Where’s Biden?
I remember when President Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981. I was serving in the U.S. Army in West Germany as a Russian linguist in a mobile intelligence unit.
Category: Access
Wednesday’s Child: Peace on Earth
Two kinds of ideas animate the world. One kind is private, hermetic, sovereign; I would go as far as to call it anaerobic, by analogy with the bacteria that perish when exposed to air and light. Fedor Tiutchev, Russia’s most original nineteenth-century poet, had this variety in mind when we wrote his “Silentium”: “Keep silent, secret, and obscured / Thy thoughts and dreams without end, / And let them rise like stars, inured / To darkness regnant in thine head.”
Learn Italian, Lessons 5- 8
The present tense of verbs, vocabulary for getting around and talking about the weather.
Wednesday’s Child: Other Figures
My paternal grandmother’s family was from Vitebsk, where it was well remembered that as a callow youth Marc Chagall made a living painting shop signs in that provincial town. It turns out, however, that the canvases Chagall produced in the years preceding his emigration to France are perhaps the only pictures of lasting value – of genius, a more impulsive chronicler would say – ever painted on the territory of the Russian, and then Soviet, empire.
History of Florence: The Initial Rise and Fall of the Medici
While the Ciompi were clashing with the Grassi, Archbishop Giovanni Visconti’s nephew, Bernabò Visconti (who had allied himself by marriage to Mastino II della Scala of Verona), was constructing a powerful base in Central Italy by conquering papal territory on the Tuscan border.
History of Florence: Feuds and Wars in the 14th Century
The Guelph elite might have regained power permanently had the various families been able to work together in harmony, but the Donati, Adimari, and Tosinghi were constantly at odds.
History of Florence: Guelfs and Ghibellines
Florence had always been close to Rome, and her relationship with the Papacy would be encouraged by the war which broke out between Florence and Ghibelline Pisa and then with Ghibelline Siena.
Wednesday’s Child: A Figure in the Niche
Children are often asked by adults, especially by those who have made a stinking mess of their own lives, what they want to be when they grow up. Mercifully, before the child is able too speak for himself, there are parents on hand to answer the question. I always say I want Vasily to become a painter.
Learn Italian, Lesson 7
I am going forward on the assumption that everyone has received his copy of Living Lanugage.
History of Florence: Early Years
What we do know is the Florence was settled by Romans in the late Republic but was never as important as nearby Fiesole, much less Lucca or Pisa
