My Florence Apartment, Film Noir Style!

Come take a tour of my Florence walk-up apartment and see where the magic happens!

Get a tour of my Italy apartment...

...where the magic happens.
Or hell, I don't know if it's magic, but I do recall an interview with Tom Petty before the good Lord pulled the guitar plug: "I think I'm just a conduit."

That's the way I feel sometimes. Because God knows, the way I was raised, it wasn't to be a writer, that's for sure. But that's my life. Anyway, I spend a good portion of it here in Italy, and this is a video of my apartment where I write and contemplate the life, the losses the gains, the loves the, the not to be loves.

I hope it inspires you to do the same.

One quick correction when I say "I stay here anywhere from 6 to 2 months." Huh? That's supposed to be six weeks to two months. Must be the Chianti with lunch....

Write and write with passion. And do it from anywhere in the world. You not only live once. Your life is super short. Don't blow it in the suburbs in a most unhappy way.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

Sucker Punched in Paradise

The other night...I think it was Monday...I stopped in at one of my local Florence pubs that's no different from the local I head out to most nights back in New York after work. Since I've been frequenting the place for over ten years consistently, lots of people know me there and it's a nice atmosphere. Anyway, after speaking to a few folks whom I haven't seen in some months, I turned to reading the new texts on my phone when I feel a locomotive slam into the side of my head.

Next thing I know, I'm on the floor on my back, and I'm watching this dude stomp out of the bar. Stomp is literal since he stomped on my eyeglasses just to add insult to injury. I wish I could say I did the heroic thing and bounded right back up and went after his cowardly ass, but things being the way they were, I could hardly see straight I was so stunned (also, my head hit the back of a solid wood bench on the way down). My guess is I passed out for a second or two.

CCTV vid shows proof positive that the psycho dude who did this was waiting for me. What beef he had with me is anyone's guess since I'd never met him before, although I believe I might have seen him a few days before and even briefly exchanged some small talk while I ordered a drink and then proceeded to speak with some friends. Word about this man surfaced later, and apparently he's been drifting through Europe, bragging about getting into fights. If that's the way he fights--sneaking up on people while they are reading their texts--I imagine he wins a bunch of them.

I did the right thing and reported the incident to the police who picked him up the next day when he stupidly showed back up at the bar. I'm told there will be a trial at some point. I also shared the CCTV footage with the state department who are monitoring his actions since his face has no doubt been recognized by now along with his ID. I'd show you the footage here now, but I made promises to certain professionals that I would keep it under wraps until the time is right. When the time comes, I'll spring it here. It's creepy.

The point of all this is not to lick my wounds in front of my readers, but to send out a word of caution to all those who, like me, live to travel. Even in a place like Florence, Italy, an artist's paradise, significant dangers exist. You must be vigilant at all times. If I had eyes in the back of my head, I might have seen this creep closing in on me. But I don't and he got the best of me. But it won't happen a second time, believe me. That's why I keep lifting all those heavy weights everyday, day in and day out. It's why I do the cardio. It's why I engage in target practice at the range consistently. 

Traveling at present? Be safe and watch your back...always.

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Jason Michel: Noir Drifter

Jason Michel fits the noir bill to the T.
Gruff and scruffy, his salt and pepper hair is cropped almost to the scalp, which itself shows signs of scarring. The result of a knife fight maybe, or his having been tossed out of a train car during one of his many adventures around the globe.

My kinda dude.

The forty-something noir writer and publisher of the underground but universally hailed Pulp Metal Magazine, originates from Wales, but as far as I can glen, he's never enjoyed the many splendors of a proper home.

He's a drifter.

For certain, I know he lived in Bangkok for a few years, and Paris for a long time, along with other ports of call. He's not a big or imposing guy, but he carries about himself an aura of self assurance that would make a man twice his size think again about engaging in a scrape. It's the eyes, the stare, the roaring silence. He now lives in Florence but as usual it's "Just for a while, I don't know how long..." That is, until he heads somewhere else. The U.S. maybe. Who knows. Such is the code of the noir drifter.  

Jason and the author enjoying a cold beverage at the Goose Bistro in Florence

I'm sure wherever he chooses to live for a while longer, he will still be putting out some of the most poetic noir pieces this side of 1950's Paris. Such as the one you can listen to below which is lifted from his new novel, The Death of Three Colours. And as for the cool background music, its comes from his brother's musical project, Little Deaths. Obviously the noir thing runs in the family. So too do the eyes. Those frightening eyes.

