John Capista | The Smart Set

Don’t Sing, Scarf, or Spit

John Capista — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:28:17 +0000

Culture, if we can still call it that, has taken a definite downward turn in the last couple of decades. Tee shirts with I HATE YOUR F—ING MASK (the F word spelled out) printed in large letters on the front. Texting at the dinner table. Parents using profanity to children. Being honked and tailgated while […]

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The Allure of Medievalism

John Capista — Mon, 08 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

On a recent three-week vacation to Italy where my wife Maria and I go each year to celebrate our Italian heritage, we spent our first week in Siena. Our only previous visit there had been three years earlier on a one-day tour to several Tuscan hill towns with a hired driver. The schedule called for […]

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The Inner Voice of Books

John Capista — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 17:41:00 +0000

In the tangled web of my teenage years, farther back than I care to admit, I had the uncanny ability of always knowing what was best for me. Or so I thought. When my parents told me it wasn’t unreasonable for them to expect me home by midnight after a night out with friends, I […]

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Of Time and the City

John Capista — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 12:30:00 +0000

History begins at ground level, with footsteps. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life It was midday, lunchtime. I was working near Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. Every so often the explorer in me asserts itself and I have to set out for parts unknown. This particular day, it was going to be […]

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Time (out) in Tuscany

John Capista — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 11:30:00 +0000

As we gradually and, in some cases, fitfully emerge from under the shadow of the pandemic, the ordinary pleasures of the B.C. (Before Covid) era beckon with renewed allure: a grandchild’s hug, a restaurant meal, a day at the ballpark, and that abandoned vacation that now seems even sweeter than it did when first planned. In our case, my wife and I have been spending two to three weeks in Italy each year to […]

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Spot Makers

John Capista — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:30:00 +0000

When Marcel Duchamp exhibited his Nude Descending a Staircase at New York’s famous Armory Show in 1913, the New York Times called the painting “an explosion in a shingle factory.” At the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, Harvard professor and literary critic Irving Babbitt described it as a book that could only have been written “in an advanced stage of psychic disintegration.”  When confronted with something new, unusual, or different, critics […]

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In Search of Lost Summers

John Capista — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 12:30:00 +0000

When I was a child, everything moved toward summer. The gradually warming weather of spring promised lazier days. The celery-green of grass hinted of the deeper shades to come. Heavy coats were pushed to the back of the closet to hang there undisturbed for months. The leaden days that had weighed me down all winter long gave way to a pleasant lightness that made each new day […]

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Venice Vantage Points

John Capista — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 15:30:00 +0000

Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to be in Venice. You’ve seen the party-colored palaces that line the Grand Canal. You’ve sat at a table in the Piazza San Marco enjoying an aperitivo at Florians or lunch at Harry’s Bar, thinking this is how Hemingway felt. You’ve run your hand along the smooth sensuous marble interiors of churches and stood in awe before the art on the walls around you. You’ve done your best to […]

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Tivoli’s Poetry

John Capista — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 12:30:18 +0000

For Aristotle, poetry was a “medium of imitation.” For Wordsworth, it was “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Among the thousands of definitions of what is certainly one of the western culture’s oldest art forms, one of my favorites is by the 19th-century Romantic essayist William Hazlitt. In his essay “On Poetry in General,” Hazlitt defined poetry as “the language of the imagination and the passions.” One doesn’t have to be a Romantic to understand […]

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Everything Desirable

John Capista — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 11:30:16 +0000

As the years pass I find myself wondering more and more if what I remember about my childhood are the events themselves or merely a memory of those events. There is a half-awake feel about these memories, a sense of being twice-removed, as if somewhere along the way the direct chain of cause and effect […]

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