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The Permesso di Soggiorno: The quest in Italy for an immigrant’s holy grail

This prized possession allows me to be a legal resident of Italy for a year.

The source of my joy is a little 2 x 4-inch plastic card. It sits next to my laptop like a Bernini sculpture. It’s a Permesso di Soggiorno. That’s Italian for resident’s permit. It allows me to stay in Italy, legally, for another year. I no longer have to worry about a government paddy wagon hauling me into the back with a bunch of squatting West Africans and Albanians and deported in the hull of a slow freighter. I picked it up Tuesday morning, ending a process that took only two months. Keep in mind Italy is as famous for its non-functioning bureaucracy as it is for its pasta. The amount of red tape in this country could wrap around the Colosseum and make it look like a Christmas present. Getting legal in Italy is torture, and the Permesso di Soggiorno is the government’s version of waterboarding.
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Clubbing in Rome: The Piper still shaking its booty after nearly 50 years

Alessandro Castellani, Robert Della Vedova and me at Seventies Night at the Piper, a landmark since 1965.

Unlike Studio 54, which closed in 1991, the Piper is still around. It’s an unassuming place from outside. The name is lit up in red above a single door leading down two flights of stairs to a sprawling room the size of a small opera house. I took a long time walking down the stairs, not because my intense loathing for clubs made me feel as if I was descending into the Inferno of Italy’s greatest writer, Dante Alighieri. It’s just that I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures in the stairwell. There was Jimi Hendrix with his afro and microphone in hand. Tina Turner, when she was the appropriate age for her micro miniskirts, was dancing on stage. The Italian pop singer, Patty Pravo, whose iconic “La Bambola” (The Doll) helped me learn Italian in language school so many years ago, looked hotter than any of her American contemporaries. The Piper really is an institution. Unfortunately, it caved into 21st century marketing strategy and is now just another disco for Roman youth who think Jimi Hendrix is Germany’s goalkeeper.
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Cantina di Montefiascone is a wine outlet store off Rome’s oft-beaten path

Me and Alessandro Castellani with our loot for one of the cheapest wine and pasta stores in Italy.

I came to Montefiascone, home of EST! EST! EST!, one of the most intriguing white wines in Lazio. The story goes that in the 12th century, a German bishop about to visit the pope sent a high church official to Rome on a scouting mission to find the area’s best wines. When the prelate reached this village, now with only 13,700 thousand inhabitants, about 60 miles north of Rome, he found the best. To indicate where the bishop must stop, he wrote on doors “EST! EST! EST!” (Latin for “IT IS!”) Thus, the wine EST! EST! EST! was born.
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Chance encounter with monk brings opposites together to find the eternal truth

St. Peter's reach envelopes the Catholic world and the city of Rome.

I was coming back from a scambio, the Italian word for language exchange, near Piazza Navona when I crossed a street in Piazza Venezia next to a young man in a long black monk’s robe. We had to sprint to escape some mad speeding Italian. The monk said to me, “Stay behind me. I’ll get hit first.”

It was quite funny coming from a man who probably doesn’t hit too many comedy clubs. He was an American monk/priest from California finishing his fifth year of study in the Vatican. We had an interesting conversation.
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Capri is the prettiest island in Europe but bring your banker and … do you like crowds?

Capri, 27 miles off the coast of Naples, is 4 x 1.8 miles and gets 10,000 visitors a day in summer.

I don’t like buying hype. It’s like lobster. It’s good but never quite lives up to its billing. But believe me on this.
Capri is the prettiest island in Europe. I’ve been to so many: Santorini. Ischia. Mykonos. Sicily. Sardinia. All through the Kvarner Islands in Croatia. Nothing is like Capri’s towering cliffs that descend through olive and pine trees into a sea so clear and clean I could drink it. But I’d get sick. It’s too warm. I languidly floated in a Tyrrhenian Sea that’s the blue of an Italian summer sky. I looked down through the depths at an ocean bottom that seemed five feet away instead of 20.
Every turn up the mountainous little isle produced a view more spectacular than the last. Little rocky coves with sunbathers basking next to the sea. Ancient villas sticking out over cliffs with views clear to Naples 26 miles away. Expensive yachts lining a bustling port with tony shops and outdoor cafes.
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Rome dining: “World’s Smallest Restaurant” is also world’s most romantic restaurant

At Solo Per Due (Only For Two), couples hand pick their meals and their music in a 19th century home.

The atmosphere of Solo Per Due is like something out of a game show, where contestants see if they can keep from mauling each other before they finish their salad. Solo Per Due is Italian for “Only For Two.” It gets its name from how many people it serves a night. That’s right, two. That’s it. They have one table. That’s it. The couple hand picks their dishes made from ingredients found in the surrounding countryside. They hand pick the music. They call the tuxedoed waiter with a silver bell. The pink 19th century home is lined with artwork and Roman busts. A fireplace is in the corner. It’s a place only a poet like Horace could describe which he probably has. He lived in the remains of an ancient villa on these grounds in the 1st century B.C.
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Tuscany Cinghiale festival a great way to pig out on Italian history

Clockwise from upper left: cinghiale cacciatore, cinghiale sausage, cinghiale with polenta.

