The Grumps don't win

The Venetians built a church specially-designed for Vivaldi. A pair of 14 year old twins can increase my hope for the future. And the reason cows wear bells is because their horns don’t work. Three of the many things I learned during this year of guiding tours of Europe for Rick Steves.

Not Vivaldi's church. This one's in Paris.

When I look back at the year I feel an overarching gratitude and admiration for the people I got to meet and share a trip with. The feeling glows and warms. And then snags. Because this year had something else too. For the first time in my (admittedly less-than-ancient) guide career, I had a tour member who...I don’t even know how to say it. I would not want them on another of my tours.

Rick Steves offers a tour experience far above the sort of shambling boredom I see on other buses and in clusters of clueless curmudgeons blocking the sidewalks and galleries of Europe. Largely, we just draw a fantastic clientele (thank you, PBS!) but part of the magic is our “No Grumps Policy.” The logic of it always made sense to me; negativity is contagious, and if someone’s not happy, they don’t need to be there bringing everyone else down.

In the Forum you can focus on the sun, or that you're standing in history. Your choice.

But it wasn’t until this year that I witnessed how subtle it can be. No overt tirades, nothing tangible enough to justify removal from the group, but as time went by nothing was ever good enough or worth appreciating, and I never once saw a smile. Several local guides recognized it immediately, but I just chalked it up to botox. But when the evaluations came in, I realized it was much worse than that. People who I know had a fantastic time were complaining about the size of the showers etc. It feels clear to me that if this person hadn’t been in there radiating negativity, those people would have brought home another positive memory instead of gripes about shower stalls.

Negative energy is problematically powerful. I sat with the person for one meal and was considering quitting my job by the time dessert came. At the very least, I was ready to sign off the tour as a loss.

Sure the view, whatever. Ugh, do there have to be so many people?

Then something happened. Perhaps inevitable and undoubtedly wonderful. I talked to other tour members. And was restored. I remember one lady in particular that night, enjoying the unexpected fireworks display the town put on, taking unmitigated pleasure in the light and sound and moment shared with the small beach community. The words are forgotten but I remember the healing power in hearing how much fun she was having, what the tour meant to her, and how grateful she was to be on it. I walked away from that chat ready to sign up for 100 tours on the spot.

It's all about how you....frame it.

Her positivity is reflected in the hundreds of tour members I’ve had, with just the one who bummed me out. That’s magnificent. And beyond that, it’s important. Because in a moment where the worst of us is degrading the Oval Office and contaminating the headlines, it’s good to remember that the vast majority of us are beautiful people. I can expand out to all the innumerable niches of Europe, rock climbing walls of San Francisco, classrooms of the IRC, streets of New Delhi and prayer-soaked hallways of Dharamshala, I can expand to embrace all the environments and moments I found this year and in the cast of thousands I see an incredible panoply of human goodness.

So, though the grumps are out there, the lovers and delighters outnumber them by a degree of magnitude that gives me hope. And I didn’t even tell you about the twins. Humanity is beautiful. And I can’t wait to go back to work.

I think that guy's going to need his own post...

Living the dream

I had a dream when I was a kid. A literal, “I’m asleep” kind of dream, that is. This isn’t an inspirational post. In it, I’m swimming along the bottom of the pool, my favorite place in all of Childhood’s Kingdom, when I realize I can breathe down there. Not fully, not well, but if I calm down and do it just right, modestly, I can breathe. I remember an infusion of calm and an understanding that everything could be fantastic. Could be better than I’d known to hope for. (It wasn’t until later that I suspected I’d just rolled over and was breathing through my pillow.)

Amsterdam welcomed me my first day

This morning I’m coming up for air. After 21 days of Best of Europe tour-guiding, I’m waking up to a day without appointments, no reservations to confirm or information to convey. Not even a city to depart.

The street is polite vespas and well-dressed Parisians, nothing on my plate but baguette crumbs and the promise of more good food to come, perhaps after a stroll by the Seine? And I remember that dream. Its epiphany that I can do something I really enjoy and get the air I need while doing it. And I realize that’s what I’ve been doing for 21 days.

Swiss Alpine calm

I’ve been swimming, diving into Amsterdam’s historic harbor before turning up the Rhine to reach Austrian Alpine passes, waterfalling down Roman roads to muse about Venetian canals before making my way through old Florence to reach older Rome, just to smile and drift up into Swiss glaciers, a liquid core of calm that persists when I slide down through the vineyards of Burgundy to wash up fully rational on Seine shores.

