In Love with France, At Home In Italy

 ONLY IN ITALY? When they haven't got the garden tool you want, they will offer to make it for you! Let me explain.  Cape Cod weeder? Nah, never heard of it. This is the land of MACHO power tools. Manual ones, the only kind I like, are deemed for sissies like the English. I remember the howls that greeted my question about where to buy a manual lawn mower. Go back to England, lady! Never mind that I'm not from there. According to these dudes with their giant gas-guzzling weed whackers, I might as well be.  You have weeds in your Italian garden. Do you know where your estirpatore is? When I first heard that word, I had a FLASH to when I was singing Mendelssohn's "Elijah," the most thrilling moment of which was when the good guys were about to "EXTIRPATE THE FOES." So it was only fitting when I found out that the name of my most useful garden tool would be the Italian word for extirpator: "estirpatore."  My...

I'm almost finished with Tim Parks' "Italian Neighbors or A Lapsed Anglo-Saxon in Verona," which describes, among other fascinating things, the way things work in Italian cemeteries. "After 30 years, a coffin can, if more space is required, be lifted up, the bones removed, and a new coffin with a fresh corpse introduced in its place."  There are even more disturbing details about how people are typically buried on top of each other in trenches. "When all the coffins have been down there for ten years or more, they are then dug up together and the bones removed, and the space is once again available for the freshly dead."  Rest in peace? Not so much!  I guess I had these morbid thoughts on the brain because a favorite aunt just died last week, and yesterday we stopped to look at the local cemetery, which has a beautiful view of the city. We did notice the mixture of very old graves amid the new, so having just read about the Italian modus ope...