Author: Juliana Lightle

Italy-Sorrento

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

It takes approximately four hours to travel by road from Rome to Sorrento.  To get in and out of Sorrento, the highway goes through three tunnels, one of which is more than three miles long.  Like all cities along this area of coastline, Sorrento is a city where many of the buildings hang off the edge of cliffs above the water.

IMG_4109

This part of the primary street off the main square is full of shops and pedestrian only.  Christmas decorations were already being installed.  From the time we arrived until we left, the giant metal tree in the middle of the main square went from just metal to covered with greenery to the installation of lights.

IMG_4110

A typical side street off the main street seen in the first photo.  Sorrento is the perfect place for those who like shopping in all sorts of little shops or enjoy hanging out in restaurants, many of which are open air along the street, sipping cappuccino.

IMG_4113

From the main street, we walked out to a cliff park overlooking the sea.

IMG_4114

This photo, taken from the same spot as the previous photo, shows Mt. Vesuvius in the distance.  Cities below the mountain include Naples and Pompeii.  Several thousand people also live on the slopes of Vesuvius.

IMG_4115

Again taken from the same spot, looking in the opposite direction, this photo shows the steepness of the cliffs around Sorrento. Houses, vineyards, businesses, olive and lemon groves hang off the edges.  The volcanic soil here is very rich and conducive to intense, successful farming. This is lemon country where limoncello is very popular.

IMG_4112

A few feet from the overlook, we visited a very old church courtyard.  Very old is relative everywhere in Italy.  New can be several hundreds of years old.  I kept thinking about the US and question whether anything we have built now or even at the beginning of the country will last as long as much of what I saw in Italy.

Italy–Rome

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Where have I been?  Italy, on a trip planned for months, a trip with friends and family centered around a group of women writers with The Story Circle Network, a group focused on women telling their stories.  Yes, we had classes and wrote every day.  When we were not writing, we discovered a little part of Italy.  The first half day we strolled through ancient Rome, starting with the Coliseum.

IMG_4086

To the left of the Coliseum stands this arch–see a bit of the Coliseum on the right side of this photo.

IMG_4087

The Coliseum is so large that it is impossible to take of photo of all of it at once.  We were there on a holiday.  There was a long line of people waiting to get inside.  We did not go inside.

IMG_4088

IMG_4083

The arch in the first photo seen from the side.

IMG_4089

On the other side of the Coliseum facing down a wide pedestrian only boulevard.  Many of the following photos were taken along this boulevard.  The trees in these photos are umbrella pines.  They are everywhere in Rome and other parts of Italy south of Rome.

IMG_4092

IMG_4116

My daughter and grandson strolling along with friends in the background.

IMG_4094

One of the things I found most enjoyable strolling along were the street musicians:  One played classical guitar music, farther down the boulevard another was playing popular music while another man danced to it. I wanted to stop and dance along but everyone was walking fast away from me.  Getting lost in Rome did not seem to be a great idea.

IMG_4095

While sauntering along, I turned around and took a photo of the Coliseum in the distance.

IMG_4096

In one short walk in Rome, I saw so many things from thousands of years of history, it was hard to fathom.

IMG_4098

Away from the boulevard and walking toward Trevi Fountain, we saw this memorial.  It was a rainy, stormy day.  I kept thinking it is going to rain but it didn’t. In many places, the ancient, the not so ancient, and the new could all be seen in one place.

IMG_4100

And, of course, one of the most famous places in Rome.  We found a little restaurant near here.  I had my first Italian cappuccino and a delectable desert which I tried to find everywhere else we went but did not. It was in a little cup, 2/3 was a creamy bottom, 1/3 was berries on top.

 

IMG_4103

Walking along another route.  I seem to have a little problem taking photos, walking, and keeping my fingers away from the iPAD mini frame while taking some of these photos.  So much seen in a mere half day in Rome.  Shortly after lunch, visiting the Trivi Fountain, and passing by the above monument, we headed on the four hour road trip to Sorrento.

