
01. Friday night at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival with very, very dear friends – we enjoyed 21 (!) cicchetti and six Italian wines at Ombra. Highlights: Continue reading

01. Friday night at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival with very, very dear friends – we enjoyed 21 (!) cicchetti and six Italian wines at Ombra. Highlights: Continue reading

These books deserve thorough reviews but I also really want to be done with 2020. So, for the sake of completeness, quick reviews of the books I read in November and December last year – Continue reading

01. I promise not to post pics of my local every week… But being able to go swimming again is making me VERY, VERY HAPPY. Continue reading

I didn’t care for the books, but thought the first TV series (with each episode representing one chapter in the first book) was superb.
The second series – which aligns with The Story of a New Name – is so, so good. It’s demanding viewing because the actress who plays Lila (Gaia Girace), is the master of the overt and the incredibly subtle – her glances, her body language, the slightest tilt of her head says EVERYTHING. Continue reading

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Lena adds more people to her list, Arseholes I Have Known.
3/5 Liked it more than the others (probably residual joy after watching My Brilliant Friend).
Find my other unhelpful reviews of the Neapolitan series here, here and here.
As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (June 28): Belfast 15°-22° and Melbourne 13°-19°.

You might remember my feelings about the Neapolitan series (if not, read them here, here, and here). In short, I didn’t love the books. Other readers were raving. I was disappointed.
So why watch the tv series? I really just wanted some glimpses of Naples. But what I got was so much more.
I LOVED this series – for capturing the close, suffocating and violent world of Lila and Lenù. For letting the excellent cast say in a glance or a grimace what Ferrante said over endless pages. The series had tension and menace and love. You saw the insecurities and determination in the girls. Clearly this is all the stuff I missed in the books.
I’m doing what I vowed I wouldn’t – going back for the final instalment – part four, The Story of the Lost Child. And I’m already looking forward to season two.

We caught the train from Montepulciano to Naples, and drove from there to Sorrento (with me quietly congratulating myself on the decision to hire drivers in Italy rather than get behind the wheel ourselves. Traffic in Naples was insane). We had four nights in Sorrento (I can already tell you, it wasn’t long enough). The highlights: Continue reading

“One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness…one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!”
I was busting to get to Florence (years of Forster playing in my mind). It did not disappoint. Continue reading

Tschüss Germany and ciao Italy!
We flew from Berlin to Venice, to begin two weeks in Italy.
I’ll be boring you with a few posts about Italy, starting with my favourite bits of Venice. Continue reading