And I’ve been breathing.

Water was an element of my boyhood joy, and travel is essential for my adult satisfaction. Sharks and me, stop moving and we suffocate. But it’s not a compulsion, not addiction, neither distraction nor delusion. It’s adoration. Adulation. Celebration of our worldwide nation and the strokes that pull us all together.

Islam is supposed to be scary? Me and
the little girl don't buy it. You?

For years I traveled. Helpless before my vagabond urges. It was right for a time, but wrong in the end. Insufficient for the long term, serving nothing but my whims. Now there’s a purpose to my travel. In a world of multimedia capitalists who profit from our fear, who compete for the spectacles that widen our eyes and shrink our horizons, I find something more worthy than mere movement when I take others with me, show them these faces of beauty left here by centuries of human struggle and millennia of natural process.

For twenty one days spread across half a dozen countries we delight in the reality of the places, rooms in our global house, and I watch the tension of the first day dissolve into the ease of the last. Day One I see apprehension when I show them the train track that will reliably bring them home, Day Twenty I drop them off in Paris’s elegant metro maze and say “See you tomorrow” and they’re off without a pause.

And in the calm, when they don’t need me at all, I can imagine them going home, feeling merely tired, to be greeted by the anxious homebound with their pinched brows who desperately inquire “You were in Europe? But weren’t you worried? Didn’t you feel unsafe?”

And in my daydream I see their calm smile, perhaps wearing the appropriate regret for the incidents of the moment, but underneath is the deep understanding that the world is something other than the misconception made up by those make-up talking heads. And my traveling companions ease back to a full library of happy moments, warm welcomes, beautiful humanity and they can shrug off the constipated clench of petty terror. Stories they know better than to buy, now.

Think they wish they'd spent more time fearful and divided?

No, they didn’t feel unsafe. They felt free. If I did my job right. And the memory of every one of their smiles resonates within me, and I feel that dream’s sense of delighted astonishment, astonished delight, and can pull in deep lungfuls of fresh air.

Maybe it’s an inspiration post after all. For me, anyway.

Europe's normalcy and hospitality are waiting, on every boulevard and back street.

Feeling fine and Florentine

“The Tuscan Frying Pan,” Florence was earning its title that day, certified in sweat dripping down the backs and sides of tourists squinting in the Piazza della Signoria, and my hair felt, again, like one of those Russian fur hats. Time for a haircut. And wouldn’t you know it, Florence is the home of my favorite barber.

I went straight for the small shop, undistracted by the Basilica di San Lorenzo where one of my favorite Italians holds wishes on his tomb, not stopping at the old friend of a hotel (taken by a different Rick Steves group, the lucky buggers), and swerving around the periodic bulges of visitors whose shoulders relaxed bit by bit with every lick of their slowly melting gelato. Visciola e fragola? Va bene.

Old Town Florence is a tourism city for sure, and the crowds used to irritate me, but working as a guide has helped me see the ways they’re doing it right (improved traffic laws, cleaning the duomo, and coordinating the many marvelous sites) and given me an increased appreciation of the place and its importance in our collective past. So now they’re not the addled brains of people in my way, they’re international minds growing in appreciation and understanding of the birthplace of the Renaissance rebirth.

But yes, at the moment, I wanted them to move. I needed that haircut. Kindly get the inferno out of my way, signore. Before I get Borgia on your ass.

I made it. The slightly cooler confines of a barbieri who’s been cutting hair here since the 1970s and his colleague with a coif like Grace Jones on an ambitious day. They greeted me with their usual dignified and affable buon giorno.

Scissors snipped, buzzer buzzed, and when the razor had scraped the edges clean I felt like a renewed man, renaissance of the scalp. ready to stand on a pedestal if I must, sling in hand, and face the future with concentration and confidence and just a hint of gel.

Back into that Tuscan sun of fame and infamy, punishing and beautiful, try to escape it but don’t forget you traveled here to see it. Down the canyons of Medici streets, past Strozzi home and Brunelleschi dome, a little slower now, a bit more strut, something lyrical in between the paces. Feeling a tad more Italian.

Florence is a pilgrimage, and I wanted to pay homage to the great ones. Architects, poets, and the family of men who led nations, and they’re just the audience for the names we know. Galileo, Ghiberti, Machiavelli, and Dante, men whose deeds echo and dance and scheme and enlighten down through the centuries.

