I first came to know Effie Ruskin some decades before the play brought her to public attention and made her a heroine of sorts. In the mid-1960’s my husband and I, and our children, spent the summer at Venice’s Lido, the locale of his youth...
Red-faced and sweating in autumn heat, Grandpa and his khaki friend from town unloaded picks and hammers off the truck, and took out a case with dials that seemed a radio or recording machine with spiral cord and microphone and needles.
When he came of age, Thomas Jefferson inherited considerable property from his father in Albemarle County, Virginia, and he chose a site not far from Shadwell, his birthplace, as the seat of his own estate. He called it “Monticello,”...
