beach chair on coast

Quick Hot Summer

I’ve left Rome for three destinations this summer, each time coming back with newfound appreciation and newfound frustration for my adopted home. A week in Abruzzo, leading a summer school in the village of Castelvecchio Calvisio, was a pleasant retreat from the noise and heat of the city. Walking from the nearly empty village out into the countryside was a joy, but the lack of broadband internet grew tiresome quickly. …

Goodbye Via Alessandrina

This post is a reflection on a road which from the 16th century until recently traversed the Imperial Fora in central Rome. It wasn’t a great road like Via Giulia, and in fact in recent years it was often closed, abandoned, overgrown. But like any road it was a connection, it offered a path for people in the city. Until the 1930s it was the central artery of the Quartiere …