Many of you have written me asking how we are doing! Thanks for your caring inquiries. The answer is: everything here is pretty normal, Yes, the tourist crowds have thinned, but the city is by no means deserted – despite what the news or an extreme article in The New Yorker might tell you. (More on that article later, I really don’t know what he is talking about). So here are a few pictures of what we’ve been up to. This is a forced vacation – no school for the kids and no classes for me means we are free to sort of wander around. Life goes on as normal with the exception of my work requirements, so yesterday we went to the park – Villa Sciarra – and today we ate gelato and a delicious lunch at Emma Pizzeria and visited the cat sanctuary at Largo di Torre Argentina. (N.B. – there are a lot fewer cats than there used to be, so things seem to be going in a positive direction with the feral colony situation.) We also rode the public “tiny bus” – a longtime personal favorite – which is just that, a tiny public transit bus that snakes through the ancient city streets.