In Italy, as my trip and some voluminous reading about it revealed, people don’t see themselves as Italian. Nor do they see themselves that much as Tuscan or Umbrian or Piedmontese. Instead, their first loyalty is to their city. That’s a legacy of the hundreds of years when Italy was not a country at all, [...]

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Sitting facing the palace of Federigo da Montefeltro in the bright afternoon sun, sipping “water with gaz” and hooking into a rare WiFi spot after my latest two-hour hit of Madonna with Child paintings, not a car in sight on this elegant cobbled street and plaza. It looks almost like La Citta Ideale, the painting [...]

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I realize that the riot is two weeks old now and that, for lack of other news, it’s been analyzed to pieces but a small personal perspective on why young people participate. I was in a small riot in Paris many years ago, when I was a student there. It was on New Year’s Eve, [...]

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Nothing like seeing a car barrelling towards you IN YOUR LANE to make you appreciate the differences in culture between one country or city and another. Coming up to almost three weeks now in Italy, we’ve had lots of time to do what is the best part of tourism: ponder what is the same and [...]

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