 
 Listen to Jason Michel read HERE

 For more on the music of Little Deaths go to their Facebook page HERE 

 "Jason Michel is an author and The Dictator over at the irreverent PULP METAL MAGAZINE and has his own Neo-Noir podcast - The Black-Hearted Beat"

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Florence Adrift

I've been coming to Florence for a year shy of a decade to write. On more than a few occasions I've recounted how it's been one of my dreams to have the opportunity to write in a place like Florence (or Paris, or Rome, or a Greek Island, for that matter) for an extended period of time while living the Bohemian lifestyle of making art during the day, drinking wine and eating the food in the evenings. I've experienced all that and more. Luck and Providence have shined down upon me, and I'm forever grateful.

You're sensing a big But here, aren't you...

Okay, here it is. Buttttt....this time around I'm sensing something different in the air. Perhaps it has something to do with the political climate...the global political climate shift, the demise of the left and the rise of the populist movements in the US, Britain, and now, yes, Italy (I saw a photo the other day snapped this past April that showed Obama, Cameron, Hollande, Merkel, and Renzi standing on a balcony together, confidant smiles on their faces, all of them having little conception of the fact that they would all be gone, minus one, in just a few months time). Or perhaps it has a lot to do with my present stage of life. I think they call it the 'sandwich generation' when your young adult kids are still unsettled and your parents, or parent in my case, also requires attention. But, and I'm going to be perfectly honest here, the peace I'm normally accustomed to in Tuscany has thus far eluded me.

Illustrations:

--While jogging in the park the other day, teams of police were rounding up African immigrants/refugees, all of whom were resisting, tossing empty beer bottles and angry fists at the cops. It was a frightening scene.

--American college kids walking, or should I say swaying, their way home, a couple of them literally vomiting in the streets.

--The cash register attendant(s) at the local grocery store who is so nasty and so obviously hateful of my Americanism, that the simple banal process of purchasing a few items is a humiliating experience.


I'm not going to belabor the point because there's still so much to love about this place. The food, the drink, the culture, the Noir at the Bar reading I participated in just last week...a terrific success and a blast. But there's something not quite right and it's tough to put my index finger on it. Perhaps it's just me and where I'm at in life. People change and sometimes the cities you live in change along with it, in every bit of that moveable feast sense of the word. Or, maybe, just maybe, you change and the city you've grown to love stays the same. In fact, maybe you're the problem. Maybe it's had enough of you and it's time to move on to a new city in which to write. A new experience. A new inspiration.

Or, perhaps I'm looking at this all wrong. Perhaps I need to shed those things that are getting in the way. Peel away the layers of skin that are bothering me. Freeing myself from the ever increasing weight that makes me feel at times, like I'm drowning in a sea of other people's needs and frustrations. For sure I should be turning off the goddamn internet when I'm working.

You can't be all things for all people, no matter how much you love them. You can only be you. Florence has always allowed me to be me, to write well, and to live well. It still is that place, but like a boat that's become untethered, I feel it drifting away. Think I'll grab the line and pull her back in.

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An Affair in Italy

He's been coming to Italy to work alone for six years now.
The first year he came, he hardly worked at all. He was suffering from the pangs of lost love, and a career on hold, and he barely had enough work to keep him going, much less a novel in the works. He was also broke. He brooded as he walked the cobbled streets of Florence in his black leather coat in the rain, wondering where things in his life had gone wrong.

The next year he was a different man. He'd pulled himself out of his funk, and he reinvented himself once again as a freelance journalist who traveled to places like West Africa and Moscow writing for global news outlets such as RT. He was taking pictures and writing articles and essays as fast as he could while working under deadline. He came to crave the rush of dispatching a story written up on the fourth floor of a Florence guest house to Moscow, and then an hour later seeing it as a top-of-the-hour story in Europe. He was a foreign correspondent and life abroad was thrilling.

The year after that he was still a journalist but now he was back to writing fiction with a vengeance and it was wonderful to come to Florence be alone and walk the streets and think up plots. He had some scratch in the bank now and he could afford a real apartment. He would wonder about people he knew or had known, and women he had loved for a short time or a long time, who were going to make it as characters in his newest novel. People were drama and drama, although painful, was sometimes fun. It was also fun to play God in a place where almost no one knew him.

