Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town [Paperback]

Michael Rips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2002

Hailed for its quirkiness and charm, this book tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and baby and discovers a community of eccentrics who make them feel right at home.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

Tinged with the bittersweet, Rips's extraordinary memoir will please Italian and armchair travelers alike. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author

Michael Rips is a fifth-generation Nebraska native. He currently practices criminal litigation in New York City. Pasquale's Nose is his first book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (April 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316748641
• ISBN-13: 978-0316748643
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,008,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank god this is NOT Bella Tuscany!, May 1, 2002

By 

Gary McIntyre (Ottawa, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town (Paperback)

I picked this book up praying that it would not be about the exploits of some annoying North American couple who buy an old, decaying villa, purportedly of historic renown, and then hurriedly write a book to pay for their folly. I didn't want Bella Tuscany, I wanted Ugly Tuscany. Something with an edge, rough. Broken terra cotta. Dusty. Weathered. Parched. Pasquale's Nose is all that and more.

In this case we get Ugly Tuscia, which rests near between Umbria and Tuscany. Michael Rips is not working and on his wife's suggestion they up and leave the United States for the lovely Italian hilltown of Sutria.

He gives us just enough information about himself and why he's in Italy to keep you interested. His wife has coaxed him to go the Etruscan village of Sutria so that she can paint. They have brought their infant daughter with them.

If you've been to any tiny little hill in the Tuscan area then this book will fill on the pieces you may have wanted to remember when you returned home but forgot.

Rips recounts some of the history the town, which is wry and funny like most things in Italy. The local characters that he describes throughout the book are what I remember vividly-coarse, refined, and yet slightly tart. You'll find out who Pasquale really is, who the outcasts of the town are, and more dirt than Bella Tuscany was willing to reveal.

Think of this book as `Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' in Italy.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Immense Charm, May 20, 2002

By 

Beth Johnston - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book immensely. Michael Rips moves with his wife and daughter to Sutri, a town in Tuscany close to Rome, and discovers one of the oddest cast of characters imaginable. I suspect that Rips has a penchant for the odd and grotesque; still, I don't think he was inventing the aristocrat with a cat's paw for a hand, the old men with fond memories of POW camps in America, the restauranteur who refuses to serve dessert, or any of the other strange figures who populate this memoir of life in an Italian town. ...[The] book is a deeply welcome change from the ecstatic, sun-soaked memoirs typical of the genre. It also has a much more refined sense of history and sociology; Rips makes valient efforts to understand the unconventional mentality of the inhabitants of Sutri, all of whom attribute their marked clannishness to an Etruscan heritage (incorrectly, as it turns out.) This book was at once more realistic, and more fantastic than the average travelogue, almost like a fairy tale in the whimsicality of the stories it spun. My only quibble with the book is that Rips, a first-time author, didn't tell us enough about himself or what he was doing in Italy for me to really care about him or his family. The book has no sense of narrative; it's more a collection of sketches of his neighbors. I actually didn't realize Rips was an attorney until I read about it on Amazon; he portrays himself as a good-for-nothing layabout with no skills. A more honest account of himself, his family, and what they were doing in Sutri would have helped me better situate myself while reading this utterly engaging travel memoir. Still, this is one of the best examples of the genre I've read in a long time.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good to the last drop of espresso ..., December 13, 2002

By 

tom - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town (Paperback)

As one of the many who has fallen in lust with Italy over a too-short visit, I found this a fun read.

The author displays a whacked-out sense of humor as he deconstructs the citizenry of a small town (large village?) north of Rome. There seems to be an unusually large number of eccentrics inside those ancient walls, and one more - in the person of Rips - just adds to the brew. He seems out of his element in the beginning, but eventually you start to think he's landed exactly where he belongs, in a sort of beign asylum where the inmates are the admissions committee.

The dry commentary reminded me of the great Ludwig Bemelmens, one of the 20th century's premier travel essayists, though sadly largely forgotten today. Maybe you've read D.H.Lawrence's accounts of travel in Italia - infuse an offbeat sense of humor and a semi-fictional tone and you'll come away with a copy of Pasquale's Nose. If you don't get to go to Italy yourself this year - or, better yet, if you do - this may be the perfect vacation read.