Italian Summer Quotes

I reached reverently into the bag, then took a big bite of the cornetta. It was warm and melty and tasted like every perfect thing that could ever happen to you. Italian summers. First loves. Chocolate.

History, memory is by definition fiction. Once an event is no longer present, but remembered, it is narrative. And we can choose the narratives we tell—about our own lives, our own stories, our own relationships. We can choose the chapters we give meaning.

What got you here won't get you there.

There is more to life than just continuing to do what we know. What got you here won’t get you there.

My mother, you see, is the great love of my life.

Every day the world is born again. Every day the sun rises. It is a miracle, I think. A simple, everyday miracle. Life.

History is an asset, not a detriment. It's nice to be with someone who knows you, who knows your history. It will get even more important the longer you live. Learning how to find your way back can be harder than starting over. But damn, if you can, it's worth it.

The present is relentless. It forces us over and over again to pay attention. It requires all of us. As well it should.

We made promises in a world lit with light. We do not know how to keep them in the darkness

There's something about photography I love -- a whole memory caught in a moment.

Hey, I just thought of something." "What?" "When we're together, we make one whole Italian.

i hope you walk through the world knowing your value. I hope you find a passion--something you love, something that lights you up inside. I hope you find the peace and confidence it takes to trust where your path leads. Remember it is only yours. Others can wave and cheer, but no one can give you directions. They have not been where you are going. I hope you will understand someday that just because you become a mother doesn't mean you stop becoming a woman. And above all else, I hope you know that even if you can't see me, I am always with you.

And finally to you, this time around: one of life’s most important challenges is determining what to hold on to and what to let go of. Do not be fooled into believing that you do not know which is which. Follow the feeling, follow it all the way home.

It’s possible actions only have the weight we give them,” she says. “We can decide what something means.

The difference between being good and bad at something is just interest,

DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.

I hope you’ll understand someday that just because you become a mother doesn’t mean you stop being a woman.

What got you here, won't get you there.

I don’t think bad action makes you a bad person. I think life is far more complicated than that, and it’s reductive to think otherwise.

I think I'm really good at travel and less good at what happens when you stand still," he says. "I like to be a visitor. In places, in hotels, sometimes in other people's lives.

Never trust anyone who hasn’t had their heart broken. It’s a before and after. You never quite see the world the same way again.

Actions only have the weight we give them. We can decide what something means.

Please. If you find yourself falling in love with me, don’t stop it. Don’t hold back. Don’t deny yourself that. Let yourself love me.

Don’t you see, Grace? You are everything to me. And I have a possessive heart. It wants only you.

The entire town is built around the cove of the sea. It looks like an amphitheater, enjoying the performance of the ocean.

I have maybe a half-hour before the next surgery. Want to go and get a cup of coffee?” What I want is to meander eight kilometres down the canals with you from Kirov to your Fifth Soviet door. I want to get on the tram with you, the bus with you, sit in the Italian Gardens with you. That is what I want. I will take the cup of coffee in your hospital cafeteria.

She made me in her image, but she forgot the most important part. She forgot that one day she’d leave, that she already had, and then I’d be left with nothing. When you’re just a reflection, what happens when the image vanishes?

Hey, do you want to get a gelato?” I wrinkled my forehead. “What’s that?” He groaned. “Gelato. Italian ice cream. The greatest thing that will ever happen to you. What have you been doing since you arrived?” “Hanging out with you.” “And you’re telling me I only have one summer.” He shook his head, then stood up. “Come on, Lina. We’ve got work to do.

You’re mine, Grace. More than my muse, more than a lover. I’ve never felt this way before about anything or anyone and I…I know that if you just trust me, if you give me your heart, I will carry it with me. I will be kind and gentle with it. I will always keep it tucked in next to mine. So that whatever happens in the future, it doesn’t matter. I’ll have your heart and you’ll have mine.

