Homer's invocation of the muse in the Odyssey
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After a career in life sciences communications and corporate responsibility, I'm writing novels, short stories, and essays about outsiders, science, and family life.
Alberto Moravia, one of Italy’s most famous literary figures, is renowned for his neorealist and anti-fascist novels such as Gli indifferenti – The time of indifference, La Romana – The Roman woman, and La Ciociara – Two women, but he also wrote more than a hundred short stories featuring the common people of Rome, collected in Storie Romane – Roman Tales.
He calls her again: ‘I can’t stop thinking of you. I need to see you.’ And she incredulous but also vainly asks why, wanting to understand but also to be flattered.
The Italian poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863) wrote thousands of sonnets about Rome during the Risorgimento, when the Catholic Church lost much of its power and the various states in the Italian peninsula were unified into a single state.
Arturo would never fulfil his dream of establishing his own construction business, and he’d speak wistfully of the holiday village he had built in the Sila mountains of Calabria, where the handsome Swiss-style hotel and chalets can still be found, ensconced among black pines and beech.
The electric churn on the counter wooshes like a heartbeat on an ultrasound. It’s not a great churn, but the vaniglia ice cream it makes is almost as good as my grandmother’s.
At the dressing table in the corner of their white bedroom, she sits on her red-painted chair where countless nights she’d nursed their babies, the children grown up now with babies of their own.
The online recipe calls for vanilla extract but no egg yolks, and substitutes half the (cold) milk for double cream, which (in my opinion) results in a thin flavour and tacky texture.