I know how freelance writers “pitch” story ideas. Or, as a noun, how you make a “pitch” to a magazine.

I know, because I was the editor of the Sunday magazine of the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin. And I was features editor at a magazine-launch in Atlanta. And in college, I spent a couple of months reading story pitches from the slush pile for the Atlantic, when it was in a brownstone in Boston.

But I was an editor in those roles, the guy who wrote “thank you, but . . .” rejection letters, mostly.

Fortunately, I never had to make a living by pitching stories as a freelance writer.

But when we decided to go to Italy for a few months, it seemed like a fun whimsy to pitch some story ideas. As I worked on this, I was excited to find I had hit on three great stories for American magazines. I felt lucky, with good timing on my side. Here are the ideas, in a nutshell:

• A retired couple walks a piece of the 1000-year-old pilgrim route called the “Cammino di Francigena” from Lucca to Sienna, Italy. Everybody seems to be walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. This would be a how-to travel piece on a different, more original route, a self-guided hike with help from one of the companies you could hire to book your Tuscan hotels and carry your suitcase.
• An archeological discovery of the long-sought master work of the Roman Empire’s “father of architecture.” This dig was fresh news, and happened to be just down the street from where we had booked an apartment in Fano for a month.
• What would Machiavelli say to our political leaders today? With Trump seeming as brutal and duplicitous as a bad Renaissance prince, and the Democrats needing to get real, I thought I could peg this one to the timely publication of a book that a friend (and Democrat) had coming out – Machiavelli 4 Everybody, by Carol Darr.

The “Cammino di Francigena” idea, on the pilgrimage, I pitched to AARP Magazine. We joke about the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) when we get invited (and gently compelled) to belong at age 55. But it’s a powerful lobby for good (at least for us geezers) and its magazine is by far, and every year, the largest circulation magazine in the U.S. I used to include this fact when I lectured on magazines to W&L students. My little 750-word Italian feature could be read by millions!

The Fano archeological dig seemed like a story that needed to be told up close – a narrative around the dramatic scene when Italian archeologists realized what they had found. The news had already been in newspapers worldwide, and in Smithsonian magazine. But what was the human story behind the story? I pitched that to Smithsonian as an on-site follow up and, through a contact I acquired, to The New Yorker as a “Letter from Fano” feature.

Finally, I drafted a few ways to pitch the Machiavelli story, and shared those with Carol Darr, whose book was coming out in early May. One idea was a newspaper op-ed, “How Machiavellian is Trump, Really?” I never got around to pitching that to an editor.

I didn’t hear back from AARP Magazine (except a robo-response on receiving the pitch) or Smithsonian, having used their on-line forms for story pitches. I don’t need to tell you I never heard back from The New Yorker editor whose email I got from a friend on its staff out of Atlanta. (Aspiring writers are known to have framed even a rejection slip from the famously monastic New Yorker.)

I emailed AARP Magazine on March 18, having heard nothing for seven weeks, and a week later I got a nice email from an associate editor. She said it was the first she had seen this – and she monitors the pitch inbox. She said she forwarded my email to the travel editor. I’m still waiting.

All of this is good. It relieves me of the pressure of “working” while enjoying our current two months in Italy. It gives me material for this blog – a few subjects I have actually researched between our two stays in Italy. I have a much better relationship with my editor now than I would have with those magazines. My wife is the editor on all of these blog posts – and she is an incredibly careful and honest editor.

And you get to be my elite readers on these blog posts. I appreciate it when you let me know when you like one of them. Grazie mille!