When my parents were first married, they lived in Florence and ever after talked about going back there with my brother and me. In 1966, when I was ten, my father at last took a sabbatical from Queens College in New York, and the four of us left our three-bedroom house on the corner of a tree-lined street in Queens and took up residence in a Tuscan villa. From the red stucco porch, we could see the Arno and all of Florence. The air, thick with wild broom and fennel, smelled like hay and licorice.
