January 2003

Scuola Materna: Public Preschool in Italy

January 30, 2003

Scuola materna (kindergarten) is a wonderful thing. In Italy, every parent has the right – though not the obligation – to put their child in preschool, free of charge, for three years, until they begin first grade in their sixth year. Traditionally, this seems to have been regarded as a way to socialize kids to [...]

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Asilo Nido: Daycare in Italy

January 29, 2003

Jan 29, 2003 / revised and expanded Jan 26, 2007 When we arrived in Italy in December, 1990, our daughter Rossella was 16 months old. I had been full-time at home with her for most of her life, except for two months of increasingly long hours in a parents’ cooperative daycare center at Yale in [...]

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Largo al Factotum… Why People Think I Know Opera

January 24, 2003

Those of you who know me from Adaptec/Roxio days probably remember the tag line appended to my every email and newsletter: “Largo al Factotum del CD-R.” It’s a pun on a line from Figaro’s song in the opera in “The Barber of Seville.” The original phrase is “Largo al factotum della citta’” (“Make way for [...]

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Teenagers and Cellphones – Standard Equipment for Italian Adolescents

January 24, 2003

David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, mentioned in his weekly column (some time ago) some ways in which Europe is technologically ahead of the US. We’re certainly far ahead in the use of SMS (short message service), by which you can use your cellphone to send text messages to someone else’s cellphone. [...]

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Servants: Household Help in Developing Countries

January 17, 2003

If I mention that I grew up having live-in servants, many Americans assume that I must have been filthy rich. But, when I lived in Asia, most foreign families there (and many local ones as well) had servants, and needed them for very practical reasons. Picture yourself as the wife of an American diplomat or [...]

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Cellphone Comedy

January 4, 2003

During one of my many trips to Silicon Valley, I was on a shuttle bus at San Francisco Airport, heading towards the rental car building. Four men got on together, talking animatedly, obviously colleagues on a business trip together. A cellphone rang, and all four simultaneously dived for their pockets. I burst out laughing, and [...]

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Holiday Hell – Italian Vacation Traffic

January 1, 2003

Almost every Christmas, we drive halfway down Italy to Abruzzo, where my in-laws are retired by the seaside. This puts us on the road with millions of other Italians going home for the holidays. Much of the flow is north to south: the many southern Italians who migrated to northern Italy decades ago to find [...]

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