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Thanksgiving in Rome: Great food, great people, great turkey trot home

Peter Bloom and his wife Gretchen have been preparing Thanksgiving in Rome for the past 10 years.

In my previous stint in Rome in 2002, my then-girlfriend and I tried introducing our Italian friends to Thanksgiving. It was an absolute disaster. The turkey took three more hours to cook than we expected (our starving guests started gnawing on the furniture) and our oven could only handle one dish at a time. And have you ever seen chicory that’s been on a kitchen floor overnight? It looks like a snarl of black snakes. Last night I got invited to the Blooms, my dear retired friends from the Food & Agricultural Organization who have lived in Rome 17 years. They’ve done Thanksgiving dinner for the last 10. The people you meet in Rome is one of the most underrated aspects of living here and last night’s Thanksgiving was a smorgasbord of fascinating people. I met:
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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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Rio Secreto underground river tour goes right through dark heart of Yucatan

Rio Secreto is 2 million years old and stretches 50 miles underground near Playa del Carmen.

Where I went yesterday there was no sun. There was no light. I walked, floated and swam through a half mile of pitch-black darkness while bending over to make sure my 6-foot-3 frame didn’t get gored by a million sharp stalactites. I did a tour of the Rio Secreto, one of the wildest river cruises in the world. The difference is you do it without a boat. It’s just you, a life vest, a wetsuit and a lighted helmet. That and a guide who stood between seven of us being hopelessly lost forever 60 feet underground.
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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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Tulum tour is 10-stop shopping for Mexican souvenirs

This temple was the center of Tulum's social and execution network from 1200-1500 AD.

Tulum isn’t what I expected. A couple years ago I went to Ek-Balam, a former seat of the Mayan kingdom north of here. That featured everything from living quarters to warehouses to an acropolis. Even though Ek-Balam’s influence faded later during the empire, I got a feel for what the complexity of a major Mayan city. At Tulum, the first thing we saw as we pulled into a parking lot was a souvenir emporium the size of Wal-Mart. Is there a country that has more souvenirs than Mexico? This place makes Rome look like a fishing village in Greenland. Mexico seems to have as many different brands of tequila as dirty T-shirt messages.
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Playa del Carmen timeshare spiel is definitely no day at the beach

Would you buy a timeshare from this man? Actually, Alvaro was nicer than most but didn't land the sale.

I’m a veteran of these things. I’ve spent a weekend in Steamboat Springs for $75. I had a condo in Cabo for $50 a night. I know how to say no, a word too many people can’t say to strangers. Timeshare salesmen aren’t strangers to me. After an hour or so, they become annoying, cloying vultures who would lie to their first-born child if it ravaged their savings account for one of their properties.

Some are worse than others. I remember one clown with Marriott who asked everyone in the room where’s the one place they’ve always wanted to spend a week. It don’t matter, he said. They had a property there. When they got to me, I said, “How are your resorts in North Korea?”
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Playa del Carmen’s six-star resort scene puts the “high” in high maintenance

The Grand Mayan Resort sports "The Largest Swimming Pool in Latin America."

The Grand Luxxe redefines opulence. The grand villa where I’m quartered has every luxury you can imagine without violating some federal obscenity laws. It’s 2,500 square feet with three huge bedrooms. Mine has a king-size bed covered with enough pillows to house flood evacuees. An above-ground eggshell-white Jacuzzi tub separates the room from a bathroom that has a shower with two different shower heads. Next to the bathtub is a little stand with a carefully rolled towel tied by a decorative bow. Small bottles of bath salt, bathing gel and bubble bath are placed equal distance around the towel. Who knew feng shui extended to toiletries?
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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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