Last Sunday was a wonderful day with clean blue sky.  A sunny day in winter is rare and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to enjoy the old town and take some pictures.  After almost four years living in this place I’m still impressed, expecially by some of the buildings from the middle age.  This palace, Palazzo Vecchio, was built seven centuries ago.  Can you believe it?

In Ferrara I used to sing in Coro Polifonico “Santo Spirito”, where we performed mostly baroque sacred music. I was very proud of that hobby, that allowed me to sing in prestigious theaters together with famed orchestras and world-class directors. Unfortunately when I moved to Florence I had to give up on this activity and I missed it a lot.   I tried to look for something similar in my new location but couldn’t find anything that matched my time budget and my taste.

For three long years Caterina tried to have me join The Pilgrims, a gospel choir.  I went to see one of their concerts and I liked it but, you know, jumping from Mozart’s Requiem to Happy Days is a big leap and I didn’t feel like I could do it.  Luckily enough, a few months ago Caterina eventually convinced me to give it a try and… it’s great!  I ended up joining their group – so now I am a Pilgrim – and already performed in five concerts!

What makes The Pilgrims great is not the songs we sing, even if there are some really good.  It’s not the musical skills, even if we sing everything by heart and the soloists have amazing voices.  It’s not the red tunic and the choreography we make dancing on the stage.  What makes it great are the choir members.  They are very energetic, friendly, inclusive and I have lots of fun with them!  And when you have fun performing the attendance has fun as well, which by the way is the goal of our performances.

I’m very thankful to Caterina for all the fun and the emotions I got in the concerts and for everything else that will come!  Damn, if only I joined them three years ago…

After an entire life spent with professional laziness and no sport activity whatsoever, a little more than one year ago I began running.  When my friends discovered what happened they were shocked.  It happened while I was in Brazil.  Weather, mood and nature in Rio De Janeiro invite you to open air lifestyle and when you see… you know… people running on the beach all the time you end up wanting to try yourself.

A few months before that trip, my boss and half of the top management – all entering their 40s – had just run the New York Marathon.  I remember I was impressed by how quickly some of them got fit for the challenge and how excited they were after successfully running all of the 42 kilometers.  My boss had told me that running would make your brain produce endorphin and that would make you happy and become addictive, and this of course also factored in.

I would have never expected the running experience to be so easy and satisfactory.  Yes, at the beginning it’s damn tiring: you run just five minutes and your heart feels like it would explode, to say nothing about the pain you feel coming from your ankles, calfs and spleen.  And the next day your legs hurt like they were beaten but you get that feeling that your brain can win against your body, that you can push yourself beyond your physical limits.

If you try and persist you’ll find in a couple weeks it’s going to be much better, to the point it does not hurt anymore.  Your body will quickly adapt: your lungs will extract more oxygen from the same air flow, your heart will pump more blood every single beat and your muscles will be more efficient at burning some chemicals to create motion.

At the end of the day you’re making your body more efficient.  And healthier.  In 18 months I lost more than 15Kg and now I feel much better.  I also suffered high cholesterol and now that’s gone.  Yay!  Nowadays I usually run 35Km every week and I’m trying to run faster.  I have no plan to run a marathon, but then who knows.

Along the way I learnt a few tricks to make my running experience better and I want to share those with you.

• Running in a group can make you perform much better, just because natural competition is a good motivation factor, but this is only true when you are already trained.  If you’re left behind you’d be totally frustrated.  At the beginning be sure to run alone.
• Music helps: you think to something else and ignore the anxiety and self-suggestion that comes when listening to your heavy breathing.  If you think to something else (ideally to nothing) your body will work much better.  Music also helps to set your running rhythm but be careful with songs too fast.
• Running is one of the least expensive sports so don’t try to save money when you buy shoes.  Believe it or not, if you wear the wrong shoe you can hurt yourself and damage your knees.  There’s a good shoe for everybody so ask to a competent clerk and they’ll help you find the one that’s right for you.  After some bad experience with Nike and Reebok I bought two pairs of Mizuno X10 and now I’m very happy about them.
• Run early in the morning if you can, before going to work.  The running experience is going to boost your day and make you more productive.  If you run late at night you’ll find a hard time getting asleep because running makes your body active and is much better than coffee and keeping you awake.  Running in the morning – before breakfast – is also better in case you want to lose weight because your body has no sources of fresh energy to consume and therefore it is forced to burn fat.
• A running watch with hearth rate monitor and speed meter can prove very useful to optimize your run but probably you only need this when you can regularly run a couple hours a week.  I bought a Polar s625x but nowadays Garmin also has good products.
• You can ignore most of the pain signals that your body sends to the brain.  That’s the way your body tells you that you’re going past the limit of what it’s prepared to do, but that’s not necessarily dangerous.  If you ignore the signal, your brain will quickly produce endorphin stopping the pain and that will allow you to push beyond the limits, basically moving those limits to some farther point.  None the less, be careful!