I could not resist taking a video of the lush emerald Italian countryside south of Rome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We The Corporations

/ Juliana Lightle / 4 Comments

IMG_3487This is for those who are mystified, upset, angry, or whatever else about Citizens United.  Without doubt I learned more from this book by Adam Winkler than I have learned from any book in months and some of it shocked me. It is this month’s assignment if one is a member of the PBS/New York Times online book club.

The first English settlement, Jamestown, was a corporation.  The people who first lived there were all employees of that corporation and could not own anything  themselves.  Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded as a corporation as were several other colonies and Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale.  In the first business related case before the Supreme Court in 1809, Bank of the United States vs. Derveaux, the bank won.  It was the first Supreme Court case which dealt with the constitutional rights of corporations.  With occasional exceptions, since that first case, the Supreme Court has generally sided with businesses.

Corporate and business donations to presidential campaigns began over a hundred years ago with the election cycle of McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan. Marcus Alonzo Hanna realized just how much money could matter and transformed the campaign process.  He created the first national advertising campaign.  This new strategy required money, lots more than the traditional campaigning methods.  Where did he acquire this money?  Corporations.  He coined the phrase, “There are two things important in politics.  The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

In a case in 1916, Dodge Brothers vs. Ford Motor Company, Ford lost because of his testimony when he said he had the right to make business decisions in the interests of the general public even if stockholders had to sacrifice.  The Michigan Supreme Court ruled against him, stating that they could not commit to the concept that “a general purpose and plan to benefit mankind at the expense of stockholders” is acceptable.

Although there have been periods of time when the Supreme Court of the US has been prone to limit the rights of corporations, they have been brief in comparison to periods where corporate rights were increased by Supreme Court decisions. The extension of corporate rights to free speech began long ago in Britain.  However, in the US, the Fourteenth Amendment was used in the case of Grosjean vs. American Press Company to guarantee free speech rights to corporations. This case decades ago is, along with many other cases, a precursor to Citizens United.

If you want to understand how corporations have increasingly attained rights, I highly recommend this book.  It will give you new insights into where we are now and how we got to this point regarding the rights of corporations in the United States.

Teacher Tales

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Sometimes a teacher’s work seems to never end and, honestly, it keeps me from posting here as often as I might like.  At the same time, it provides me with endless joy and entertainment.  The last couple of days brought lots of laughter.

I teach 8th – junior English and Spanish 1 and 2.  This past Friday, Spanish 1 class became the site for lots of laughter.  We were practicing translating sentences from English to Spanish.  To date they have learned to say what they like, sentences about the weather, write about time, and to use the two “to be” verbs used in Spanish among other things.  Somehow in the process of describing a person using a variety of adjectives they have been taught, one of the students blurted out, ” I think old people are ugly.” I said, “So you think I am ugly?”  This caused a minor uproar with laughter and indignation.  In an attempt to make the situation better, he continued, “No, I mean people over 60.”  I repeated, “So you think I am ugly?”  By this time everyone was laughing, including me, protesting his attitude.  He started to try to wriggle out of that one when I pointed out that it might be better if he kept quiet.  He started to say something about wrinkles but that got shut down by the other students.

Just before all this,  his younger brother came into the classroom.  He is the student who wrote a page-long poem about my hair last year.  He said to his brother, “What is wrong with you?  She is beautiful.”  Then walked out of the room.

E6A29E6C-D58A-44CE-89FA-3B69CC78F2AF

By this time everyone was laughing and talking except the student who made the original remark about old people and a few were shouting at him about his awful attitude.  By the way, in case you do not know, the word for ugly in Spanish is feo or  fea, depending on whether you are describing a male or female.

This weekend I read 50 or so book reports.  One of them included this statement in response to the question, “What did you learn from this book?”  “I learned it is sometimes fun to be bad.” The student was referring to the book, “Tom Sawyer.”

I have no clue how to respond to that remark.