These days he's no longer unknown, and he's working on at least three books (and novellas) at once for three different publishers, plus a book for his own label. He's still a journalist (he knows this because he just paid his SPJ dues), only the fiction is trying to shove it out the door like the beautiful, young, brunette-haired affair who's angrily had enough of the wife. It's a violent and emotionally heartbreaking conflict. He forces himself between the two beauties wishing absurdly and selfishly that they could somehow get along and coexist peacefully.

"I need you both," he pleads.

But they both stare him down.

"Soon, you must choose between one or the other," says the affair.

But he will never choose. He wants them both. So, he just keeps on working as best he can, no matter what happens in his life, no matter what goes on in the world. The work: She is his most reliable friend, his most trusted lover, his affair, and his wife. She is ageless and her beauty only improves with the years, like ancient green-white marble that glistens and radiates in the Tuscan rain. She might resist him sometimes. She might pretend to be elusive, but in the end, she always sheds her clothing and slips into bed with him.

The work ... He comes to Italy to be with her, alone.

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Where the Home Is

People ask me...and ask me often I might add...if I have a home.

An editor for a magazine I work for referred to me in a nice way as a vagabond, and a fellow author posted in Facebook just the other day , "Does Vince even have a home?" My sig other got a little frustrated with me about month or so ago when she shook her head saying, "I feel like I'm living with a nomad."

I assure you I'm neither a vagabond, nor a nomad, and I do have a home, even if the home I live in is not my own. This goes for both my studio and said sig other's place of residence. I will admit, having been on the road for months and months over the past five years has begun to make me feel like I don't have one place in the world that I can call my own, so much as places I can return to, to sleep, to wash my clothes, and to be cared for by others while I care for them. But always in the back and fore of my mind are thoughts and dreams of where I might escape to next.

Italy has been a great place to escape to. Florence in particular. It's a good place to write and a good place to think. Its cobblestones seem to resonate with the inspiration that so motivated DaVinci, Machiavelli, Dante, and yeah, Zandri. I wrote Blue Moonlight here which takes place in part in Florence. There isn't a time I don't walk past the Duomo in Piazza Dell Duomo and picture Dick Moonlight being chased by two Russian mobsters on top of the dome, a la Alfred Hitchock. For me, this is more than a place for escape, it is romance and intrigue. A place where, in the fall as the rains come and darkness settles in early, men don their leather coats, scarves and black watch caps, while the women put on their black leggings, short wool skirts, and tall black leather boots. 

Other places have been good for escape and writing. Paris is one of them. I even wrote well in Cairo, but always there was this sense that the barrel of an AK was staring me down. There is West Africa, and Moscow, and Athens, and even Lima. I've written in many places, but none of them I refer to as home. I will always consider them escapes regardless of the reason I go there.

In January I will return the US and my day will be the same as it is here in Florence. The only difference will be that at the beginning and end of the working day I won't hear the bells ringing from the Cathedral, nor will I make out the click-clack of the women's high heels pacing past my open French windows, nor will the street lamps shine down on the damp glazed stone in a way you never get sick of looking at. The voices will not speak Italian and the smells of olive oil and garlic cooking will not fill my head and make my mouth water. But when I look up on a clear night and see the same moon that we all see the world over wherever we lay our heads, I will know that I am never far from anywhere I call home.

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Travel Day

In 1937 the young journalist Martha Gellhorn traveled to Spain to to observe the Spanish Civil War and to get a little private face-time with Ernest Hemingway. She carried only a knapsack, a portable typewriter, and fifty dollars in her pocket. I think for Martha, or Marty as Ernest would call her, it wasn't what she brought along on her travels that bore importance, it was more about what she left behind. There's nothing romantic in packing up your entire apartment and dragging it along with you on your travels. Far more romantic to leave it all behind. Everything.

Martha would become a life-long traveler, never staying in one place for very long. She would go on to have homes in Cuba, Mexico, Rome, East Africa, and eventually London. Her homes were always small if not humble and in terms of mod cons, sparsely equipped. Instead the layover-homes contained the essentials for a writer who spent most of her time on the move: books, a typewriter, booze, and an ashtray for her never ending cigarette. Even into her late eighties she was always ready to travel at a moment's notice and often found herself making difficult journeys on her own dime in order to research a new novel she was writing or to find the truth behind an armed conflict or the resulting carnage of that conflict.

