Arriving in Padua, an ancient city of about 200,000 people in the north of Italy, I started brightening up. The place did seem to have a lot in common with Boston. We drove by a park in the middle of town that resembled the Public Gardens. Like the Boston area, Padua takes education pretty seriously. Its university, founded in 1222 and boasting such past faculty greats as Galileo, makes Harvard look like The University of Phoenix. And Padua is surrounded by great places for a weekend trip. Venice, for example, is only a half-hour train ride away. With its proximity to the city, delightful water views, and throngs of sunburned tourists, Venice has rightfully earned its international reputation as the "Cape Cod of Italy."

It turns out, though, that these similarities were mostly superficial. I quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to get my Boston fix in Padua. Though I found one seafood store with lobsters in the window, there wasn't any more creamy clam chowder in Padua than there is in Krakow. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find any multi-billion dollar construction projects that still weren't really done twenty years after they started. And even though I was in Padua during games six and seven of the Celtics-Hawks first round playoff series, I didn't spy any leprechauns, much less a bar which was showing the games.

I'm an only child, so I guess I had the wrong idea about siblings. As my wife pointed out, sisters aren't always the same. Of course! I thought about the many sisters I had watched on television over the years. Remember Sherry Stringfield's character from E.R.? Her deadbeat sister wasn't anything like her. What had I been thinking? Boston is Boston, and no sister city was going to compare.

Once I figured this out, I began to really appreciate Padua. For one thing, the people are incredibly friendly. The first day we were there, for example, the guy working at the Lava and Lava Laundromat gave my four-year old son a bunch of pictures he had drawn of futuristic cars, one of which had six wheels, even though just two minutes before we had busted the latch on one of his dryers. Wow. What Bostonian would ever forgive someone for breaking his dryer in only two minutes?

There are some incredible sights in Padua. Its top attraction is a series of frescoes of Biblical scenes painted by Giotto between 1303 and 1305. The paintings are so precious that only twenty-five people are allowed to see them at a time. Now, I know nothing about fourteenth century Italian art. I can't tell a fresco from a can of Fresca. I wouldn't know a Giotto from a cup of Gelato. But these works were truly magnificent. The gorgeously detailed scenes of heaven and hell were particularly outstanding, and not just because they helped me explain to my son why he has to start behaving at bedtime.

Padua is a quiet town, but with all of its students, it has a lively after-dark scene. I went out one night to see what it was like. After going to a student hangout for a couple of one Euro beers (a mere $17 each at the current exchange rate), I spent an hour at the famous Caffé Pedrocchi, Padua's answer to the Union Oyster House. Sandra, the charming head bartender, explained some of the bar's history while pouring me glasses of red wine and grappa. The place was opened in 1831, catered to luminaries like the French novelist Stendhal, and was bequeathed by the owner to the citizens of Padua. Sandra gave me directions to my last stop of the night, a tiny hip bar called Caligola where loud music was blaring, Dirty Dancing was playing on the plasma screen, and the drinks were served in squat, wide glasses that made me feel like I was drinking out of a cat's water bowl. When the spiky haired bartender told me that Boston makes him think of Ally McBeal, I knew the night couldn't get any better, and I headed home.

I didn't want to leave Padua without giving something back, so I worked with our delightful hotel host Marco at the Belludi 37 to invent a Padua-Boston "sister city handshake" that can forever link the two great cities. After a few false starts involving lots of hand-waving and awkward robot impersonations, we settled on a simple but symbolically powerful shake that proceeds in two steps: (1) grasp hands in traditional handshake fashion with arms fully extended, so as to symbolize great geographical distance; then (2) step toward each other, bending arms at the elbow and switching hand orientation to crossed-thumb position, to symbolize the power of friendship to overcome such distance.

I'm not sure whether anybody has already created an official sister-city handshake, so perhaps our effort was wasted, but I hope not. Marco and I devised the handshake for residents of Boston and Padua, but it would work just as well for any other sister city combination. So, if you find yourself in your hometown's sister city—whether you're a Bostonian in Padua, a citizen of Sacramento visiting Chisinau, Moldova, or an Albuquerquian is Ashgabat, Turkemistan, won't you consider teaching the handshake to everyone you meet? Ike would be so proud.

You may also want to read Jay Wexler's Beacon Broadside post on Clarence Thomas, his defense of the Toothbrush of the Month Club on McSweeney's, and John Hanson Mitchell's "Digging the Dig." Photo of Citgo Sign by wallyg. Photo of Padua Observatory by purplecthulhu. Used under Creative Commons.