Scusateme

This blog's more dedicated readers may have noticed that once my long genealogy saga was completed, the blog itself seemed to abruptly follow my ancestors into the vale of nonexistence. 

I'm sorry for dropping the ball like that. In fact we came back to California in July and will be returning to Italy in a couple of months, and so far, knock wood, we have survived summer air travel and all the other horrors of our modern age. I hope Quanto? Tanto! will survive, too.

This summer I'm afraid it collapsed under the pressure of the relatively hectic travel schedule of my three months in Italy, which included not only the trip through di-Carlo-connected towns in the South that I've already documented, but also a week and a half in Sicily with Danny and our friend Valerie and then an eight-day trip to New York and Maine to see family.  Even more than usual, I felt like I was always in the midst of coming or going, with no time to write all the things I wanted to. I managed to finish the story of our genealogy tour, but somehow that one-week trip took up all my Italy writing time.

I have to admit that I also shirked my blogging responsibilities because our daughter and her entourage were around a lot, which was delightful and meant there was often something much more entertaining than sitting in front of keyboard to attend to. Probably the fading stamina of old age has something to do with it, too. 

One California enticement: an artisanal pastrami place just opened up the street.

Despite all that, and all the enticements of the California half of my life, I am determined to play catch-up and get at least some of this past summer's Italian adventures into the blog before we return to Fidenza and I have even more things I want to record for posterity. At the very least I will post about our trip to Sicily, at my usual tiresome length, just so that there's a record of it for my own delectation, although anyone else who's interested is welcome to follow along. And maybe I'll get to a few other odds and ends, if I can manage it. Thanks for bearing with me.