You act like you don’t know how you got here, like you just woke up and looked around and thought, Huh—but I have news for you. Even inaction is a choice.

You are in the midst of uncovering yourself. Right here, right now. You will discover who you are. You will flourish.” … “I see it happening before my eyes. And it’s all you.

Per favore,” he says gravely, holding my hand up his mouth and placing a kiss on my knuckles, his eyes pinning me in place. “Please stay with me.

It was hard not to feel resentment that men weren't forced into these choices. Some days she felt that she would spend all her time trying to forget her life before children because she loved them too much to be reminded of the heat of Rome in the summer and a beautiful girl who turned heads as she walked down an Italian strada.

And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.

My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.

Do not be fooled into believing that you do not know which is which. Follow the feeling, follow it all the way home.

Get a window seat, honey, ’cause there’s so much to see. —LORELAI GILMORE

I do not belong to anyone. Not in that way, not any longer. I am my own, just as she was hers.

She seemed to love the stage of life she was in—somewhere past all the figuring out. Somewhere solid.

Sometimes I think it didn't work because it wasn't right, and sometimes I think it didn't work because I refused to let it.

I think I’m really good at travel and less good at what happens when you stand still,” he says. “I like to be a visitor. In places, in hotels, sometimes in other people’s lives.

It's hard to be good at what you don't love.

One should always let waiters choose food, and builders choose wood,” she says. “Something my father used to say.

There's more to life than just continuing to do what you know.

I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence.

Never trust anyone who hasn’t had their heart broken. It’s a before and after, You never quite see the world the same way again.

History is an asset, not a detriment. It’s nice to be with someone who knows you, who knows your history. It will get even more important the longer you live.

I will never grow tired of you. I will never stop wanting you.

You are everything to me. And I have a possessive heart. It wants only you.

The magic of Italy seems to be in its ability to connect to some time out of time, some era that is unmarked by modernity. There is so much peacefulness in being present, right here.

My mother was the first person you called for a recipe (a cup of onions, garlic, don’t forget the pinch of sugar) and the last one you called at night when you just couldn’t sleep (a cup of hot water with lemon, lavender oil, magnesium pills). She knew the exact ratio of olive oil to garlic in any recipe, and she could whip up dinner from three pantry items, easy. She had all the answers. I, on the other hand, have none of them, and now I no longer have her.

Yet the flaws make us who we are. What we’ve been through make us who we are. This life, it’s trial by fire. If we didn’t go through it, we wouldn’t be the people we are today, and we wouldn’t fit like we do right now.

As an author, you notice it. It’s always overlooked for literary fiction, whatever that means. People always thumb their nose at the genre, even though romance finds its way into every good story, every good movie or TV show.

I’d like to kiss you,” he says. I hear it in my rib cage. “But I’m not going to unless you tell me it’s okay. I know you’re in a weird spot. I also know we’re here, and there is a very big full moon, and your lips look like watermelon. The good kind. The breakfast kind.

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir...)

Mia Musa,” I whisper to her, kissing her again. I pull back, searching her eyes, feeling everything inside threatening to spill over. “I want you. I want this. Always. Not just for now. I want so much from you that I’m afraid to ask…I don’t even think I’m worthy of asking.

Naples is a strange city,” he says. “It’s in tatters in some places, absolutely run-down, but there’s also this persevering Mediterranean beauty, almost Grecian. It was the most bombed Italian city in World War Two and has a largely tragic history—a huge cholera epidemic, poverty, crime—but there’s this strength to this place and its people. I find that beauty next to decay is its own kind of stunning. You can really feel it when you’re there.

And in that gaze I see it all—birthdays and dinners and shopping trips. Mornings spent watching soap operas in her bed. Nights on the phone. Care packages mailed to New York City. Scraped elbows and fevers and her voice, always her voice. Everything is going to be all right. You’re okay. I’ve got you.

