"It seems the only planning stipulation was that the streets be wide enough to accommodate a pregnant cow."
The ability to tell stories is the primary requirement to work in Boston's tourism industry — that line above is about the city's Italian quarter on the North End (which is not the picture above it), writes Brian Byrne. And it seems to me that there must be a training school which teaches them the stories, because you keep hearing similar ones from different guides, trolley drivers and cruise couriers.
Which is fair enough, I guess. It's a compact city, with a compact history both in its depth of years and its geographical area. And things happened fast — the gaining of independence from the British Crown took only eight years from the time the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed from the balcony of what is now known as the Old State House in 1776.