She had a son, Sandy (adopted), but she would claim herself to be the worst mother in the world. She had several husbands (including Hemingway), but she would claim to not only be a poor wife, but also very bad in bed. Once, she spent a couple of years playing the house-frau to the then editor and chief of Time Magazine, complete with weekend house parties in the suburbs and she nearly committed suicide from the boredom and despair. I think it safe to say that Martha Gellhorn was not the domestic type.

I've just packed my knapsack. I have considerably more than fifty bucks stuffed in my pocket, but given the more than three quarters of a century that's lapsed in between 1937 and now, I'm not carrying much more than its 2013 equivalent. I'm heading back to Italy for two months and then onto France for the New Years. When I'm gone I will be rewriting two books, MOONLIGHT WEEPS and THE BREAKUP. I'll also be mapping out another new standalone that at present has no title. I'll be taking care of my normal journalistic duties for some magazines I work for (I have a deadline tomorrow which I'll make as a soon as I land in Rome). It will be a busy time that will also include some four-wheeling in the Tuscan Mountains and short trips to other countries. Traveling light without the burden of possessions is important. Traveling without regret is essential.

I'm not sure who pointed out to me that if sharks don't move forward they die. Probably some dude in a bar. But no one wants to be that dead shark laid out on the couch watching the flat screen in his living room whispering shoulda, coulda, woulda. Not me anyway.

Passport...check.
Boarding pass...check.
Wallet and euros...check.
Kindle...check.
Backpack...check.
Laptop...check.

I'm off to the airport.
So long and farewell.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM






     

   

Chianti by Motorbike and a Prayer

Checco and I make it to Chianti in one piece and take in some wine and atmosphere in a typical piazza...

Yesterday I played some hookie from my new book(s) and hopped on the back of a motorcycle for a ride into the Chianti region of Italy. Chianti is about 25 or so kilometers from downtown Florence, and calling it a scenic ride doesn't remotely do it justice, as it is as close to God's country as one can get without dying and taking the high speed express to heaven.

The high speed metaphor is a discriminate since my mode of travel was a motorcycle (they call them motorbikes here which makes them sound cute and fuzzy which they are not). I rode on the back of my friend and all around fixer's bike, Francesco "Checco" Tassi. Checcho loves motorcycles and he owns a bunch of them. He races off road with a core group of like-minded crazies and sometimes will travel across entire countries like Spain on a motorcycle. So when he accelerated our bike upwards of 110 KPH, while I held on with one hand and aimed a video camera in the other, I had to believe that he knew exactly what he was doing and that if we crashed I would die as quickly as an insect goes splat against a speeding windshield.

At one point, a two-point buck jumped out in front of us and for a split second, the old life (or middle aged lives in both our cases), flashed through our brains. Instead of spilling the bike, Checco calmly decelerated and tried to ease us past the frightened deer who suddenly about-faced and made the mad dash back across the street in the direction from which he originally crossed. It was all quite the adventure, and dressed in vintage leather coat, scarf, and engineers boots, I felt like I was caught up in some 1950's adventure movie. Secret of Incas, China, or maybe The Naked Jungle. Of course a Fellini flick would have been more apropos.

One thing is for sure, when you find yourself riding on the back of a motorcycle in the middle of the most beautiful, vine and tree-covered hills imaginable, cruising a gravel-covered road with a slight rain spattering against the translucent helmet visor and dripping down your lips, you come to realize in every bit of that "Eat, Pray, Love" sort of way, that life does indeed not suck. Life is what you make of it. No one is going to make it for you. So if you're reading this on your couch today in your living room, and you want to escape so badly you think you're going to lose your mind, promise me something. Promise me you'll click off this blog and click onto the Expedia travel site (or whichever site you prefer) and book a ticket to some distant land. Doesn't matter where too or for how long, so long as it's far away, and will take some difficulty getting there. I guarantee it will change your life.

Until next time...

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 THE INNOCENT, the No. 1 Bestselling, Amazon Kindle is FREE all day, Sunday, 25 March, 2012...Nab it for your travels!!  

Walk With a Writer Over the Ponte Vechhio

My Virgin Video Blog in the home of the Renaissance, Warts and all ... Appropriate I think...