Wild boar. Huge, beefy, black pigs with curved horns, a demonic reputation and a demeanor to match. Tuscany is lousy with cinghiale. You can see them in forests, in national parks, even outside some rural hotels. No wonder the cinghiale is Italy’s national wildlife symbol. Hanging around Roman men and women for the last eight months, I thought it would be the peacock. However, a peacock feast probably wouldn’t draw much of a crowd. Capalbio’s Sagro del Cinghiale sure does. For the last 49 years, Capalbio has had a five-day cinghiale festival every September.
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Traveling to Bratislava: Getting in touch with my inner Marxist

Josef Stalin is a popular figure in Bratislava's KGB bar, which redefines the word "retro."

Bratislava is a capital of a country that prides itself on its rural reputation. Slovaks don’t want to be called country bumpkins, but they don’t want to be called city people, either. It’s like they identify more with a backpack than a briefcase. “There’s a rivalry between Bratislava and the rest of the country. They see Bratislava as a big city which is quite funny since it is quite small.” Those words came from a real bright 24-year-old Bratislava native who’s sharing my train compartment to Prague with me. He’s dressed all in black, from his black-rimmed glasses to his monk-like haircut to his black beard. His button-down short-sleeve black shirt makes him look like a priest in training. But he’s totally astute about life in post-communist Bratislava.
“I love Bratislava,” he said. “It’s not as big as Budapest or Prague but if you find the right people it is a wonderful place to live.”
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Retired in Rome Journal: In Eastern Europe, discussion about communism is only a bunk bed away.

Hincove pleso, at 6,422 feet, comes after a three-hour climb straight up and is on the Polish border.

I will say I was once a closet Marxist. My University of Oregon’s entire sociology department was Marxist. I took Sociology of Education, Sociology of Sport, Sociology of Sport. I found myself walking around campus wearing a black trench coat and a Cossack hat. My education leaned heavily toward a need for more even distribution. The core of evil in society is the discrepancy of wealth, of the bourgeoisie taking advantage of the proletariat. Karl Marx, whose childhood home in Trier, West Germany, I toured in 1978, was a genius. Everyone pulls for the state and the state pulls for everyone. The working class gets equal pay and the state takes care of the rest: housing, food, education.

Then I graduated. I went behind the Iron Curtain and realized something: My sociology professors had never been east of Hartford, Conn.
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Retired in Rome Journal: You’re never alone when you hike solo across 11 miles of High Tatras

Popradske pleso from atop 1.2-mile-high Sedlo pod Ostrvou and where I'd spend the night after an eight-hour hike covering 11 miles.

I just finished an eight-hour hike that had my mouth blabbing adjectives at the top of my lungs from high atop Eastern Europe. Yes, eight hours. This was what TravelSlovakia labeled an “easy” hike. Tell that to my thighs. They feel like lead barrels. My shoulders are sagging from carrying a pack up and down a 11-mile ridge. My jogging suit, shorts and T-shirt are drying in this hut’s heated drying room after a torrential downpour that shepherded me down a 1.2-mile mountain. The trail zigzagged down to this gorgeous, crystal-clear lake at the foot of towering rock walls of the same relative grade as elevator shafts.
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Retired in Rome Journal: Views from atop Eastern Europe hard to beat in Slovakia

Me high atop Lomnicky stit (8,643 feet). The little blue dot below is the lake next to Zelenom chata I stayed at the night before.

The Himalayas, the Andes, Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Alps, the Rockies. Where they rank in terms of sheer raw physical beauty has bounced around in my mind for years. The Himalayas are the most awesome, an entire stretch of 20,000–29,000-foot mountains across the horizon. Kilimanjaro, mountaineers say, has the best view. The Matterhorn in Switzerland could be the prettiest single mountain, the Andes are pockmarked with volcanoes and the snow on the Rockies make them look like a series of giant ice cream sundaes. But now I have to add one to the mix. Like a Big Sky Conference football team that upsets Oregon, the High Tatras today earned a place in my lifetime mountain rankings. I can’t remember a view that stopped me in my tracks since I saw the sunrise over Africa from atop Kilimanjaro in 1992.
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Retired in Rome Journal: Four-day trek starts slow but ends on a very major high

Zelenom pleso ("lake" in Slovak) is what greeted me at the end of my first day's hike, a five-hour uphill slog.

I’m sitting in a big A-frame hut in the middle of the High Tatras and trying to decide what’s the better view: The one to my left through two big picture windows of window boxes filled with pink and white flowers, with a green lake in the background and a craggy mountain climbing to the sky. Snow is on its higher crevices and a series of waterfalls cascade down the rock. Then again, over my right shoulder is a series of picnic benches surrounded by purple wildflowers and the expanse of the thick green forest stretching into the valley I left far below this morning.
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