Once again, I was driving into the hills, this time in a pokey Fiat Panda with Vincent Vichit-Vadakan, a literary agent, as my Italian-speaking companion.
The singer Jerry Vale wrote the foreword to Mr. Grudens's latest book, "The Italian Crooners Bedside Companion" (Celebrity Profiles Publishing, 2005), a 246-page self-published compendium of folksy stories, recipes and photos from the big-band era and the musical worlds of Frank Sinatra, Frankie Laine, Perry Como, Vic Damone and Mr. Bennett.
Modotti became the companion of Italian Stalinist Vittorio Vidali, a suspect in Mella's death.
But although it is full of good music, the Scottish is less powerful than its companion, the Italian (finished 1833).
Mr. Mastrogiacomo was released (in a complicated deal that included the release of five Taliban prisoners and a new road said to have been paid for by the Italian government), but his companion was detained and eventually murdered.
In her masterful Oxford companion to Italian food, Gillian Riley reminds us this habit of collecting wild plants is from the days when the poor, unable to afford a doctor, were cared for by country women, with their collections of medicinal wild plants.
When one of Ernst's driving companions, an Italian policeman, dies, the man's twin brother, also on the trip, takes them to his home to bury the body.
A constant companion in his Italian adventures was... Ravarino... they were often seen together".
And you find Caitlin Thomas's son by her companion Giuseppe Fazio, an Italian actor, in possession of Thomas's wallet.
The sullen Bertram agrees to the match under pressure, but quickly bolts for the Italian front with his constant companion, the obnoxious, vainglorious Parolles (Reg Rogers, recreating his turn as the posturing John Barrymore figure in "The Royal Family," with an added touch of Borat).
