Finale

Well, we're home--actually for over a week now. Our trip home last Wednesday, the 26th (original date), and Thursday, the 27th (actual return), took two full days, one entirely cancelled three-leg itinerary, a further missed connection and resulting late arrival, lost luggage, and several hours sitting in a plane whose engines didn't work and whose internal temperature reached the high 80s; it was one of the worst travel tales we know of that did not involve a crash. But we made it home and are very glad about that. We've both been seriously jet-lagged and exhausted since we got home, but we have made slow but steady progress on re-entry tasks.

I had hoped to write, in down-time in airports last Wednesday, if the travel had gone more according to plan, about (1) our visit the day before to the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace,) as well as the new-in-2010 MaXXI National Museum of Art of the Twenty-first Century; (2) a comparison of the graffiti everywhere in Trastevere to those in the

vicinity of our second apartment off the Via del Corso (it's less ubiquitous and hectic in the latter, which I found more conducive to serenity of mind, but there is still a lot); and (3) a book I have been reading. We'll just go straight to #3.

Many of you may be familiar with the American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, of Bengali extraction, author of three books of short stories (one of which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction) and one novel that was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, won other awards and was made into a movie). A friend gave me her then-new book Unaccustomed Earth years ago when I was in the hospital, and the stories, many with twist or surprise endings, took my breath away. I've since read all her books, and she is one of my favorite living writers. She's a professor of creative writing at Princeton.

In 2011, she and her family moved to Rome, as she has long loved the Italian language--she has a doctorate in Renaissance studies--and wanted to write in it. How I envy that! She has written two books of essays and one novel in Italian, which--only the novel so far--I've had waiting for me to read it for over a year.

I took it with me on this trip and at last got around to starting it; I'm now about halfway through. As I am reading it, I seem to feel the pleasure she gets from the language,

the wonderful words that I feel sure she must love choosing. One of the first times I noticed this was when she spoke of her scarf being tangled with her necklace --la sciarpa si è ingarbugliata con la mia collana. Isn't ingarbugliata delicious to say?

Here are just few other examples, words that pleased me to say and learn: alla rinfusa = higgledy-piggledy. Ninnoli = knick-knacks (those are both fun words to say in English too). Titubante = hesitant. Ingegniosamente = ingeniously. Un scapolo = a bachelor. Un portagioie = a jewel box.

Finding that last word confirmed for me how happy she must be to be writing with these wonderful words that she loves, because the paragraph it's in goes, "... comincio a cercare una certa collana ... sarà da qualche parte, in qualche portagioie, se ci penso la parola piu bella che ci sia." That translates as, "I start looking for a certain necklace ... it is probably somewhere, in some jewelry box-- if I think about it, the most beautiful word there is."