Then over to stand in front of the tomb of perhaps the greatest artist in human history. It was just me, the cooler air, dust motes painted by stained glass light slanting down through basilica space, and the tomb of Michelangelo Buonarotti.

He looked good. I looked good. Florence looked good. Travel, now that is good. Buon viaggio a tutti.

Who cares about cows?

Yeah, that looks like a homeland to protect and remember

Farm bills and agricultural subsidies are always a big deal, from the US to the EU, and definitely in Switzerland. This baffled me a bit. Swiss agriculture? In a country that wealthy and stable (take my word for it, or come on tour with me and I’ll explain) why are a few cows such a big deal?

The answer I always gave was national identity. The people of Country X want to see themselves as coming from pastoral roots. This didn’t make a ton of sense to me, since if you didn’t grow up on a farm why do you need to feel like your nation did? But I’m used to not quite understanding identity politics since I come from the rampantly, disastrously, shamefully dominant demographic set. Straight, white, middle-class, American male with full health, mobility, education etc? Having every advantage in life reduced the need for an identity to process it.

But other people will talk about such things until….(wait for it)...the cows come home.

Ain't she so pretty!

That expression was always a mystery to me. I’d picture farmers chatting on the porch until the cows meandered home in the evening light. Or was it that the cows would never come home on their own, so you’d talk forever? That could be, too, but let’s go with something else.

Because it’s wearing a floral headdress.

Every spring, the farmers throughout the Alps drive their cows up to higher pasture for the summer. They stay up there eating rich green grass and justifying Alphorns for the warm sunny months, giving some folks time off to talk endlessly (hence the phrase, I’m thinking) while a few heroes of national identity up in the mountain meadows churn butter and coagulate protein. (Ain’t that just the sexiest phrasing I could have chosen for cheese-making?)

Get on with your cow self!

Leave it to this last tour group I had, with their preternatural luck and timing, to arrive just in time for the almabtrieb, or viehscheid, the annual parade of cows returning from summer pasture. It was stupendous. The cows, dressed in their finest and caring not one udder about it, paraded through town in a ceremonious way that was most a-moo-sing. (You’re welcome.)

So what? So some cows walked through town, why should I blog about it, and why should legislatures spend so much time on ag issues?

In this year of an insane US presidential candidate, United Kingdomers choosing to leave the most successful diplomatic structure in European history, and Colombians voting to reject peace in favor of punitive measures and further bloodshed, well, it’s damn fine to sit back in the sun and watch something so hearty, so earnest, so down-home rustically peaceful and reassuring as a parade of decorated cows coming home.

Not a shabby looking place, that Switzerland

Is it worth it? All the tax revenue spent to prolong a procession of bovine ladies and tractors of cheese? Well, it did me good, and the whole town with me, so I guess the fiscal considerations are a moooo-t point.

The Secret to Europe

No photo of the boulangerie, but this was just down the street

The smell of fresh baked bread. Is there anything on earth so glorious as that smell on a Paris morning? It was Friday and the perfectly round fruit-topped tarts were glistening with sugar and the muffins with their floured plumpness were the first part of an equation whose answer was a comfortable chair, cup of tea, and a good book. But it was the freshly baked baguettes that drew me in.

The mademoiselle behind the counter was chatting with the dignified madame l’customer ahead of me, their words lilting about in that frolicsome French that seems always on the verge of a loving tut-tut.

When it was my turn I stepped forward, gave a friendly smile and nod, and said in my very best French “Un baguette si vous plait.” I was killing it. An integrated part of this morning in the boulangerie.

Except maybe not. The mademoiselle seemed annoyed by my presence. She wasn’t rude, but nor was she nice. She was curt and briskly businesslike with my bread, so different from the affectionate glow of moments before, and barely looked at me as she handed over the bag and greeted the next person in line with a friendly hello.

Maybe the old stereotypes were right. Maybe the French (or Parisians at least) really were still rude to foreigners. Maybe my inevitable accent was just not good enough for their demanding sensibilities. How terribly disappointing!

Good thing it wasn’t true. It took me some time to figure out. Countless more small interactions across the continent, but eventually I noticed the missing piece. And what a difference it made.

So when I watched three young Americans make the same mistake I had, ordering their sandwiches on the Rue Cler last time I was in Paris, and receiving the same terse Parisian response, I was ready to share what I’d learned.

