Stornaiolo publishes book of memoir, travel tracts

Ugo S. Stornaiolo Silva has published a new book, Wandering Meanderings (Into the Idea of Love): The Libertarian Catholic Essays (2023-2025) (2025) (Amazon).

Polymath Stornaiolo writes on political theory, history, and law, and authors poetry, besides. His poetry is collected in Princely Rhymes (2023) (Amazon). This latest book is deeply personal, intermingling interests with memoir and travel log. Here is the publisher's description.

Wandering Meanderings is a memoir-in-essays by a man between homelands, Catholic by anchor, boundless by culture, who keeps a passport in one pocket and notebook in the other.

From Kraków trams, Viennese Mass, and Westminster corridors to nameless winter streets, these essays track how love, friendship, and meaning are made at human scale: slowly, locally, face to face.

For him, beauty wrestles with the sublime, proximity argues with digital distance, and mentors, muses, and peers form the living triad of a life, as Erasmus and Thomas More hover like friendly ghosts, Lords Acton and Byron quarrel on his shoulders, and Leo Tolstoy and Mark Fisher speak across the dark. Travel becomes a way of thinking, and thinking a way of keeping faith with places and people.

This is a conservative book of affections, a romantic book of cities, and a refusal of modern affectations. Attention is not love, algorithms aren’t providence, and abundance without presence is a desert. The remedy is old and demanding: fidelity to the near until meaning appears.

Part travel log, part philosophical meditation and part confession, Wandering Meanderings invites anyone who has felt out of place yet alive to truth, beauty, and goodness to step back onto the pilgrim’s road into the idea of love itself.

Stornaiolo works as a legal researcher for the Centre for Law and Religious Freedom at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He serves as an associate editor for The Miskatonian and writes as well for The Libertarian Catholic and for the Mises Institute.

I have featured Stornaiolo's work here on The Savory Tort before, including two books that preceded Princely Rhymes: Jueces Como Soberanos: Una Exploración Jurídico-Política del Poder Supremo de la Corte Constitucional Ecuatoriana (2022) (Amazon), and Achaean Disputes: Eight Centuries of Succession Conflicts for the Title of Prince of Achaea (2024) (Amazon).

Stornaiolo is an Ecuadorean and European attorney, now living in Kraków, and a friend, colleague, and former LL.M. student of mine. He kindly has visited my U.S. classes via Zoom to speak on topics such as comparative constitutional law and the Ecuadorean case law on the rights of nature.

Demonstrators in Poland support Ukrainian POWs

The war in Ukraine drags on, but central European resolve against Putin remains firm.

Last week in Kraków, Poland, the main square, Rynek Główny, was packed with Poles and foreign tourists in the days before the Christmas Market's weekend opening. Even amid the festive atmosphere, a small group of demonstrators held flags and spoke through amplifiers about the war in Ukraine and demanded the release of prisoners of war. Passersby were supportive, and some paused to listen (though the speaker spoke Ukrainian rather than Polish when I went by) and to look at the faces of POWs and MIA.

Poles have been unwavering in support of Ukraine. Polish history engenders empathy with victims of Russian oppression. And there's the simple benefit of having at least one friendly neighbor to the east. Poland's Baltic Sea border abuts Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, and Poland has been besieged by passive-aggressive threats on its eastern border with Belarus.

Unfortunately for Krakovians, especially university students such as mine last week, the influx of Ukrainian refugees drove up the price of housing. Refugee populations have evened out, but, as these things go, housing prices have remained high. That's been a drag on university enrollment: just one more small way that the war burdens the region.

Image by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

'American Dream' is still achievable in hot-dog form

My Thanksgiving featured craft beer with some ace Polish law students.

Last week I had the privilege to teach American tort law to a class of Polish law students at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, for the American Law Program of the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America, as I have for many years. Catholic and JU have a summer program in Poland for American law students, too. 

Thursday night I took the students to my favorite craft beer pub in Kraków, Multi Qlti Tap Bar. The beers always are top notch. I had a fruited gose, as well as a hazy IPA called "tank killer," or something like that that seemed appropriate to the times in central Europe.

Multi Qlti has good food, too, hot dogs and fries, with different preparations named after different places. For this Thanksgiving, I thought I'd share the description of the Massachusetts dog, subtitled "American Dream": "Cheese & Bacon Burger in the form of a dog? This is how we broaden our horizons: smoked frankfurter from the grill, crispy bacon, cheddar, honey, cucumber, lettuce, red onion, and BBQ and hamburger sauce."😋

Now that's a positive American food influence. Walking in Kraków, I saw the dark side of American food influence, too. A place called "Mr. Pancake" advertised the "American Pie-Cake." 🤢

Don't worry Poland; I'm sure appetite-suppressing injections are on their way next.

Images: "Massachusetts" from Restaurant Guru, translation by Google; "American Pie-Cake" by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, no claim to underlying works.