Author: Andrei Navrozov

As the gentle reader seems to have appreciated the trope of Sunday night in Modena as an abandoned mining town in a spaghetti western, I keep pushing it.  But first, a scene from Palermo.

Sunday, ten in the evening, Piazza Roma in Modena.  Not a soul in sight.  At lunchtime, this, one of the city’s main squares overlooking the Palazzo Ducale, was swarming with people in their Sunday best. A skating rink had been set up for the children, their unsteady shuffle on the ice choreographed to Tchaikovsky and Lehar. 

In other news of the week, I note with a sour mien that the British expatriate formerly known as Prince and his spouse, a sometime television actress, have been awarded a prize called “Ripple of Hope” by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation. 

To Modena next week, where the Amici della Musica are hosting Olga with a program of Azeri composers, including the formidable Fikret Amirov whose centenary this is.  Later on in the year the same program may take us to Turin.  

I read somewhere that the famous “elements” of Aristotle had been lifted by him from a pre-Socratic sage, Empedocles, but anyway let us keep calling them Aristotelian.

When passed by a horse and buggy, ubiquitous in the streets of Palermo, I scarcely know how to respond to Vasily’s wordless query.  Is the answer “horse”?  Or “carriage?”  Or “anachronism”?  Or “tourist attraction”?  By the same token, what am I to say about an open “door” to the balcony, which is a “window” when it is closed?  And is a cup of tea primarily “cup” or primarily “tea”?

We are three Scorpios in this nuclear – a passing nod to the suddenly fashionable dirty bomb – family, all three of us about to celebrate our birthdays this week. Scorpios, avers Cosmopolitan magazine, “like extremes, challenges, danger and darkness.

A criminal case, expected to last for another six months, is now being heard in Manchester Crown Court.  The gentle reader may recall my fitful interest in public sensations of this kind, most recently the Depp libel trial, as these would transport me into that epoch of yellow journalism where liberty of conjecture reigned supreme, so unlike the straitjacketed press in our day.

Scanning the papers, I noted with interest that the Montecito house presently occupied by the British immigrant formerly known as Prince has nine bedrooms and 16 bathrooms.  The bedrooms are neither here nor there.  I’m not a Leveller or any other sort of Communist.  It’s the number of bathrooms – great enough, I should think, to serve a medium-sized airport – that got my goat.

The slogan “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” otherwise known as “the three Ks,” makes most people think of the Third Reich which famously adopted it, but in fact this slogan dates back to the German Empire.