I live and work in Florence, Italy. My international spirit travels with an American passport but I’ve long since lost count of all the relevant metrics. I am very much at home in Europe. Italy as been my cultural north star since 2004. I moonlight as a legal researcher for a local law firm. My off-hours are filled with parenting, managing various people and projects, and literature. I have worked professionally in higher education, international education, software development, fine art, and writing and publishing.
I freelance online content for a variety of entities. I’ve got novels in draft (see: Publications link). I love to read (see below). I’m an incurable shutterbug (see: Blog link). Follow me on Instagram as @occhiatafiorentina.
Favorite authors and poets: Short list. FSF, Hemingway, Austen, Annie Proulx, Louise Erdrich, Lydia Davis, Chang-Rae Lee.
Latinx and italiani: Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Elena Poniatowska, Cervantes, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Luisa Valenzuela, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar. Elena Ferrante, Claudio Magri.
Canadians, Brits, and poets: Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Strand, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin.
Americans, Irish, and dissidents: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Edna O’Brien. Sally Rooney. James Joyce. George Orwell. DH Lawrence. Milan Kundera.
Warrior women: Isak Dinesen. Beryl Markham. Katherine Mansfield, and Katherine Anne Porter. Sylvia Plath. Gertrude Stein.
French: Marguerite Duras. Simone de Beauvoir. Marguerite Yourcenar. André Gide. Flaubert. Baudelaire. Villon.
Russian classics! I cannot get enough: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Chekhov.
Nonfiction faves: Anthony Lane and Judith Thurman, both often found in The New Yorker, and Thurman’s biographies, which are to die for if you like to get buried in a book like me. John McPhee. Isak Dinesen. And, of course, Orwell, again. Joan Didion.
Feature photo: Museo Primo Conti in Fiesole. Selfie: my workdesk.
Sharp Monica 