It has all made my blood pump faster and my skin feel softer, weightier. The blessing of this life, this one, brilliant, beautiful life. All the loss and anguish. All the joy that makes it possible. The tender connections, the fragility, the impossible odds of being here, now, together. The choice of continuing to make it so.

The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly; of the choice between objects, subjects, contacts—what might she call them?—of a thin and those of a rich association; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden—allowing only for arid places freshened by the natural dews of a quaint half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood.

There is beauty to the run-down buildings, the laundry strung high overhead, the rhythm and drawl of daily life here. There is beauty, too, in the old Mediterranean architecture, buildings left over from centuries ago, before Naples became what it is today. There is beauty in the discrepancy -- two things that seems oppositional, coming together.

You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems

I’ve been starved for affection for far too long. Now that I’ve had a taste of it, I’m craving it

The difference between being good and bad at something is just interest,” Carol says.

The money will come,” she’d always say. “You’ll never regret the experience.

She knew me completely, but it didn’t work both ways; it couldn’t. Look how much life was lived before I ever even arrived. Look at who she was before she met me.

No one is perfect, Katy. Perfect doesn’t exist. What we had was pretty fucking good, though.

When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine...

My mother, you see, is the great love of my life, She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.

There is more to life than just continuing to do what we know. What got you here won't get you there.

I love Italy. For hundreds of years, if not centuries, the people of italy (Italians) have been living here." [Audrey's insight]

the wife of Ben-Hur, sat in her room in the beautiful villa by Misenum. It was noon, with a warm Italian sun making summer for the roses and vines outside. Everything in the apartment was Roman,

think about the death of her own mother—so young, far younger than me—and her warm but removed father. Who taught her how to love? Who taught her how to be the woman she became, the woman she is here today?

That the same set of circumstances, beliefs, actions that got you to a moment won’t get you to what comes next. That if you want a different outcome, you have to behave differently. That you have to keep evolving.

Maybe we’re born whole and polished and unscathed, and then life slowly chips away at us. Some of those chips are deep, some are just surface scratches, but we carry them with us as we walk through life, becoming more and more worn. Yet the flaws make us who we are. What we’ve been through make us who we are. This life, it’s trial by fire. If we didn’t go through it, we wouldn’t be the people we are today, and we wouldn’t fit like we do right now.

What got you here won't get you there. That the same set of circumstances, beliefs, actions, that got you to a moment won't get you to what comes next. That if you want a different outcome, you have to behave differently. That you have to keep evolving.

History, memory is by definition fiction. Once an event is no longer present, but remembered, it is narrative. And we can choose the narratives we tell - about our own lives, our own stories, our own relationships. We can choose the chapters we give meaning.

Era come una mano di colore data sul venticello, sui muri gialletti della borgata, sui prati, sui carretti, sugli autobus coi grappoli agli sportelli. Una mano di colore ch'era tutta l'allegria e la miseria delle notti dell'estate del presente e del passato.

On the bus, make sure you choose a good seat, you know, because people are creatures of habit, and the seat you pick in the beginning could be your seat for the rest of the year, you know? Get a window seat, honey, ’cause there’s so much to see. —LORELAI GILMORE

My darling Katy, my baby girl—Italy is so beautiful. It reminds me of you. How happy everyone is in the morning, how the stars come out at night. I know I am not there, and I hope someday to explain to you why. I hope so many things for you, baby girl. I hope you walk through the world knowing your value. I hope you find a passion—something you love, something that lights you up inside. I hope you find the peace and confidence it takes to trust where your path leads. Remember, it is only yours. Others can wave and cheer, but no one can give you directions. They have not been where you are going. I hope you’ll understand someday that just because you become a mother doesn’t mean you stop being a woman. And above all else, I hope you know that even if you can’t see me, I am always with you.

