Gelato vindication!

This just in from Adam, a longtime ISB reader in New York: Serious Eats names its top 5 gelaterie in Rome, giving a special nod to Gelateria alla Scala in Trastevere. They say:

Alla Scala: located in a small piazza across from the baroque Santa Maria della Scala church in the Trastavere neighborhood; Appell's picks: pear, pineapple, kiwi, banana, fragola (strawberry), or frutti di bosco (forest berries). Via della Scala 51

As you may recall, ISB crowned Alla Scala top honors in 2005. The editorial board here of course seconds the Serious Eats list, although we favor the cannella, but the fragola is pretty damn good too.

Blogging from basecamp

I suppose I should have bloggers' envy about this sad fact: I've been running this little blog here for the past few years and now manage something like triple-digit traffic each week. Older brother Chris starts blogging a few weeks back and he's amassed 1.5 million page views since May 21. Ok, he's blogging from K2. And the media loves him, including me. He and his team are the subject of my most recent Times column.

It was fun exchanging emails with him. At base camp, Chris met up with an Italian team consisting of a very famous sports journalist/celeb, Marco Mazzocchi. Mazzocchi (pictured below) was a recent contestant of Italian TV show Ballando con le stelle (Dancing with the Stars). If you think those moves are bad, you should see Chris on the dance floor.

Summertime, and the living is easy

Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'/hush now baby, don't you cry

The danger of having wifi in the country is you start doing geeky stuff in the middle of the afternoon, like updating your web site about the very place you're sitting. But this is the digital age, and hence, I'm putting the new broadband connection to work.

There are some fresh fotos here, giving you an idea of what life is like in the country. I'm sparing you the less appealing details like Bessie, at my feet, trying to catch flies, the two scorpions I found in a box of New Yorkers this morning, the lizard wrestling a grasshopper to the ground and devouring it in one spikey gulp, oh, and the snake that wriggled up the driveway this afternoon.

I'll leave you with this image: Xtina lazing in the sun, reading her latest anarchist manifesto, chuckling blithely.

Dog days of summer

It's hot in Central Italy. How hot? Even dogs need a day at the lake. Here's Bessie going for a heroic swim in Lago di Fiastra, about a half-hour drive from the house in the middle of Monti Sibillini National Park. The lake is perfect on a hot summer day. Fed by mountain streams, the water is always cold and refreshing. We spent the last two days there, underwater.

Best. Obit. Ever.

That was the subject line of an email from faithful ISB reader Jim I found in my inbox this morning. For those unfamiliar with the subject, the British papers long ago turned the obituary into an art form. Some of the best prose in British nupes can be found on the obit pages, a far cry from the formulaic capsules I'd write in my first days at (the defunct) The New Brunswick Home News.

There's plenty of material. There are so many drug-addled, eccentric Eurotrash philanderers parading around the capital cities of the old country. Check out this latest obit from The Telegraph on the great-great-grandson of Otto von Bismarck. Poor Otto.