Teacher training on a bicycle.

Don Meyer is a man of many parts. In his youth he grabbed his a guitar and lugged along his Bridgestone mountain bike to spend time in Europe. His plan? To spend a year in Italy. Working on his Master’s degree he felt the tug of renaissance literature — John Webster and Shakespeare in particular. “I just wondered,” he says, “why Italy in particular, held such sway in renaissance literature.” He had noticed that so many playwrights in…