I know a number of women here in Italy who complain they are married to Mammoni - Mama's Boys. Some are foreign, others are Italian. The fact is that they all find themselves having to share their lives with: a man living under his mothers' thumb and a mother-in-law (M-I-L)...

More than half of Italy's bachelors live at home with their moms. With that in mind, a recent poll on Italian TV posed two crucial questions on the 'Mummy's Boys' ('mammoni') phenomenon. The first:

How come Italian youngsters tend to live at home for so long?

According...

Sara lives in Rome and has three boys. She nursed them all for 3-4 years; in other words, until they decided of their own accord that they no longer needed the comfort of their mother's breast.

Today, they are aged between 15 and 28: They're smart, healthy and --...

I bet you'd already discovered it. Well, I only got there now: using Skype as a babysitter. Or rather, using the grandparents - who live outside of Italy - as babysitters via Skype video.

At the end of our ritual Sunday chat - in which our daughter recounts her adventures...

The Daddy Dearest I wrote about in one of my May posts has created his own blog about being a 'Mammo' (Mr. Mom) in Italy. It's a tough battle he's waging in 21st Century Italy to be the kind of father he wants to be.

Here's an excerpt from...

The other day, I bumped into a colleague pushing her 18 month old through the streets of Rome in a cherry-red stroller. The dark scowl on the little boy's face clashed with the brightness of his cross-country four-wheeler. The exasperation on her face was unmistakeable.

She's been...

"Hey, can you fly with those bat ears?"..."Your ears are so huge, you could tattoo them and pass for a giant moth..." "Hi, Dumbo."

To avoid the heartache that comes with so-called 'jug ears', three year old Vivi's parents want her to undergo otoplasty. Not right away, of course. But...

"The mosquitoes are mording my bumsie!"..."Does the cactus punge?"..."Come to the kitchina please now, Daddy!"; "I want some malacqua".

Around the age of two, our daughter started amusing us with a variety of linguistic amalgamations -- 'mordere' is Italian for bite and 'bumsie' is Trinidadian for bottom; 'pungere' means to...

I've decided fathers fall into two categories here in Italy: Caretaker Daddies (CTD) and Caregiver Daddies (CGD).

CTDs think their role is fundamentally a financial one: being a daddy means going to the office and bringing home the bacon. They seem to forget that children need a...

Dr. Fabiola is an eye surgeon living in London . She entered medical school in Brazil at the age of 17 and at 27 she was performing cataract and retinal surgery as well as laser treatments. Her career was as successful as she could have dreamed.

Then, she and her...

"Well done, you're still breastfeeding!" some moms occasionally tell me here in Rome. "Are you kidding?" I answer. "Don't praise me, I do it because it's convenient."

Kiersten, who just opened a shop for nursing moms in the Italian capital calls it "Lazy Parenting." And she's not far off.

I...

As my daughter chased a rubber ball with a two-year-old boy we often see at the park, I got talking to his father. A news photographer, he told me he looks after his son every morning until midday and works the afternoon shift.

"Lucky kid," I exclaimed, "Not many get...

Not too long ago, at a dinner party, someone asked us point-blank: has your life changed since your baby was born? He was a highly-educated, highly-successful 40-something Roman.

His next line was: "You see my wife and I would like a child, but we don't want to have to change...

You spend a lot of time apologizing to cab drivers when you have a small child: "Sorry about the screaming," "Sorry about the cracker crumbs," "Sorry about the flying rattle," "Sorry about the..."

"Cacchetta?" this one asked cheerily soon after I had bundled my child and her scooter out of...

There's an amazing amount of literature on the pros and cons of sleeping with your child...but in Italy, there's very limited talk on what's really happening in mom and dad's bedroom.

In fact, I discovered from a Sicilian mother, whom I admire immensely, that parents are not always truthful when...

"My husband is convinced our son will be gay," Gisella admitted a little bashfully one day. When asked why, she said: "I'm still nursing him; he's 18 months old." Now she didn't say 18 years old. But to her Roman husband, it was tantamount to keeping her adolescent son in...

"Of course I'm nursing my baby, I'm a mammal," became the standard reply of Carrie, a Rome-based American mother, to the umpteenth local who marvelled that she was nursing her 4-month old.

Ah, breastfeeding. By no means a red-hot conversation topic in Roman circles, it appears to be snubbed by...