If you are an animal lover, the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, are heaven on earth. You can have a close encounter — on land or in the water — with wildlife that exists nowhere else on our planet. …

It doesn’t make sense to compare life “in the US” with life “in Italy.” You have to compare apples to apples — Gala versus Gala or Fuji versus Fuji. A fair comparison means you need to be specific about WHERE in the States and WHERE in Italy. In some ways…

Voting in one country can be complicated. Remember Florida’s hanging chads in the 2000 US presidential election? So what happens when a civic-minded individual with two passports tries to vote in both? …

When I lived in Italy, the letter arrived regularly every other year in my mailbox. It was from the regional Azienda Sanitaria Locale (ASL), the regional health office, inviting me to participate in a free screening for cancer of the colon. …

This is my 15th month fighting the US banking system, and the challenge is wearing thin. When I lived abroad, I knew that “modern” banking originated in medieval Italy. But today Italians are not among the world’s great banking powers. Their top bank is ranked 25. The Chinese occupy the…

Owners of border collies know automatically that their dogs are very VERY smart — the smartest of any canine breed. Dog IQ was formalized by a psychologist named Stanley Coren in a book published in 1994. He ranked 130 breeds of dogs on two criteria: how fast they learned a…

A week ago, this is where I stood with a frozen bank account: a Human Banker Person from the call center of the largest bank in the US had recommended that I not fight the arbitrary blocking of my six-year-old investment account in said bank, but rather do an end…

The saga started long before I moved from Italy to the US 14 months ago. A bond held in our Italian bank (the country’s fourth largest, so not a provincial fly-by-night) had been caught up in a political pas de deux between the US and a non-European country. The upshot…

All I could think about was dinosaurs, but the handsome young Russian sitting next to me on the final leg of my journey to Mongolia was aghast. He shook his floppy blonde hair. Dinosaurs were not the issue, he thought. My destination was. “I live in Khabarousk, 600 km. north…