They agreed they neither gave two hoots now as to how marriages were normally conducted. They would do as they pleased and run their lives by the roll of the seasons. In autumn the apple trees would be bright and heavy with apples and they would hunt birds together, since Ada had proved so successful with the turkeys. They would not hunt with the gaudy Italian piece of Monroe's but with fine simple shotguns they would order from England. In summer they would catch trout with tackle from the same sporting country. They would grow old together measuring time by the life spans of a succession of speckled bird dogs. At some point, well past midlife, they might take up painting and get little tin fieldboxes of watercolors, likewise from England. Go on country walks, and when they saw a scene that pleased them, stop and dip cups of water from a creek and form the lines and tints on paper for future reference.

When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses . . .

She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn't socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger [...] their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I'd forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; they freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless. For all I had in common with any of them, I might as well have tried to go down and hang out with the eight year olds at PS 41.

cannot comprehend that if I call her phone, it will just ring and ring—that there is no longer anyone on the other end who will say, “Katy, honey. Just a second. My hands are wet.” I do not imagine ever coming to terms with the loss of her body—her warm, welcoming body. The place I always felt at home. My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.

The iron miners who belonged to the Italian Club in the town of Virginia, Minnesota, took pains to procure more suitable grapes, dispatching a grocer named Cesare Mondavi to the San Joaquin Valley late each summer to acquire their supply. Inspired to get into the grape business himself, Mondavi soon moved his family to California, where his precocious son Robert would make his own name in the winemaking world.

Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.

Finn helped me through the darkest, bleakest stage of my life. He was strong for me when I was at my lowest ebb, returning year after year and helping me to stand tall. He was the Italian cypress to my withering apple tree, and I will always love him for it. I'm so proud of his achievements. He's doing so well and he deserves to be happy. And he deserves to be with someone else who's happy too. It does strike me so well as slightly ironic that I'm doing the best I've ever done, both mentally and in my career, just as he's no longer around to witness it. He helped me to fly, only for another man to see me soar. Part of what I love about my relationship with Tom is that it started from a place of strength. I'm no longer a shadow of myself, crippled by pain and grief, and we're not pulling in different directions. I like that I'm strong enough to support him if he needs me to.

No, for some unknown reason, I feel more at home in the Italian Alps than I do in the brutal heat of Puglia. I like brisk autumns, snowy winters, rainy springs, and temperate summers. The change of seasons allows for a change in one’s wardrobe (I’m sartorially obsessed) and, most important, one’s diet. A boeuf carbonnade tastes a thousand times better in the last days of autumn than when it’s eighty degrees and the sun is shining. An Armagnac is the perfect complement to a snowy night by the fire but not to an August beach outing, just as a crisp Orvieto served with spaghetti con vongole is ideal “al fresco” on a sunny summer afternoon but not nearly as satisfying when eaten indoors on a cold winter’s night. One thing feeds the other. (Pun intended.) So a visit to Iceland to escape the gloom of what is known in London as “winter” was an exciting prospect. However, my greatest concern, as you can probably guess, if you’re still reading this, was the food.

I just feel like I need more time.… I really just feel ambushed, you know? I mean, I thought I had so much more… time. I thought I had all summer to impart my wisdom about work and life and your future, and I just feel like I had something to tell you. Oh! On the bus, make sure you choose a good seat, you know, because people are creatures of habit, and the seat you pick in the beginning could be your seat for the rest of the year, you know? Get a window seat, honey, ’cause there’s so much to see. —LORELAI GILMORE

