In English we signal everyman randomness by speaking of Tom, Dick, and Harry, with the French it’s “Pierre, Paul or Jacques,” while the equally boring Russians employ the common surnames “Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov.”  But when the Italians, God bless their intractable little souls, want to do the same, they speak of “Tizio, Caio e Sempronio,” that is to say, Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius.  Just imagine how that would trip off the tongue:  “If he thinks I’m gonna let every Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius use the new lawnmower, he’s got another thing coming.” When I first came to Palermo some...

If I were asked to devise a novel “ontological proof” of God’s existence, in the tradition of St. Anselm and the rest of that crowd, I would probably begin by pointing out the difference between the price of a yard of cashmere tweed and a yard of blue denim.  Hierarchies exist and, despite society’s attempts to erode or invert them, are demonstrable and immutable, which suggests that some kind of apogee of the natural order of things must exist in its turn. Though our society seeks to level the field, so that a fur must now be qualified as “real”...

  We later divorced – among other reasons, because I did not deserve her – but the American woman to whom I was married at the time had certain peculiarities of character, and it was not until many years later that the visitor whom she had entertained at dinner recounted the episode to me in vivid detail. We were living in Florence then, a town I loathed and still do, renting the piano nobile of the Palazzo Corsini at the Prato – a cavernous, draughty, forbidding place, illuminated but dimly by Guido Reni’s portrait of a Corsini cardinal who would...