Italy is simply an astonishing place, full of food, antiquities, nature, more antiquities...

It is a terrible shame that the country has been blighted for centuries by poor governance, graft and corruption.

We keep thinking of moving there. Italian is a desperately easy language(*), it's cheap, I work remotely, but the kleptocracy and our general lack of interest in being affluent homesteaders in struggling countries where we are essentially aliens makes this a dream that will never achieve reality.

Regarding the pictures attached to this article, they are great, so let me be blunt! (**)

Your original profile picture here on Medium was artistic and a bit mysterious. This new one is a bit serious, but not really and not mysterious. But the pictures in Italy you are grinning like a lunatic: this is good energy, it's eye-catching.

If you wanted to grab people's attention with your thumbnail, I'd use one of these new pix, like the first one, and not the current sorta-serious-not-really profile picture which is... ah... less interesting.

(* - the difficulty of Russian, on the other hand, is the least of the reasons that we aren't going to take up residence in Moscow anytime soon.... :-D )

(** - I am actually smoking a J, not a blunt.)