You’d never know it, but just being here in the neighborhood bar is a huge step forward!

My broken wrist is still in the cast, I’m still more or less immobilized. You never realize these fragile abilities until you lose them.

Writing a blog takes dedication and effort. Taking photos and videos is a challenge. So is typing one handed!

Getting out is a gift. Today I had an appointment for a shampoo e piega (that’s a wash and bend or fold in italiano and blow-dry in inglese). I decided a cuppa te on this rainy afternoon was a nice idea after.

My neighborhood bar is a fine pasticceria. Look at the cakes on offer!

Two weeks from today the cast comes off! I should not complain! There was a 50% chance I would need surgery to set my arm properly and I waited 9 days from the application of the cast until I could get the xray that revealed the setting the orthopedic doc at the emergency room had managed with my wrist was adequate.

I’m thanking my lucky stars I escaped that!

I finished Kneale’s excellent history of Rome and wanted more. I found this and am enjoying it!

Summary and Reading Guide
Overview
Lavinia is a 2008 novel by American author Ursula K. Le Guin.

As her last novel, it tells part of the story of Virgil’s Aeneid from the perspective of Aeneas’s wife, Lavinia, who appears in the Aeneid as only a minor character.

Although primarily a retelling of myth, the novel also attempts to explore what little is known about the people of the Italian peninsula before the founding of Rome.

The subject matter of Lavinia differs dramatically from most of Le Guin’s more famous works, given that she wrote primarily science fiction and fantasy.

In this final novel, Le Guin explores Lavinia’s entire life, far beyond the limited detail provided by the Aeneid. Lavinia becomes aware that she’s a character in a story, which changes her relationship to fate and duty.

Enjoying my bubble. I waited my whole life for it!

But I’m still here, waiting for my wrist to heal and the cast to come off. 2 more weeks! But I am still actively engaged, reading a fascinating book on Rome by Matthew Kneale until I can actually get back to the city her Eternal self!

Here’s my current obsession.

I devoured this fascinating story too!

Thank goodness for books! As many other times in my life, they have the ability to get me through the hard parts.

Join me if you will on memory lane. Let’s go back several decades:

So you know the comic character in the movie Roman Holiday, called Irving Radovich? He played the role of comedic sidekick to Gregory Peck. The actor was Eddie Albert and he was a popular star in American movies in the 1950s and was later a big tv star with his own series in the 1960s called Green Acres. I grew up watching that show every week with my mom and dad. It was silly, but good family friendly comedy.

I never thought as a child growing up on a ranch in South Dakota, which is sparsely populated and couldn’t be further removed from Hollywood than from the moon, that I would ever meet the star of my dad’s favorite sit-com. But my love for Italy, of all things, would eventually lead me to meet him.

I would love to have met Gregory Peck or Audrey Hepburn, but at least I got to meet Eddie!

When I was working at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA), I decided to take a course in marble carving at the art school connected to the museum. My particular niche in art history, which served my career well, was 19th century American sculptors who studied or worked in Italy. I always wanted to try to carve marble to better understand the work that this group of artists created, much of it in Carrara marble, in imitation of Michelangelo and other great Italian sculptors.

The professor who taught the marble carving class in Boston was of Italian heritage and by coincidence, she was creating a sculpting course to be held the following summer in Carrara, the place from which came all the marble for all the sculptures of Italian Renaissance. I had no ability or talent in marble carving or anything else artistic, but understanding the materials the artists I study worked with was a valuable aspect of my research, which enhanced my writings on the subject.

I convinced my Chief Curator, who was the head of my department at the MFA, to give me the time off from work to go to Carrara with this professor. Miraculously, he agreed. It was fabulous!

We lived in a tiny old hotel in Carrara that provided us breakfast and dinner and we had lunch in town. We went to the marble yards in Pietrasanta and Viareggio and chose chunks of stone from which we would carve whatever we pleased, then we worked every morning in a old sculpture studio, along side actual artisans who were hand carving marble for various commissions from around the world.

I learned a lot that summer, about many things, including how marble responds to a hammer and a chisel. I still have the implements I bought that year in Pietrasanta, at a shop so ancient it could have sold chisels to Canova and others. But, even more amazingly, because a hammer and chisel are fairly easily packed and shipped in a suitcase, I paid to ship my unfinished Carrara marble block (about 25 inches wide by 18 inches tall by 5 inches deep) to Colorado, where it still sits, still unfinished, in my garden.

Before going to Italy that summer, I happened to be meeting with a well-known American scholar who specialized in international sculptors working in the 19th and 20th centuries. I mentioned to Fred Licht that I was going to Carrara that summer and he said, Oh, you must meet my friend, Grayce Murabito. She lives in Casoli di Camaiore.

Grayce was an American radio actress who was married late in life to Rosario Murabito. Murabito had died by the time I met Grayce, but she still lived in Casoli and because Fred Licht contacted her and told her I was coming to Italy to carve marble nearby, she was gracious enough to invite me, my professor, and our tiny class of 7 students to her beautiful home in this tiny little village.

We went to meet Grayce on a beautiful Saturday and it was love at first sight between Grayce and me. She introduced us to several of her artist friends in Pietra Santa and it added so much to our summer lessons.

I have pictures from that summer somewhere in my stash of mementoes and someday I will find them and illustrate an article.

Grayce and I stayed in touch until her death many years later and she invited me to come and stay with her any time I was in Italy. She had a huge home that had been a hunting lodge for some wealthy Tuscans in earlier centuries. She made a bathroom out of one of the frescoed rooms and living with her was for me like living in a painting or at least a dream.

I visited Grayce over many years and she introduced me to many things, including panna cotta, Brunello, and some Sicilian fish dishes with raisins that I thought was awful. Murabito was Sicilian.

And now, how, you are wondering, does this have anything to do with Eddie Albert. I will tell you in Part 2, which I will write soon. Stay tuned!

Here’s thinking of you, Grayce!♥️

Even, no, especially when it’s super hard. Note to self.

I’m on the hunt for a guy like this one. Let me know if you have any candidates.

Must be kind, financially independent, intelligent and have a delightful sense of humor. Must be easy to be around.

Hahaha. If only it were this easy.

A wishlist like this worked in Mary Poppins. I decided to take a chance and send my list out into the universe. Fingers crossed!

But here’s the thing, if I don’t conjure him up, I’m okay with that.

I see it wherever I go in Europe. I also saw it in Morocco, Japan and India. American brands advertised on hats, shirts, bags, and many other itms.

I suppose it started in the 19th or 20th century with Coca-Cola and even the word: okay.

I’m showing just one picture, this baseball cap with the New York Yankees logo as I recently saw on a train between Rome and Florence, but I could illustrate it times 1000.

The world is flat, getting flatter all the time. And symbols of America are everywhere.

I will admit, the time I flew through Dubai returning to Seattle from Delhi, I almost threw myself to the ground in gratitude when I saw a Starbucks. I had been in India for a month and was so thrilled to see something familiar.