I’m about 28 hours from the start of my journey home and I am feeling pretty homesick now. There are a lot of things I miss. Aside from the obvious – ie my family, friends and my own home, here are some of the less obvious things that I take for granted: Speaking English: after …
Author Archives: Ernest Zanatta
All Is True
One conspiracy theory I will not entertain, even in jest, is the Shakespeare authorship question. The original advocate for someone else being the author died in a lunatic asylum (Delia Bacon) and an early advocate for the Earl of Oxford was an eccentric unfortunately but perhaps approximately named Looney. What saddens and appalls me is …
Why the moon landings are real and the Roswell UFO is not…
I like to stir people up by being provocative. I get ample ammunition from my frequent purchases of ‘alternative news’ publications (ie the looney conspiracy stuff about UFOs, vaccinations, Chem trails, 9/11, Obama’s citizenship etc). For example, this past July during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, I was calling it the ‘moon hoax’. And …
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I blame Vespasian
The Emperor Vespasian was the son of a tax collector. This explains a lot. As a form of revenue collection, he introduced a urinal tax. When his son Titus objected, according to his biographer Suetonius, Vespasian grabbed a coin from the pile of revenue from this tax and held it under his son’s nose, exclaiming …
Crepuscolo
Crepuscolo is the Italian word for twilight or dusk. I never knew that til I asked google translate just now. Just like ‘calice’, it’s not a word in my Italian vocabulary. Right now I’m sitting out the front of my hotel in Treviso enjoying the crepuscolo. You need to be a certain distance away from …
Tired in Treviso….
I’ve now been abroad and on the road for over three weeks and I am starting to feel pretty tired and homesick. Not counting day trips to Asti and Magenta, Treviso is my ninth stop on this trip. I’ve seen as much new stuff as I can handle for a while and I am getting …
An overwhelmingly sized pizza menu
Last night I did dinner with a legion of my cousins and their families at Charlott, a Charlie Chaplin themed pizza restaurant which is in the centre of Cusignana, my father’s home village (and therefore my own ancestral home). Great to see my cousins again, and to meet one of the latest additions to the …
Treviso
The province of Treviso is my ancestral homeland, on my father’s side. The medieval city with its walls, moat and canals has a unique charm. I spent three hours this morning walking through the city. The Gate of St Thomas on the north side of the city was completed in 1518, and the cathedral is …
An extremely green building
Not far from my hotel in Milan is an area filled with well designed new skyscrapers. This 25 storey building has been designed as an urban vertical forest, covered in shrubs and bushes equal to what would cover an entire hectare of land. Aside from this, a lot of other buildings appear to have enormous …
Wallaby Australian Pub
Magenta is a town on the railway line just outside Milan. It is also the location of the Wallaby Australian Pub. I visited yesterday and had a beer and a chat with the owner, an Italian chap who has owned it since 2007 (it’s been there since 1994) and has fond memories of drinking Guinness …
Lost For Words! 