I celebrated my 75th birthday in Bologna.

Here I am signing books at the International Book Fair itself, and on the table in front of me, pink and be-ribboned, is a birthday cake which later we sliced and shared.

Here are a few glimpses of the fair, which give an indication of its flavor but not of the magnitude...it occupies several football-field sized buildings.

And of course there were all the western European countries as well, and Asian, and Scandinavian...  Wonderful to see the global-ness (globality?) of children's books...

I spoke in a  public building which like all buildings in Bologna, was magnificent and seemed more like a cathedral...to a group of maybe 200 or so 12, 13, and 14 years olds. Of course I needed a translator but the kids were patient and well-prepared and polite. Here is a classroom having their pictures taken with me and you can see that they are just as goofy and giggly as American adolesecents..

And here I am (in a snippet from Publishers Weekly) with my publisher, Betsy Groban, at a party in my honor which was held in a spectacular palazzo

There was much celebration of my new book (Here is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's booth  with wall decor featuring it):

and here I am at the party with the Korean publishers, who had just given me a lovely gift

and finally, here is the Italian display of THE GIVER and its successors

At first glance it looks like a candy shop!  And that's what it felt like: so colorful, so sweet.

Bologna is a fascinating and picturesque city—with altogether too much pasta! (and a heck of a lot of shoe stores!)— and I was not there long enough. But tomorrow I head to Chicago. And in the meantime, my forsythia in Cambridge has burst into bloom. It happens every year but every year I am astounded once again at the burst of color. Happy, happy Spring!