12 Thursday Apr 2018
Posted in Education
Leaving the story’s title and my own for translation anon,
I’m struggling with the opening line: its missing subject,
Along with prepositions that always require concentration.
Succedere: to happen, befall; succeed, follow, come after.
It happens in Spoleto, in the city of ‘culture’.
The professor has my attention. So begin my Italian lessons.
12 Thursday Apr 2018
Posted in Travel
10 Tuesday Apr 2018
Posted in Travel
10 Tuesday Apr 2018
For a long time after the maps were changed,
I could never find the (unremembered) name
Of a deconsecrated church. Booklet in hand
Now the problem continues to be my Italian.
That, and the length of the prose exposition,
Leaves this travel post under construction.
10 Tuesday Apr 2018
09 Monday Apr 2018
Posted in Art
What better way to spend another rainy day
Than on a Van Gogh date at Sala Pegasus?
With the production values of the foreign film,
All the art talk was kept in a manageable place.
09 Monday Apr 2018
Posted in Education
Misery–the English word for unhappiness, misfortune, or distress–comes from the Old French misere by way of the Latin miseria, the word for wretchedness.
Misericordia is the Latin word for “mercy,” derived from misericors, “merciful,” which is in turn derived from miserere, “to pity,” and cor, “heart.”
Put it together, I suppose, and my confusion disappears: what I have uncovered in the word that points two ways are false cognates but not false friends?
09 Monday Apr 2018
Posted in Education
08 Sunday Apr 2018
They can find out what’s going on behind the scene
Simply by asking a countryman an obvious question.
Likewise they encourage us to revisit an old haunt, Just as they insist we overeat just for starters.
07 Saturday Apr 2018
When Christo was invited to drape the Spoleto Festival in 1968,
His wife chose the sites, while he wrapped up another one tight.
Here in this Time Life photograph, two native Italians are caught unawares by the lens of Carlo Bavagnoli.
When a couple of unknowns returned uninvited, they were far less invested
In the disruption to business than they were in the uncanny resemblance.
