One aspect of the present invasion of Ukraine, and of the causes that precipitated it, has gone virtually unremarked. Yet recent revelations consequent to the ongoing mass arrests in the highest echelons of the Russian military – an echo of Stalin’s purge of the Red Army on the eve of World War II – are shedding light on a murky chapter in the annals of this century’s history.
Although most of what Machiavelli says applies more to despotic regimes, he does indicate his support for what he calls in Latin a Principatus Civilis, a civil principality, that is one that respects the rights and traditions of citizens.
Rather than present the entire alphabet with pronunciation, let us start with the vowels.
I have been asked more than once to clarify what is meant by faith, hope and charity. Faith and hope seem, in English at least, to overlap: If I have faith that my friend will pick me up for work in the morning, doesn’t that mean that I hope he picks me up?
Many modern Italian series for Americans avoid grammar. While this makes it easy at first, it becomes tedious and time-consuming as one goes on. Italian, though it has lost most of the declensional forms of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, has retained most of the active verbal system of Latin and added on tense: The Conditional. By learning the grammatical terms from the beginning, students will make rapid progress.
The American republic was founded, for the most part, by men with fine classical training, and anyone who takes the trouble to read the correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson will see that their conversation is studded with discussions of points of grammar, ancient history,
I have been long considering a not too formal Italian class, partly to help people intending to participate in one of our Italian programs. When I proposed it recently, I received one positive response from the Cornells–at least from Papa Cornell.
Dr. Fleming and Rex begin a conversation on the plunge of the United States into anarcho-tyranny and on the American refusal to look reality in the face without flinching. In the next six (possibly seven) episodes, they will take up, one by one, the key events that turned a naive American boy into a Jeremiah, First up will be the downing of the U-2 spy plane shot down in 1960.
Van Houten, the Dutch chocolatier founded some two hundred years ago, is still in business today selling its brand of cocoa, but few remember the public-relations ploy that made it famous. Mayakovsky, in a poem written in 1914, recalls a man condemned to death by hanging who had been paid by the company to shout “Drink Van Houten’s cocoa!” from the scaffold as the sentence was being carried out.
Bowing to popular demand, the program in October we are planning will be held in Tuscany. My current thinking is to stay for 3-4 days in Florence and Arezzo, and from those bases we shall visit a few smaller places. Possible destinations include Chiusi, Montepulciano, and Pistoia.
