Friday Morning: Fall has arrived in this part of Tuscany, but the whole week has been pleasantly warm (65-72 degrees F). Yesterday we drove a friend to the Pisa airport and ended up walking through the downtown area for a couple of hours because we were too early. Drank a Becks beer for the first time in a decade.

Sadly Italians dress like Americans now, which means that most of them dress as badly as I do. I saw lots of boots or sneakers, jeans or sweatpants, T-shirts with Nike or Adidas logos or slogans like Just Kill Me or Will work for Beer. Of course tourists now blend in perfectly except Germans, who with their bright and square glasses are easily distinguishable. A friend asked me whether ALL Germans wear bright glasses. I told her that a law in Germany states that everyone has to wear them and that they were all Government-issued… (not true of course)

More change has happened in Italy during the last couple of years than I saw in the seven or eight years before that. Italians are eating processed food – Risotto in a jar, pasta in a can, even Kraft’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese – and are becoming larger.

Will really good pizza become a rarity, only to be found in little towns in the south? Already many bars offer food that they simply re-heat like TV-dinners. Processed foods, MTV-style, a large influx of immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe – I believe we will see a lot of change in Italy over the next decade.