Florence italy

Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though through steam. The Arno river was a dense strip of dew. At the Piazzale Michelangelo, the statue of David was etched by the surrounding murkiness to a stark silhouette, the renaissance defined by gothic cloud. I peered through a telescope that overlooked the city and saw nothing for miles. My friend Alessandro told me this was unusual for sunny Tuscany, which made me feel quite pleased. Perhaps with each day that passed I would see less of Florence — the ultimate tourist experience. At a nearby cemetery, the milky arms

While sitting beside a pool under a blistering Tuscan sun, I’ve been reading an article in Corriere della Sera about how to make the most of a summer holiday. The paper says that it isn’t enough to do what I have been doing — sweat, swim, sweat again, swim again, and then eat and drink too much — because this leaves you feeling gloomy when the holiday is over. Strongest in your memory, it claims, will be the last few days of the holiday, which are the most depressing ones because you are starting to dread the resumption of the usual drudgery at home. The answer, it says, is for

It may be pushing it to compare Philip Bobbitt with Indiana Jones, on the basis that a constitutional lawyer will never have the exotic and uncommercial appeal of an archaeologist adventurer, even if he does look remarkably similar. Then again, a profile of him in the New York Observer called him the James Bond of the Columbia Law School, which also suggests impossible glamour. But you can see why his students and reviewers come over star-struck. He’s a courteous, urbane, well-connected (nephew of Lyndon B. Johnson) literary academic, adviser of presidents but way above the party fray, possibly the last Wasp standing in the academic elite, certainly the last cigar-smoker,