Italian museums offer much more than portraits of beatific Madonnas and maleficent Medicis hung along dusty corridors with dim lighting. Italy’s industrial history has created the backdrop for a special category of museum that appeals to visitors interested in food, health, design, society, fashion, transportation, even children’s toys. Would you…

A shell game always involves deception or fraud. You’ll find plenty of online videos to show you the tricks in a street game with shells and peas. But what about the game with bigger stakes — the health of a person . . . or a country? …

When I was six years old, I wanted to be a paleontologist. While other girls dreamed about Snow White (or Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or whoever the princess of the month was), I dreamed about dinosaurs. As I grew older, paleontology was discarded as a professional aspiration, but not my…

Medicare madness is enough to drive you bonkers in the US. Add the IRS and Social Security to the mix, and catatonia in American society is within reach of the entire population. Let’s start with the place where all roads end — Medicare. I take two daily meds, one to…

By the time I landed in Sarajevo, I was a nervous wreck. …

One of the disheartening things about returning to places in Europe where one has lived for decades — not years, mind you, but DECADES — is that no one wants to deal with Americans anymore. By “no one,” I specifically mean European banks. It started with FATCA in 2010 and…

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” goes the saying. The more things change, the more they remain the same. That is halfway true of Monaco, where I had lived throughout the 1990s but had not revisited for almost a decade. The weather on the Côte d’Azur was perfect…

A wardrobe is in constant flux. When you change jobs, lifestyles, climates, and countries, you should rethink the clothes in your closet. This is especially true when you are moving TO or FROM a country like Italy, arguably the most clothes-conscious country in the world. My lesson came early when…

Italians have always admired American logic, rationality, organization, and ability to Get Things Done. They may see in the US a culture and lifestyle inferior to their own, but they respect the Can Do attitude across the ocean. …