That's my big mystical secret

“It helps a lot if you say hello first.” I told them (not bothering to say hello first because we’re Americans). “It took me awhile to notice it, since back home we smile and get straight to the point, but over here they really like it if you greet them before saying what you want.”

Being Americans, they were guarded about this stranger speaking to them, their defensive caution struggling against the desire to learn and enjoy their vacation.

“So if you just start with a quick ‘Bon jour madame’ in France, ‘Buon giorno signore’ in Italy, whatever, you usually get a much better reaction.” They kind of mumbled a response, still wondering when I’d demand their wallets, so I let them be and stepped up to the counter.

“Bon jour madame” I said to the mistress of sandwiches, who chirped back the answering greeting. “Un sandwich au jambon et fromage, si vous plait.” And we were best buddies by the time she passed across my lunch.

The Americanas were immersed in their guide book when I turned around, but perhaps somewhere down the road they’ll speak from experience when they whisper to someone “It helps if you greet them first.”

A love song, in Munich

The sun wasn’t as warm as memory promised it would be. The grass perhaps thinner, mud between the stalks, and itchy on my calves, which felt awkward in shorts after so long under professional trousers. I wanted so badly to enjoy my afternoon off in Munich, the city that most surprised me with it’s beauty when this new job introduced us. So I’d returned to the English Gardens, green and liquid among the concrete realities of urban modernity, seeking the easy summer joy I’d found there last time, when my friend/mentor and I had earned the respect of our Teutonic neighbors with our beer garden food trays.

“You are going to eat all of zis?” They inquired. “No, zis is not possible.” They informed. “Sehr gut!” They soon praised.

But this time, supper was solitary, crushed granola bar dug out of backpack bottom. And no bicycle, just the implacability of my own feet, again, still, always, forward because it’s easier than stopping. But now I’d paused, by a river that didn’t care, with no one to talk to about it. My nature, my vagabond urges, my desire to connect with the planet that threatens to disconnect me from my people, felt closer than my kin. And the water wouldn’t talk to me.

But this age, this semiconductor madness, it has its perks, and the phone in my pocket connected me with the woman back home. The woman I missed. The partner I loved. The deeper dream I wanted to reach. To reconcile with my wanderlust. And now the setting sun wasn’t abandoning, it was saluting. The air wasn’t sucking the warmth from my flesh, it was enlivening my skin. I wasn’t alone and forgotten, I was adrift in a city, the way I love to be.

My steps into the park had been dragging, an effort to reach someplace where Good would start. My steps out were light, aware that Good starts within. I was feeling that flow when I reached the musician.

I'd passed him before, but busy seeking the melody of happiness in my headphoned isolation, so had nodded hello and kept on. Now I took the earbuds out and listened to him. He was good. Soul and skill. I dropped a euro of gratitude in his case, and we got to talking, sharing who we were that day, until another voice spoke up.

"Excuse me," it said in a soft German accent. "I just wanted to sank you for your playing. She likes it very much."

The smiling man was pushing a stroller. Inside, an infant daughter watched the guitar player with a focus that seemed enlightened. Her infant’s inability to form facial expressions left her focus somehow pristine, unmuddled by self-consciousness or the details of communication. Just pure attention, approaching easy adoration. The joy coming from this tiny vulnerable creature felt invincible.

"Would you like another?" asked the guitarist. Then he sang her a love song, smooth and sweet, as evening light caressed down through the trees, which stood around to watch this tiny, perfect child listen to a musician’s harmony and care. And I, privileged witness, could only feel that the world was again in its perfect orbit.

(The guitar player can be found here.)

The Wizard of Oz and I

(This will make much more sense after part one, here.)

Outside Il Mago's shop, in Orvieto

An eruption of sound, light, and motion, as the world below my eyes kicked into life, overlapping music box jangles and blinking lights. I’d come to see the Wizard of Oz, tucked away in a side street of hilltop Orvieto, Italy, and now that same gruff wizard was standing beside me, lights reflected in his glasses and smile.

“This carousel is in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris. The oldest in the city, from 1879.” Looking at his tiny faithful reproduction, I could imagine the generations of children that have sat and shrieked on the original Parisian horses.