Subject: Some boat Alex, I know Fox Mulder. My mom watched The X-Files. She says it was because she liked the creepy store lines. I think she liked David Duchovny. She tried Californication, but I don't think her heart was in it. I think she was just sticking it to my grandmother, who has decided it's the work of the devil. She says that about most current music,too, but God help anyone who gets between her and American Idol. The fuzzy whale was very nice, it a little hard to identify. The profile of the guy between you and the whale in the third pic was very familiar, if a little fuzzy. I won't ask. No,no. I have to ask. I won't ask. My mother loves his wife's suits. I Googled. There are sharks off the coast of the Vineyard. Great big white ones. I believe you about the turtle. Did I mention that there are sharks there? I go to Surf City for a week every summer with my cousins. I eat too much ice cream. I play miniature golf-badly. I don't complain about sand in my hot dog buns or sheets. I even spend enough time on the beach to get sand in more uncomfortable places. I do not swim. I mean, I could if I wanted to but I figure that if we were meant to share the water with sharks, we would have a few extra rows of teeth, too. I'll save you some cannoli. -Ella Subject: Shh Fiorella, Yes,Fiorella. I looked it up. It means Flower. Which, when paired with MArino, means Flower of the Sea. What shark would dare to touch you? I won't touch the uncomfortable sand mention, hard as it is to resist. I also will not think of you in a bikini (Note to self: Do not think of Ella in a bikini under any circumstanes. Note from self: Are you f-ing kidding me?). Okay. Two pieces of info for you. One: Our host has an excellent wine cellar and my mother is European. Meaning she doesn't begrudge me the occasional glass. Or four. Two: Our hostess says to thank yur mother very much. Most people say nasty things about her suits. Three: We have a house kinda near Surf City. Maybe I'll be there when your there. You'd better burn this after reading. -Alexai Subect: Happy Thanksgiving Alexei, Consider it burned. Don't worry. I'm not showing your e-mails to anybody. Matter of national security, of course. Well,I got to sit at the adult table. In between my great-great-aunt Jo, who is ninety-three and deaf, and her daughter, JoJo, who had to repeat everyone's conversations across me. Loudly. The food was great,even my uncle Ricky's cranberry lasagna. In fact, it would have been a perfectly good TG if the Eagles han't been playing the Jets.My cousin Joey (other side of the family) lives in Hoboken. His sister married a Philly guy. It started out as a lively across-the-table debate: Jets v. Iggles. It ended up with Joey flinging himself across the table at his brother-in-law and my grandmother saying loud prayers to Saint Bridget. At least I think it was Saint Bridget. Hard to tell. She was speaking Italian. She caught me trying to freeze a half-dozen cannoli. She yelled at me. Apparently, the shells get really soggy when they defrost. I guess you'll have to come have a fresh one when you get back. -F/E

Grandfather, is it all right if we join you for a bit?" "Of course. Particularly since you've brought sustenance." He eyed the tray of food. It looked like a food magazine layout, featuring a variety of cheeses with fresh berries on brightly painted Italian pottery, and a tiny glass container of honey with the smallest spoon he'd ever seen. Isabel laced a thread of honey across the cheeses. "These are my favorite honey and cheese pairings. Comte, Appenzeller and ricotta. I had my first honey harvest last summer- a small one. That's when I realized I needed extra help with my beekeeping." "Sorry I wasn't your guy," said Mac.

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

My mother was the first person you called for a recipe (a cup of onions, garlic, don’t forget the pinch of sugar) and the last one you called at night when you just couldn’t sleep (a cup of hot water with lemon, lavender oil, magnesium pills). She knew the exact ratio of olive oil to garlic in any recipe, and she could whip up dinner from three pantry items, easy. She had all the answers. I, on the other hand, have none of them, and now I no longer have her. “Hi,” I hear Eric say from inside. “Where is everyone?” Eric is my husband, and he is our last guest here today. He shouldn’t be. He should have been with us the entire time, in the hard, low chairs, stuck between noodle casseroles and the ringing phone and the endless lipstick kisses of neighbors and women who call themselves aunties, but instead he is here in the entryway to what is now my father’s house, waiting to be received. I close my eyes. Maybe if I cannot see him, he will stop looking for me. Maybe I will fold into this ostentatious May day, the sun shining like a woman talking loudly on a cell phone at lunch. Who invited you here? I tuck the cigarette into the pocket of my jeans. I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence. I am incapable of understanding that she will not pick me up for lunch on Tuesdays, parking without a permit on the

RAMPICANTE (ITALIAN VINING ZUCCHINI) This is one of my all-time most-loved garden vegetables because it does double duty as both a summer zucchini and a winter butternut-type squash. This Italian heirloom is a vining summer squash rather than a bush plant. The fruit is long and trumpet-shaped, curls gently, and features medium to light-green striped skin. The flesh looks like other zucchini but tastes sweeter, another reason this squash should be more popular. All the seeds are contained in a small bulb at the end of the long fruit, so this zucchini is easy to use and does not need to be picked within days of appearing on the vine to be tender and tasty, as other summer squash does.

