A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
When you travel you become invisible if you want. I do want. I like to be the observer. What makes these people who they are Could I feel at home here No one expects you to have the stack of papers ba...
But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your ow...
The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers...
The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.
There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake with lyrical headaches.
Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes...
Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full or choice, free to visit the stately pleasure domes, make love in the morning, sketch a bell tower, read a history of Byzantium, stare f...
At a few times in my life, I’ve not been aware that I’ve just stepped onto a large X. Change might not be on my mind. Why change? I’ve always admired lives that flourish in place. The taproot reaches...
We were given one country and we've set up in another.
Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere...
Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.
Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely differ...
Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.
Now I find the stack of chapters I called Under Magnolia. Why, after many years, even open these flowered folders? Dare alla luce, the Tuscans say at the birth of a baby, to give to the light.
We feel prepared to face the reality of restoration. We walk into town for coffee and telephone Piero Rizzatti, the geometra. The translations draftsman or surveyor don't quite explain what a geometra...
We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garb...
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