“Here is a ride from Coney Island, in your country.” The little roller coaster car rose to the top and slid down the track, tiny wooden figures throwing their arms up in an unaging joyous thrill. His artisan finger worked down the row. “This is the ice skating rink from Toronto. The ferris wheel of London. The tea cups of Disney.” We moved among the world’s remembrances, sharing each one whether we’d ever seen it or not. Each tiny world, handmade by this artisan.

“When I was a boy, I knew what I wanted to be.” My assumption was beginning when he filled in the answer. “A cowboy!” He watched my grins over his bifocals for a moment before continuing. “I wanted to so much, that I did it, I ran away! I left my home and started towards Texas." Let that moment linger. "My mother caught me ten seconds down the road, gave me two big slaps, and brought me home. So instead of running away to be a Texas cowboy, I began to make things."

Orvieto is the sort of town where doing
things the old way makes sense.

Together we looked out over the delicate wooden toyscape of figures and memories. On the corner of his desk, beside the antique cash register, I noticed a familiar book. Seeing my glance, he picked it up. “Yes, Rick Steves. I am in his book. He came here and liked my work. Other companies want me in their books too, but they want money. It’s a commercial. Advertising. I am in Rick’s book because he liked what I do, so he put me in. That’s it. But I haven’t seen him in years.”

I told him Rick was my boss, that I was a guide, and that I’d learned of the toy shop in the current edition of the book. There was a hint of melancholy in the Wizard’s voice when he repeated “I haven’t seen him in years.” I assured him that even if Rick doesn’t have time, someone from the company comes around at least once a year to make sure we still believe in our recommendations, so we still appreciate his work. But there was something else.

Rick Steves and the Mago di Oz have something in common. Both are among the rare few who have created exactly the career they wanted. My eyes returned to one of the Wizard’s handpainted signs. Make your reality like your dreams, and your dreams into your reality. These two men have done that, and I can only imagine they recognized something in each other.

Nothing against minions, but compared
to the 12th century Moor's Tower,
they seem a tad chintsy

I was feeling a peaceful sense of satisfaction and happiness in the presence of this gentle man when the door opened to admit a woman and her son, from one of the bigger bus tours that feed people through Europe’s Express Lane. Her hand held the cheap plastic Pixar balloon he’d wanted for a moment, and neither greeted Il Mago as they entered his space. I watched him monitor them with the same tolerant caution he’d initially shown me, and was thinking how nerve wracking it must be to have unknown entities always lumbering among your treasures, cheap balloons bonking into handmade zeppelins, when the woman took out her phone and lifted its little factory eye.

“No photo!” The Wizard’s snarl was instantaneous and sharp. Blunt force reminder at an Italian volume. “No photo!”

How does one bring the fragile lightness of childhood into the tenacious heaviness of adulthood? Not easily, I thought, as I watched mother and son endure that awkward pause to save face before fleeing the shop. But it’s only appropriate for a wizard to be a little scary. Booming voices and flaring flames of castigation, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, with his gentle love of a gentler life.

No, the Wizard of Oz doesn’t let you take photos. But when a reminder of the texture of childhood is on offer, photos are not what you want anyway.

The Wizard did allow me one photo.
(Photo credit: some woman who did not take out her phone.)

The Wizard of Oz is Italian

The Wizard of Oz doesn’t let you take pictures. Looking around his close-shouldered toyscape of fragile wooden forms and clustered vintage artefacts, that was understandable. Besides, I already had enough photos from outside, Orvieto, back in normal Italy.

The walls of Orvieto

Out there, looking through a lens brings the whole world more into focus, reminding me to notice the textures of the quotidian, and aiding a more deliberate examination of our scrambling world. But in Il Mago’s workshop I didn’t need that precision, in his world I was better served by the flitting fancy of a childlike eye, overthrowing the diligence of inspection for the relaxation of entertainment.

Around, above, and behind me, colors clustered and shapes lurked in delicate extravagance. Art nouveau iconography lounged in evening wear behind nostalgic paraphernalia in pajamas, stained glass butterflies hovered above Betty Boop’s Route 66 diner, and a parade of metal giraffes and jugglers was on their eternal way to childhood’s circus. Hot air balloons drifted up among Spitfires and B-12 bombers held en route to battles uncountable. Cowboys and Indians with stagecoaches to match, while the flappers and mobsters surrounded stylish cars in a sudden sense of speakeasy jazz.

No photos in Oz, but Ippolito Scalza's
Pietá is too beautiful not to share.