So my friend, publicist, and author, Bri Clark, has been encouraging me to make a shift from only written blogs to perhaps a video blog or two. After all, as I say in this, my first video blog, "this is the 23rd century." Or something like that.

This is sort of a writer-meets-travel-meets-I'm-not-really-fucking-sure video essentially, about something not all that unique, but still romantic and wonderful: The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. My adopted home away from home. Some of you might think me a tool for saying so, but I spend a lot of time here so I think I have earned the right to call it that. And considering I've written some books here and many parts of books, including The Remains, Moonlight Rises and the forthcoming Blue Moonlight, I believe I will keep coming here for as long as the Italian government allows. That said, I will try and be a good boy and not try and create an international scandal by charming the mayor's wife.

So without further BS from my side of of the Atlantic, here is my first video blog, from the land where Dante not only created the first modern novel, he created the modern Italian language.

Ciao Ciao

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C.R. Lloyd, Author of "The Second Shot"

I love being an instigator.
Case and point: Last November during a very rainy month-long writing retreat in Florence, Italy (I'm writing this from the same apartment), I found myself spending as much time in a local pub as I did behind my desk. Anyone who knows me well enough won't see anything strange in that. Just ask my ex-wives. But I ended up chatting it up with some very cool ex-pats who work the place and one in particular from London who eventually got around to asking me about acquiring an agent. A couple of beers already swimming in my brain, my reaction was thus: If I had to do it all over again, I'd self-pub on Amazon. Forget the agent and forget about wasting time. Go for it now! Or something like that. Now mind you, I'd never self-pub'd a thing in my life and still haven't. It was the old hubris talking I guess. Or beer muscles. But I was speaking the truth. Kindle Direct Publishing is precisely the route I would take if, like London's newest best-seller to be, C.R. (Rebecca) Lloyd, I was young, super-talented, charming, attractive, and just plain fun to be around. Methinks my meeting with C.R. that rain-soaked November will turn out to be not only serendipitous, but also fortuitous. Indeed and jolly good show!

Rebecca, please take it away:

How to court a writer – in the ‘God people must ask you this all the time but please help me with my writing’ kind of way

I met Vincent Zandri at the pub where I worked. An Irish pub in the centre of Florence. I was working in the pub so that I would have the time to write, but so far I had had no luck getting a literary agent for my book.

My colleague Steve told me about Vincent. ‘Hey, there’s this American dude. He writes thrillers. I googled him. I think he’s pretty successful. He’s in town for the rest of the month. You should so speak to him.’ I met Vince a few days later. But I didn’t tell him I was a writer. I was embarrassed. And when he told me that every time he met someone in Florence they turned out to be an aspiring writer needing help, I knew I couldn’t say anything.

But then I bumped into him at the pub after I’d worked the day shift. I’d had a few drinks already and with my shame levels lowered by the beer I brought it up in conversation. Well we talked about everything that night from our relationships with our parents to our love lives to our favourite books. He came into the pub one more time before heading back to the States and gave me his email address and offered to read some of my stuff when it was ready. I blushed to my toes, feeling as though I had manoeuvred him into offering to help but I was very pleased. You need all the help you can get when you are starting out.

So the following March I emailed him the first three chapters of my book – a political thriller set in Italy. He paid me some great compliments, but even more importantly he advised me to publish it myself on Amazon for Kindle. Kindle devices had been on sale in the UK for less than a year and I still saw self publishing as vanity publishing. And Amazon had only just reached Italy at that point – Kindle was unknown – I hadn’t realised that ebooks were becoming such a big thing. But Vince’s books were selling strongly in their electronic formats and he felt that there were real possibilities out there for new writers to get read and noticed. He told me to get myself an editor, a cover and go for it. I did. And my book, The Second Shot, is now available on Amazon. And if you’re interested here’s what it’s about…

Pietro is a typical Italian: angry, disappointed, resigned to the state of things. But one drunken night he gets an idea: why have one man kill the president when you can get half the country to do it? And his idea becomes a plan, a plan to assassinate the president, using donations from Italians who feel the same as him.

The next six months of his life are a battle to put his plan into actionhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif and avoid arrest. His plan will force him to go into hiding, will put his friends and family in danger, and will bring him into contact with the criminal underbelly of Russia, France and Italy.

And after it’s done? Well if half the country are involved in killing the president, it means they have to be involved in what happens next...

The Second Shot by CR Lloyd is available on Amazon for Kindle priced $3.50