Italian Life

January 8, 2020

Why I love Rome: My 6th annual list why la dolce vita is as sweet as black cherry gelato

Six years ago this Saturday I retired to Rome saying I wanted to live the last third of my life in the most beautiful city in the world. Of course, I could’ve been leaping into a chasm of living hell. I had few friends, no girlfriend, a tiny cave of a flat and terrible Italian. Today I have many friends, an apartment nearly as beautiful […]

December 24, 2019

Christmas in Rome: Lighter on the lights but heavy on the meaning

Christmas has special meaning in the center of Christendom, but even St. Peter's Square is understated.

I grew up in the capital of the commercial world and now live in the capital of the Catholic world. It is Christmas time, a time when capitalism and religion merge into a big, sparkling Christmas ball — a green Christmas ball. Comparing Christmas in Rome to Christmas anywhere in the U.S. is like staring at the moon compared to staring at a spotlight. I […]

December 18, 2019

Christmas gifts to the world: Heads up, Washington … here comes Santa from Rome!

Did you know Santa Claus lives in Italy? It’s true. His real name is Santa Clausini. He anglicized it to be accepted in more of the world’s chimneys. He and his elves (actually a self-loathing freelance writer from Oregon) have a workshop in Rome’s Monteverde neighborhood where we think up the perfect Christmas gifts for people around the world. Mostly bad people. As the world […]

December 11, 2019

Top 10 Underrated Towns in Italy for 2020: Get off the well-trodden track

Conde Nast came out with its annual Readers Choice list for the world’s best countries and Italy came out ninth. Italy appearing in a top 10 list is like Alabama football, U.S. billionaires and Harvard. Conde Nast called Italy the “evergreen country.” It’s always there. It’s why I’m here. And I’m not leaving. Next month I will enter my seventh year in Italy, my ninth […]

October 23, 2019

My 5 favorite restaurants in Rome: Affordable, accessible, authentic

I’m often asked if I’d ever live anywhere in Italy besides Rome. I know what they’re getting at. If it’s a woman, she read “Under the Tuscan Sun” and thinks life in rural Italy is all Italian poetry and glasses of Chianti in gardens. If it’s a man, they hated Rome’s filth and have a postcard of Positano hanging on their computer back home. The […]

October 17, 2019

An Italian wedding: Like American weddings but with more romance and … do you have a red suit?

I sipped Prosecco Saturday in the same piazza where Benito Mussolini worked his fascist throng into a froth. I stood in Piazza Venezia, in the shadow of the gargantuan white confectionery monument called Il Vittoriano, in suit and tie, and celebrated the most Italian of Italian traditions. The Italian wedding. No, not mine. It was the daughter of our friends and it was my first. […]

October 8, 2019

Walk across Rome without traffic: A stroll across a 3,000-year-old city

Living in Rome is like living in a big city with a small town right across the street. Can’t believe you can get a small-town feel from a city of 2.8 million people who drive like they’re escaping a coming earthquake? Just walk down a street. In fact, walk down many of them. Walk down them all day. Chances are you’ll discover my favorite Italian […]

September 19, 2019

My five favorite wine bars in Rome: The perfect Roman-tic evening

I’ve always told people wanting to party in Rome that this city isn’t a bar town. It’s a restaurant town. However, it is the world’s greatest bar town in one specific genre: wine bars. Called enotecas in Italian, they enjoyed a renaissance in the 1990s and now are my preferred destination on any night out in Rome. With the world’s greatest wine (Stick it, France.), […]

September 12, 2019

Abruzzo home raffle went so well, Brit is doing another not far from L’Aquila and its comeback story

L’AQUILA, Italy — Jamie Abbott learned it’s pretty easy to sell a slice of heaven. Now he wants to sell another. The line has already formed to the right. Remember my March blog on the Englishman who raffled off a house in rural Italy for 50 English pounds (about $65)? Well, he easily sold all 6,000 tickets in a heated frenzy and in the live […]

August 24, 2019

Doom and gloom turn to cautious optimism as a new season for facelifted AS Roma begins Sunday

This off season I changed my greeting at my local coffee bar. Every time I walked into Romagnani Caffe across the street from my Rome apartment I greeted the Romanisti coffee jockeys with “FORZA ROMA!” the long-time mantra of every AS Roma fan, meaning “GO ROMA!” They, in turn, greeted me with the simultaneous, seemingly rehearsed, traditional response in chorus: “SEMPRE! (ALWAYS!)” Since last season […]

August 15, 2019

Lazio wines rising on the Italian, international wine scenes

FRASCATI, Italy — Daniele Cernilli remembers when he was a little boy in Rome 50 years ago, back when Italian cinema was booming and so was the economy. His father used to send him to the local osteria, a small, very traditional family run restaurant, to get a big jug of wine. Through most of the 20th century, Romans bought wine in bulk, kind of […]

August 7, 2019

Rome: The filthiest capital in Europe — and it might be second as well

Sandro Ferri, my old friend at my corner edicola, walked out of his small newsstand to show me something on the ground near his window. It was a small circle of what looked like new concrete. It was once a home — for mice. They used to come up through the hole and head to what was on the other side of his newsstand. I […]

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