Such was the cacophonic harmony of an unexpected piece of this world, created by that man, who watched me from under alert eyebrows like foxholes. There was something of a residual frown on his face, until he saw the smile on mine. Then he approached, real casual like. Was there a wisp of the masked diffidence one might find in an unapologetic adult who was once a teased child? I couldn’t be sure.

“Let me know if you have any questions.” He offered, smooth but stern as old wood.

“Thank you,” I answered, and for a moment he watched while I gazed. “But truth be told, I’m not even sure what questions to ask.”

Maybe not all passion is easily shared, but the Mago’s is. His artisanal fingers pointed here and there as he explained that he finds some of the pieces by careful search through trusted sources, but that he makes most of them himself. That alone was impressive, in our modern age of Made in China stamps and supply chains redolent with karmic consequences that may last even longer than the plastic we buy and throw away.

Tragedy! Crisis! Death! Don't read
such things, cara Nonna.

My brain wanted to walk down those familiar penal paths of today’s dire adulthood, but from his basics beginning, “They come from me”, he quickly transcended to a more dreamlike place, where his various mottos, handpainted on slats of wood, were the rules of the game: “Make your reality like your dreams, and your dreams into your reality.”

Maybe it sounds better in Italian, but in that place, it made perfect sense to me. I was nodding to the notion, but that didn’t seem to be the reaction he was looking for. “Put your dreams into your reality,” he encouraged me, and swept his hand at the array of silent creations. I had weeks of tour-work still to go, and putting one of his pieces of art into a backpack would be empirical blasphemy, but it didn’t seem like a sales pitch.

“Reach out and touch your dreams!” He was enthusiastic, expectant, and I felt like I was failing a test. “Reach out! Touch the dreams!” Reach out and touch? Was there a button hidden among the delicate arms and fragile beams? Feeling lame, my finger reached out, unsure whether to go left or right, so plodded straight ahead until it landed, just for a moment, right on the...

(Oops, late for work. See you tomorrow.)

I'm naked, with special guest: Benito Mussolini

Lake Como's not hard on the eyes.

“Mi scusi” is Italian for “Excuse me.” You might hear it when someone interrupts, or steps on your foot, or when the maid opens the door to your hotel room without knocking, two hours before check-out, right as you step buck naked out of the shower four feet in front of her. The words are the same, though in the last case they’ll be said with an edge of housekeeping panic that transcends linguistic boundaries.

My Best of Italy tour hadn’t even started yet and I was already learning. What else might I learn, before the 17 days were over? That it is impossible to find a gondolier in Venice who’s not a self-satisfied schmuck, but we love them anyway? Yes. That you can be in one country, politically, and another, culturally? Yes. That wine tastes good if you’re ready for it to taste good? Pretty much.

Cadenabbia, on the west side of Como is
near the town where Mussolini was shot

How about fascist dictators? Everyone-worth-listening-to agrees that Hitler was a terrible, terrible human being. Probably the worst ever. And Mussolini? Again, it’s obvious that teaming up with Hitler and sending thousands of people to the concentration camps is about as evil as humans get. Add violent political repression, oppressive morality laws, and the murders of countless political opponents and you have a pretty good grasp on Mussolini’s soul.

Is that it? Black and white? I wondered this as I hiked around Lake Como, looking for the place where the Italian dictator met his end. What would I find there? I’ve been to the parking lot in Berlin that they think is over Hitler’s bunker, now a place of oil stains and dog poop, and found it appropriate. Would I find something similar here?

In Spain you used to hear the lament "It was better against Franco." Nostalgia for the simpler days, when things worked, courtesy of the leader you hated. (Versus now, when things half-work, courtesy of leaders you scorn.) I imagine Americans would have a similar nostalgia for the Cold War if Russia weren't still so willing to destabilize the world. (Invading a sovereign nation and annexing it? That's so crass and 19th century. Nowadays we do it with Trade Agreements, Vlad.)

Sorry to interrupt you from your phones, but could I
interest you in some info about the place you crossed
the planet to see? How do you feel about Mussolini?

So when some Italians reminisce about Mussolini and say "He made the trains run on time" I figured it’s just those not-entirely-thought-out rose colored glasses for a black & white age, when enemies were obvious and tangible, and you could comfortably reassure yourself that there was nothing you could do about it.

But a good tour guide should have a deeper understanding than the average traveler, so I went looking for Mussolini, and his Italy.

What I found, and what I think it means...on Friday.