Impoverished Spain depended on imports not only for manufactured products but even for sufficient food. Spanish agriculture was hampered by poor soil and by the strange institution known as the Mesta. Spanish sheep grew high-quality fleeces—not as good as those of English sheep but better than could be found elsewhere—and Spain had, in fact, replaced England as the source of wool for the Flemish and Italian cloth industries. The Mesta was an organization of sheep owners who had royal privileges to sustain migratory flocks of millions of sheep. The flocks moved all across Spain—north in the summer, south in the winter—grazing as they went, making it impossible to farm along their routes.42 When conflicts arose with landowners, the crown always sided with the Mesta on grounds that nothing was more important to the economy than the wool exports. The government’s protection of the Mesta discouraged investments in agriculture, so Spain needed to import large shipments of grain and other foodstuffs.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

What are we doing for supper tonight?” Avery asked, turning around in my desk chair and separating me from my memories. I grunted and tossed a package of ramen over my shoulder. She groaned. “Not again. Please. You need real food, Summer.” “Noodles are real food. They’re a relative to real pasta, which came from Italy and we know how kick-ass Italian food is. Boom. They’re gourmet badassness.” She tossed them to the corner. “They’re not, and I’m pulling my friendship card.” No way. She couldn’t. I rotated around in my chair to stare at her. “Not the friendship card.” “Totally the friendship card.” I pretended to gasp and shudder. Okay, I really did shudder. I’d never admit it, but the ramen wasn’t doing it for me either... "I was thinking we could go to a restaurant or something.” “What is this you speak of? A dwelling where they serve many varieties of solids?” Her lip twitched in a grin. “Yeah, that. You and me, we’re going to dress up, and we’re going to dine like queens.” “Can I wear a tiara?” “Without a doubt.” She winked at me as she got up and went to the door. “Thirty minutes, then we’re leaving.

The candy-colored pavillions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles and honeycombs, the Italian pavillion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Washington and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom had been peeled, stripped, prized apart, knocked down, bulldozed into piles, loaded onto truck beds, dumped into barges, towed out past the mouth of the harbor, and sent to the bottom of the sea. It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and Utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon - he was too young to have such inklings - but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.

People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel–engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast–iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four–roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612. Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.

I just figured someone like him would be named Fabio or something.” I want to be angry, I really do, but I can’t resist laughing. “That’s what I thought the first time I met him,” I admit. Darren actually cracks a smile, and hope blooms inside my chest for an instant before it fizzles. I’m itching to tell Darren that he’s the one I want. But I don’t know how, or if I should. Keeping Darren at an emotionally safe distance might be the only way I make it through this summer unscathed. If that’s even possible at this point. “Well, whatever his name is. I still don’t like him.” His voice is rough and his bright brown eyes pierce straight through me. Tell me why you don’t like him. Tell me it’s because you’re jealous he kissed me and you haven’t. Tell me you want to. Want me. “Gag,” Nina says with a groan. “Would you two just kiss and be done with it already?” Darren and I gape at her. Fire creeps up my neck, and I press my body against the window, as far from Darren as possible. “I thought you were asleep,” Darren says to her. “With the both of you whining like children? Please,” she huffs. “I’m going to the little girl’s room.” She stands and her long legs step over Tate’s without waking him. “Fix this or we’re all going to be miserable,” she whispers to Darren loud enough for me to hear.