Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town

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In this lively book, an American expatriate tries to make a new home in a small Italian city famous for its clannish ways. He succeeds in many ways, but not without plenty of gaffes and cultural misinterpretations--all of which make Michael Rips's memoir that much funnier.

"If you live in Sutri for a hundred years, you won't have a friend; if you live in Sutri for five hundred years, you'll have a friend, but you'll regret it." So runs a proverb from the Tuscan city in which Rips, a sometime attorney and full-time student of the good life, sets his narrative, a place that defies guidebook description and most of the rules of logic. There, a first-class idler in a town where no one is in much of a hurry, he encounters such figures as a diviner who heals sick tractors by touch; a Calabrian outsider who gauges people by the smell of their feet; a chef whose favorite dish is porcupine; and an illiterate postman, plus a bewildering array of secrets and strange encounters that test the innocence of our innocent abroad.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The author is every bit as eccentric as the villages he describes in Pasquale's Nose, a quirky addition to the growing ranks of travelogues about Italy. The author, who has an obsession with living in hotels, moved to the tiny Italian town of Sutri with his wife and daughter -- and promptly took a room in a local hotel. Rips is far from the adventurous travel writer -- whenever his wife's career as an artist takes them to far-flung locations, she must book him a hotel room and arrange it to match his hotel room back home -- but that only adds to the flavor of this offbeat book and seems to make the author the perfect observer of Sutri's own unconventional inhabitants. Chronicling the unusual characters Rips encounters -- from the blind bootmaker to the illiterate postman -- Pasquale's Nose is an entertaining, enjoyable travelogue.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Beloved of readers and critics everywhere for its quirkiness, its hilarity, its charm, Pasquale's Nose tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and new baby, and discovers a community of true eccentrics -- warring bean growers, vanishing philosophers, a blind boot maker, a porcupine hunter -- among whom he feels unexpectedly at home.

FROM THE CRITICS

Vogue

...refreshing...it's the spirit of the great fabulist Italo Calvino that one feels hovering over Pasquale's Nose.

Insight

...beguiling stories...

Boston Phoenix

...[Rips] lovingly details his adventures in this remarkable village...

Washington Post Book World

...entertaining...Rips is a remarkably self-effacing memoirist...

Atlanta Journal Constitution

...an entertaining story...Read all 10 "From The Critics" >

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