174 L’Osservatore Romano: The official daily newspaper of the Vatican.
175 Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook: The Junior Woodchucks is a scout organization in the fictional town of Duckburg, the setting for the Donald Duck comic-book and cartoon stories. Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie are all Junior Woodchucks, and Scrooge Mc-Duck provides the financial support for the organization. The Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook is the all-important manual that tells them how to proceed in certain difficult situations, such as pulling people out of quicksand, crossing a river full of crocodiles, or using pepper to make dragons sneeze. Only Junior Woodchucks are allowed to use the Guidebook, though an exception is made for Scrooge.
178 a kind of autostrada: The autostrada (like the German autobahn and the French autoroute) is a high-speed superhighway.
178 ninety miles an hour: The Berlusconi government indeed raised the maximum speed on the autostrada to 150 km/hr, roughly 90
mph.
181 Smoking makes you die of cancer: Cigarette packs in Europe have much more dire warnings than their counterparts in the United States, perhaps because Europeans still smoke more than Americans.
186 cavatuna [ . . . ] caponata: Cavatuna are a kind of handmade pasta crushed with a fork or one’s thumb against a grater, so they remain scored on the outside. The crushing makes them concave or hollow on one side, hence the name ( cavato means “hollow” or “carved out”). Caponata is a kind of ratatouille of eggplant, tomato, green pepper, garlic, onion, celery, black olives, vinegar, olive oil, and anchovies. It is sometimes served as a side dish, sometimes as a main course, and here serves as the base for coniglio all’agrodolce.
205 giuggiulena: Sicilian for sesame.
205 Trapanese pesto: Pesto alla trapanese, like its cousin, pesto alla genovese, is a sauce for pasta with ground or finely chopped basil as its foundation. The Trapanese version (from the Sicilian city of Trapani), however, uses finely chopped and toasted blanched almonds instead of pine nuts, as well as several finely chopped, uncooked tomatoes, which are ground into the blend with garlic, olive oil, and black pepper. Finally, after it served on the pasta one adds a sprinkling of toasted bread crumbs in the place of cheese.
231 But I heard, without understanding at first, the sound a phone makes when a receiver on an extension is picked up: In Italy, a phone will give an ever so slight ring when the receiver on an extension is either picked up or hung up.
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli
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