From Loretta:
I’d planned to celebrate the start of spring with a new spring Barbie but on St. Patrick’s Day we got more than a foot of snow, so around here it still looks like winter. But it’s spring. Out for a walk yesterday, I saw a little girl in a driveway. Foot deep snow all around her. She was coatless, bouncing on a pogo stick.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out the seasons in Venice, where my WIP begins. A recent puzzle to solve was when, exactly, people went on summer holiday, known as villeggiatura.
Once again, as was the case with LORD OF SCOUNDRELS, I find myself wishing I spoke fluent Italian.
It reminds me how I’ve always wanted to learn that language. But this seems to be one of those things, like the great books I never got around to reading (last week’s blog) that I’m never going to get around to.
There are too many things I’d like to learn.
Pat recently blogged about learning history from novels.
Well, I like learning history--and art, and music, and language, and, well, lots of things, from writing novels.
Not the political history that schools bore their young victims with--Dates & Wars History, I call it.
The fun history--as many of you commented--is the details of everyday life. What a corset looked like and what it felt like. How the laundry was done in a big English country house. What a bed looked like, how many mattresses, and what they were made of.
So here my new characters are in Venice, and I’m trying to figure out, for instance, where this building is in relation to that one, which means dealing with all those Italian names for walkways and bridges and schools and churches and such. And what would someone say if he trod on someone’s foot? And what are some good expressions of disdain, of anger. Oh, if only I had learned Italian. Sigh. And then I realize there’s a special version of it that’s Venetian, which I ought to know, too.
Italian isn’t the only missing area of knowledge in my world. There’s architecture. What’s a pediment? What’s the difference between a Gothic and a Renaissance building? What’s a lateral window? 
A heraldic cartouche? A mannerist arcade? It would be so much easier to understand the layout of that palazzo if the architectural terms in the books I consult weren’t a foreign language to me.
And speaking of foreign languages, how about music? Somewhere along the line I developed a deep affection for Italian opera. But despite piano lessons, and some self-taught guitar playing, my music knowledge is about zero. I know what I like but don’t know anything much about it.
And what about Greek and Latin? My heroes would have learned it from an early age. That’s mainly what they were taught, all though school, and university. How cool would it be to be able to read those bits of Greek and Latin that Lord Byron and his friends casually drop into their letters and diaries? Alas, the few years of Latin I had early on didn’t take, and all I remember is the first line of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
And what about how to ride a horse? Whenever I need special horse knowledge, I have to consult my friends who know about horses. It would be so great to know about horses.
Well, life is short and you can’t do everything. I’ve written books and I know some stuff that some other people don’t.
But I don’t know a fraction as much as I wish I did.
What about you? Is there one or five or ten things you always wished you’d learned but never got around to?