Laura, but Naples for me is not monuments for tourists, but 1) narrow streets with laudry hanging from the window, 2) a f*** you attitude that permeates the place, 3) A (tiny) remaining Greek-Orthodox minority…
Asides
#FF @CutTheKnotMath (Maestro Alex. Bogomolny) w/ whom just spent 3 h talking about Russian & NonRussian probability.
I get offended when people call me “humble”.
My new policy is to respond to 10% of offenses, but hit > 10x harder. Better than responding to half the offenses, but hitting the victim twice harder. Exception is when I want to kill time in airports.
When some Harvard idiot mocks you, what the f*** do you do? Call a committee? Cry? Seek therapy?
Barbara @chicaderock , please read books BY Seneca, who was the real thing (a doer), not something ON Seneca by some library rat with a modern perspective. They will miss something essential.
On the main difference between East Med and West Med (except for Provence) called here “milk of lions”.
Flaneuring bil Lébnéné = “shmm hawa” or, better, “re5iya”, or “2awwas 3ind rabbna” (about men of leisure).
You can tell Maltese is a bit more Arabic than Lebanese: ecclesiatical & nonArabic Semitic terms are often from Latin/Italian whereas Leb uses Aramaic (Ġesù not Yasu3, Eva not 7awwa…) MeansMalta Maltese didn’t have these words in their corpus, which must have been Siculo-Arabic. Now the mystery: there were a lot of Maltese-Lebanese trading families in Leb: +Abella, Sabella, Mamo, Camilleri, Aquilina, Borg (Borji), Mcallef +SALIBA in both (my mother’s original last name is Ghosn Saliba, not Ghosn) Phoenician practice to trade w/cousins across Med ?
Point is; if you’re not Med, you’ll never understand the Mediterranean. You can spend 31 y in Oxford reading “classics”, all that sh*t, & still understand nothing about the Mediterranean. Now, if you’re not Med, the closest you’ll ever get is via squid ink & Moustaki. Salve.