So far the US Dollar has been the undisputed king of the currencies. A $100 bill worked like a passport in many countries of the world and dollars were used as the mandatory currency for international transactions in some markets. At the same time, when foreigners had to go the the States they always had to exchange their money because – Canadian and Mexican borders excepted – nobody would accept foreign money in American shops.

By the way, every time I’ve been to New York I have been disappointed by how few and how crappy ATMs and exchange counters there were between Customs and the Taxi station of Delta’s terminal at JFK. Didn’t they think of the just-landed foreigners having to pay $45+toll cash for a cab to Manhattan?

Anyhow, things are quickly changing now. Dollars fell 15% in the last year compared to the the rest of the world and tourists (Europeans in particular) are visiting the States and shopping like crazy. For this reason more and more shops in Manhattan are displaying “We accept Euro” tags. Stuff there is now so cheap that last time I felt like I had to buy something, because it was a shame to come back home with spare room in my luggage. Eventually, I bought a 250G portable USB hard drive. Friends in Italy also asked me to carry something for them.

Because of their crappy pricing policy (or should I call it a rip-off?) Apple products are even cheaper. Apple apparently doesn’t know how to apply exchange rates. I mean, a Macbook Air is 1799$ in the USA and €1699 ($2497) in Europe. No wonder there are people who fly to the States just to carry back a couple of macs and sell them to friends. Their flight is paid by Apple. It’s called arbitrage.

Americans are now very worried of their money. Friends in New York kept on talking on how lucky I was, how much the dollar was falling, how I should invest my money by buying some real estate in New York because flats in Manhattan are a bargain nowadays and so forth. I was shocked. Euro money is now trendy! Next time I’m going to try to pay drinks in Euros in one of those coll rooftop bars, just to see how they’d take it.

Last night I’ve been to Roberto Benigni’s show in Piazza Santa Croce. In the last few days Benigni has been reading Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, one different chant every night. Foreign people maybe don’t know, but this collection of three books (Hell, Purgatory and Heaven) and one hundred Cantos written in the 14th century is the foundation of italian language as well as a mandatory reading in our secondary school. More or less similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Well, maybe more Since they were forced to read it in their young age, many italians have nightmares when you talk about Dante, but actually everybody agrees is a great masterpiece.

Benigni is a unique actor and he is great at trasmitting pathos, fun, irony, and to explain the true meaning and beauty of this work. He red the 8th Canto, when Dante and Virgilio cross the Stige marsh heading to the gate of Dis. And he took the opportunity to talk about our country, our time, our world, in Dante’s perspective and using paradox and analogies, and all of this is in a wonderful scenery, surrounded by Santa Croce and the giant statue of Dante on the left. At the end of the show everybody felt elevated, in peace with the world. Of course I was in good company and that helped as well

We’ve paid our dues time after time
We’ve done our sentence but committed no crime
And bad mistakes we’ve made a few
We’ve had our share of sand kicked in our face
But we’ve come through

We are the champions my friends
And well keep on fighting till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers cause we are the champions…

of the world.

This song has never been more appropriate. After yesterday’s wonderful match our national soccer team demonstrated that, no matter the corruption scandal, they still are the best. People in Firenze went nuts and kept on partying in the streets until this morning. Thanks guys, you’ve made our day.

Suppose you want to collect taxes from restaurants, both legal and illegal, in a way that’s automatically enforced by customers. What do you do?

Well, you simply create a national lottery, so that for every euro you pay you can receive one euro worth of scratch tickets of the lottery. People will go crazy and require tickets when they pay. In the end restaurants will have no choice but to acquire those tickets from the local taxation authority (and pay them in advance!). Believe it or not, this brilliant trick has been implemented by Chinese government and works like a piece of cake. I think it would be perfect to displace escape in Italy. In the picture you see a 1RMB lottery ticket.