Happy Easter to All!

Filiberto and Angelica very kindly gave us Easter gifts - some oil from their own olive trees, a bottle of spumante and this fabulous collection of Easter candy. Italian shops provide special packaging anytime you buy a gift.















Our grandson Luca is nine days old. I grabbed this picture from Anthony's Facebook.


We are on a 4-day Easter weekend. All but a few of the students have scattered to points all over Europe. They have more money than I do (or as one student put it, more willing to incur debt than I am).

Tuesday night we had our old friend John Johnson from Winona visit. I am embarrassed that I have no picture of John. He was only in Macerata 12 hours, 7 or 8 of which we slept, so that's my excuse. I picked him up at the train station after 8 p.m. and brought him home, where Kim had a nice home-cooked meal waiting for us. We spent the evening catching up. I left at 6:30 the next morning for Urbino and San Marino, and Kim got John to the train station at 8:15.

There was a procession Friday night for Good Friday. It just so happened that it went past our apartment about 10 p.m., or we never would have seen it. Kim heard the horses' hooves on the cobblestone and got up to look. There were people dressed in Roman costumes, a marching band, crosses of various shapes and sizes and tons of clergy, all followed by hundreds of people praying and singing.

I saw a story that reported median incomes in 30 countries around the world. Italy comes in at 23rd at 12,731 Euros. In first place was South Korea at 24,030 Euros, followed by the UK, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Japan, Norway and the United States in 7th at 19,905 Euros.

Since Luca's parents are such big movie fans, I thought I'd take a look at the Italian Box Office Hits for the week of March 9. Six are US films dubbed into Italian, three are originally in Italian and one is Spanish, dubbed into Italian.

1. Grande, Grosso e...Verdone - even non-Italian speakers can tell it's a comedy by the trailer
2. Non e un Paese Per Vecchi - The Coen Brothers Film, "No Country for Old Men"
3. Jumper - the Sci-Fi Thriller with Samuel Jackson
4. Sweeney Todd - the movie based on Sondheim's bizarre play, starring Johnny Depp
5. Cenerentola e gli 007 Nanni - "Happily N'Ever After" - the animated film was released in the US in 2006
6. Rec - A Spanish Horror Film
7. John Rambo - I even saw Sylvester Stallone making Italian talk show appearances to promote this
8. Prospettive di un Delitto - "Vantage Point" starring Dennis Quaid
9. Parlami d'Amore - An Italian romantic comedy
10. Persepolis - Animated, but hardly a children's film. About a girl growing up in Iran