Sometimes I wish I’d stayed up in the Apennines where there were no mosquitoes, just giant wasps Ravenna, Italy The sun was setting on the first day of spring and I felt unusually happy as I fed the donkey. Winter, along with the fog and all the rest of it, had gone at last. But then from somewhere near my right ear I heard a small whining sound that for a moment I did not recognize. It was the first mosquito of the year. And I remembered how biblical it all gets round here under the Italian