Glory

It’s been an exciting week. Monday night, the frangipani blossoms first opened, and I almost pitched myself over the parapet trying to photograph them. When the leaves first stirred I remarked that they were early and how wonderful it would be if the flowers were early too, so The Squeeze could experience them. Six weeks [...]

Easter Sunday, so off to Anzio and lunch by the beach. They’ve been promising awful weather for today and tomorrow since last Thursday, but it wasn’t actually howling a gale so we decided to take the risk, and were glad we did. Anzio is a lovely port, despite the destruction in 1944, and the walk [...]

Just a quickie, as we make our way under the railway tracks between Porta Maggiore and Porta Tiburtina and one of the most beautifully preserved stretches of wall. I was pretty excited to see work by The Great Artist. Again, there’s no way I would have noticed that as a driver. I thought (on [...]

The best part about walking the Aurelian Walls is that one is one foot. Porta Maggiore is a scary nightmare of about 8 lanes of traffic (lanes being a completely inappropriate description, because it denotes a certain measure of order) going in four or five different directions. I had driven through Porta Maggiore many times [...]

We interrupt TID (Things I’ve Done) to bring you WIDLS (What I Did Last Sunday). TID is mostly ancient history. WIDLS is all Ancient History.
I was lucky enough to be able to join Professor Jan Gadeyne and the undergraduates of Temple University, Rome, for a walk around the Aurelian walls of Rome. We started [...]

“It’s strange that in a country where ads depicting near-naked women wearing skimpy lingerie is permitted on buses that we can’t run ads about atheism,” Villella said.

That’s actually one of the least strange things about this country.

Or maybe it was Daniel Cressey hisself? No idea whether Nature’s story adds anything to what we already  know, and I don’t care.

Longtime readers will know that I am a patient gardener. Not for me the flashy allure of a large pot of instant floral gratification. I like to sow seeds, wait for them to emerge, pot them on, savour the passing time and the growth of the plant towards its final destiny. But even I [...]

Seldom have I been so keen to rush home and Google something. We were on a weekend jaunt away, and what with one thing and another found ourselves driving between Sansepolcro and Arezzo with a Los Angelena in the back seat. We were giving her a ride to the station, and exposing her to a [...]