Continued
Cape Cod juts off the coast of Massachusetts like a huge hook, which used to snatch sailing ships from any hope of reaching the Atlantic. May still do. When I visited Cape Cod last spring, I headed off Cape Cod’s … Continued
Out of the darkness of dreams rises my sensation of dialing. I’m trying to form my parents’ last phone number in Charleston. Area Code: 843, then 766… That’s as far as I get. During my mother’s last fifteen years, living … Continued
Stand in the green field where Pisa’s Leaning Tower, Cathedral and Baptistry pose like static black and white chess pieces. Turn abruptly left and find the long low colonnade of the Campo Santo or Holy Field. Campo= field. Santo=holy. Within … Continued
Getting there is relatively easy today, so I’m told, but when I visited Tikal in the late 1960s even arriving in Guatemala City was something of an ordeal. Stepping off the plane gave us a shiver of apprehension: armed and … Continued
Think of a family as a pyramid: I’m on the phone with my oldest relative, Eleanora, 93, who lives in Dover, Delaware. She bought her first car in her late 30s, “after the war,” as the family saying goes. We … Continued
No one ever inspected the old Isla ferry riding like a double-decker, open-air church across the bay from the Cancun mainland to the heavenly body of Isla. Later, hydrofoils would compete, rising high on their hunk of spray, zipping across … Continued
On Isla, coming as we did only once a year, many things transpired whose consequences we recognized but without knowing their origin. So, with Tripod Dog. He resided, as far as we could tell, across the boulevard from the Naval … Continued