working in Italy

Divorcing Italy

February 1, 2009

Rossella and I returned to Italy the week before Christmas, having been away since June 30th. That was the longest period I’d spent out of Italy in 18 years. I was uneasy about this re-entry, expecting it to be traumatic. I thought I would be making a decision about whether I would ever willingly live [...]

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The Bi-Professional Couple: A Conundrum Close to the Bone

September 1, 2008

My life is lived in multiples.

I’ve read books, articles, and blogs about multicultural marriage, living, and child-raising. I have written about being a third-culture kid, raising a bilingual child, and living and trying to work in a foreign country.

But this is the big question, more difficult than any of the above: how can a marriage survive being made up of two people whose careers are equally important to each?

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Mad at Italy

March 3, 2008

Is it possible to be angry with a whole country? At the moment, I am furious with Italy. It was never particularly my dream to live in Italy. I ended up here because I married an Italian, he got a job here, and it seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. When [...]

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Pandecena Milano June ’07 – In Which a Cunning Plot is Hatched

June 19, 2007

Famed Italian blogger Luca Conti (pictured above at right, showing off his Nokia to Sara Piperita) has pulled off what many bloggers dream of (and quite a few actually do, in other parts of the world): making a living by blogging. Or, at least, managing to get paid for various kinds of consulting (as a [...]

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FemCamp Bologna 2007: Sessions & Reflections

May 29, 2007

In the afternoon I attended some sessions, though I missed the most popular presentation of the day, Iocelopiulunghismo (“Mine’s-the-biggest-ism”), by Elena and Feba, a funny and ironic look at (male) bloggers’ obsession with their (blog) statistics. I poked my head into Andrea Beggi‘s unfortunately-titled presentation on “Blogging for Ladies,” but the room was so crowded [...]

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FemCamp Bologna 2007

May 28, 2007

Saturday morning I got up bright and early – way too early, considering that I had barely slept Friday night (jet lag – I had just returned from Colorado Thursday). Succumbing to travel paranoia, I took a taxi down the hill rather than wait for the first bus at 7 am, and got to Lecco [...]

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Long-Distance Working – A Tale of Two Companies

April 25, 2007

Old Days, Old Ways: Adaptec When I began working for Adaptec in 1995 (as a result of their acquisition of Incat Systems, the company which created Easy CD), I was already a remote worker. Fabrizio Caffarelli, who had founded Incat in Milan, had moved himself and the engineering staff to California in late 1993 with [...]

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Light at the End of the Tunnel

March 25, 2007

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. I’ve just been through a dark period, but… here comes the sun! (In more ways than one, as will shortly become clear.) I’ve been stressed and depressed since well before Christmas. Money (lack of) was becoming a problem. TVBLOB is a privately-financed start-up, and my salary there [...]

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barCamp Roma: January, 2007

January 30, 2007

The full gallery of photos from my attendance at barCamp in Rome.

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Pursuing a Dream of Italy

June 7, 2006

(The earlier part of this story is here.) Actually, we didn’t spend the weekend together as a family. Ross stayed in Lecco because she had parties to attend. Enrico and I left Friday morning for Tuscany, to join a large gathering of people from the Expats in Italy online forum, a few of whom we [...]

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“What Do You Do?” Not Defining Oneself in Terms of Work in Italy

September 15, 2005

“All societies throughout history have had work right at their center; but ours – particularly America’s – is the first to suggest that it could be something other than a punishment or penance. Ours is the first to imply that a sane human being would want to work even if he wasn’t under financial pressure [...]

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“What Do You Do?”

April 15, 2005

“All societies throughout history have had work right at their center; but ours – particularly America’s – is the first to suggest that it could be something other than a punishment or penance. Ours is the first to imply that a sane human being would want to work even if he wasn’t under financial pressure [...]

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Hardworking Italians

January 10, 2004

I’ve seen several reports recently of studies showing that Italians have more vacation days than anyone else in the world, except maybe the French. Most regularly-employed Italians during a year enjoy some long weekends, even longer Christmas and Easter breaks, and several weeks’ vacation in the summer. However, I’d like to see a study of [...]

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How I Became an Italian Journalist

October 27, 2003

Soon after we moved to Italy in December, 1990, I read an article in Italia Publishers, a magazine about desktop publishing, in which the writer described his difficulties in finding a font for Hindi. Although he had never been to India, he had been studying the language in Milan for fun, and wanted to write [...]

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