Italy badly needs a Colin Kaepernick. Racism has been as much a part of Italian soccer as corner kicks. Italy doesn’t play its national anthem before Serie A contests but it would illuminate the problem if someone, some time, showed up at a stadium wearing a red Kaepernick jersey. Who could do it?
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On the first floor of the Palazzo Spada, in a small, quiet courtyard, is the real thing. I stared at it for 30 minutes before I finally figured it out. It’s a colonnade, an open-air hallway lined with columns that looks at first glance about 25 meters long. In actuality, when you get closer it’s about 8 ½. How? Why?
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I had a travel experience that will never make “Lonely Planet” or the Los Angeles Times. Penthouse? Almost. That’s why I’m writing this here. The famous literary magazine (Hey, it does have fine writing, too!) loved the tale I told of a trip I took to a hotel that specialized in erotica. You’ve heard of hotels that cater to families and pets and football fans. Welcome to Playa del Carmen where the Reina Roja Hotel caters to sexual deviants. Sadomasochism. Pool-side sex. Lighting out of a brothel. The Reina Roja, while also functioning as a regular hotel, invites anyone to explore their sexual fantasies — or find fantasies you never knew existed or never thought were legal outside Nevada.
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“Andiamo.” (Let’s go.)
I said that when Marina started walking over to pick it up. I wasn’t worried about her catching a disease from a dead animal. I just didn’t want to break down after watching a dead kitten lay limp in the palm of her hand.
But women have maternal instincts. She broke from my hand and bent over. When she picked it up, a remarkable thing happened. It moved. It moved its tiny, little arms and legs, one of which looked deformed, horribly bent under its scrawny body. It was as skinny as a baby bird in an oil slick. Its elongated neck was as out of proportion as E.T’s. The way his ears dwarfed his tiny head made him look like a bat. I could put my thumb and middle finger around his torso.
And he was near death.
He didn’t meow. His eyes were fused shut from mucous. He didn’t fight to break from our hands. He just moved his three tiny workable legs and his head up and from side to side, straining to see who was helping him. He didn’t need to mew. We knew what he wanted to say.
“Please save me.”
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Traveling in Greece gave me my definition of freedom: Freedom is deciding what Greek island you want to go to on your way to a boat dock. You can do that in Greece. I didn’t do that on this trip. I took one look at my hotel in Skiathos and had a hard time imagining sleeping anywhere else. Besides, traveling to Greece in August is problematic. It’s bulging with backpackers, partiers, lovers, historians, sun worshippers and shoppers. Zeus would not approve.
But, unlike Greece’s beauty, Zeus is just a myth.
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This city has the worst soccer fans in Europe.
For a tip of the fan base’s melting iceberg, consider Roma opens its Serie A, or national league, season Saturday at home against Udinese. Roma is picked as the best bet to stop Juventus’ string of five straight titles. It’s the last season for Francesco Totti, the native son who will spend his 25th season wearing the Roma jersey and is the most popular figure in Rome since Augustus. Yet 72,000-seat Olympic Stadium Saturday will not sell out. They are frantically selling individual seats in Curva Sud, which is usually filled cheek to cheek three hours before kickoff. As of Tuesday they had sold only 17,000 season tickets, a shocking number considering the passion I see in this city rivals that of the Denver Broncos’ in my old stomping grounds.
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Silvio Berlusconi was Italy’s prime minister three times for nine years, from 1994-95, 2001-06 and 2008-11. He had all the trappings of Donald Trump before he took office — and proceeded to run the entire Italian peninsula into the Mediterranean. I wanted to write this as a warning to all the racist, fascist, sexist, uneducated, angry white men who will vote for Trump what could lay ahead.
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Last week I learned a lot about Trastevere’s history going way past the ‘70s. It goes back to before the birth of Christ, to the height of the Roman Empire. Back then Trastevere was a neighborhood of slaves, violence and graft. I went with Rome Explorers, a wonderful, learned Meetup group dedicated to the history and nature of Rome and beyond. Leading the group again was Massimiliano “Max” Francia (guideromax@virgilio.it), Rome’s ubur guide whose library of Roman history could fill the Colosseum.
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People ask me that all the time. What do you miss? They are little things, not big things. I never knew happiness until I woke up with a cappuccino on my terrace looking out at the Tiber River with birds chirping and then deciding what pizzeria I want to eat at that night.
But some things America can provide that Italy can not. However, I have learned to compensate.
So for those dreaming of a life in the bella paese, here’s a list of things that occasionally cross my mind, like the train passing your window every day back home and you always took for granted.
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We settled on Denia, a town in Spain I’d never heard of which, if you’re seeking a path less beaten, is always a good sign. A map showed it’s on Spain’s famed Costa Bianca, on the point of a peninsula just across the Gulf of Valencia from hip Ibiza. On its website, the Marriott’s swimming pool looked like something out of a Las Vegas architect’s sexual fantasy. We were sold. I bought two more nights for a Wednesday through Saturday stay. It was the perfect extended weekend in a sexy part of the world.
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