Italian Life

February 2, 2017

Myths of the gladiators: Through Eternity tours sets the record straight

The thumbs down was not an indication to kill a fallen opponent.

I learned a lot about gladiators from books, particularly Daniel Mannix’s excellent 1958 tome, “The Way of the Gladiator.” However, I learned even more from Through Eternity’s Colosseum, Forum and Palatine Hill tour. Over five hours, it started with tours of the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. At the final stop at the Colosseum, tour guide Gracelyn Monaco blew away a lot of myths people have about the famed gladiators. Forget what you saw in the movie “Gladiator.” It was accurate but didn’t tell the whole story.

It wasn’t nearly as violent as the real thing.
(To read more, click here.)

January 26, 2017

Traveling to Italy in 2017? Here’s my top 10 list

The Archipelago di La Maddalena just off the north coast of Sardinia is just one of many less-trodden destinations in Italy.

Here I present you with 10 places that you probably have never heard of, let alone never made your bucket list. So here’s my collection, in alphabetical order, of lovely, interesting, off-the-beaten-path places to visit in Italy in 2017. Print it, put it under a refrigerator magnet and know you’ll never eat a better pizza than outside on a warm Italian night.
(To read more, click here.)

January 14, 2017

On the road in Serie D: 4th Division Trastevere flying high in Italy’s soccer lowlands

Snow and freezing temperatures greeted ASD Trastevere on its five-hour road trip to Puglia.

His 35-year-old face is weathered, in kind of a rugged Italian sort of way. He has a perpetual scruffy beard. Lines are forming around eyes that have seen too many patchy soccer fields, tiny towns and lonely roads.
Stefano Tajarol has the look of Serie D.
This is the bottom branch of Italy’s soccer tree, hanging just above the rubble of amateurism. Serie D has 162 teams spread from rural Sicily to the foothills of the Italian Alps. Francavilla. Ghivizzano. Darfo Boario. They are towns you’ll never see in a guide book. They’re all trying to climb atop one of nine divisions for promotion to Lega Pro, Italy’s third division where there are higher salaries, historic stadiums and — gasp! — television.
(To read more, click here.)

January 11, 2017

Three-year anniversary produces all new list of reasons I love living in Rome

The Forum of Augustus. Photo by Marina Pascucci

Here is my annual Jan. 11 list of all the reasons I love Rome. I hope it all inspires you to visit and reminds my fellow Rome residents to appreciate all that we have here. It’s a magical place, and it’s nearly 3,000 years old. It’s not going away. Neither am I.
(To read more, click here.)

December 22, 2016

My Xmas gifts for 2016 or, if Trump likes coal …

I will be delivering lots of presents Saturday night. I will mostly sprinkle them around Rome but also have a special delivery to New York. Does Trump Tower have a chimney or does Donald Trump let his Mexican house cleaners in through the lobby door? Here’s my list of gifts for all those who were naughty and nice in 2016. Guess who was the most naughty.
(To read more, click here.)

December 7, 2016

Another Earthquake hits Italy: A prime minister resigns and the EU nervously waits

At 39, Matteo Renzi became the youngest prime minister in Italian history.

Prime minister Matteo Renzi’s resignation Monday following Sunday’s runaway defeat of his referendum has left Italy’s political future wildly up in the air. In Italian politics, that’s a little like saying the Ganges River is more filthy than usual. However, it’s true. Italy may be another domino that falls in the European Union, which is starting to reveal cracks like a windshield of a car driving through a war zone.
(To read more, click here.)

November 24, 2016

Cooking Thanksgiving in Rome turns out to be a real turkey

Our Thanksgiving meal, our first venture into full-scale American hospitality, was just short of an apocalypse. I used the word “short” because I heard no documented reports of botulism. We learned that life as an ex-pat isn’t always like “Under a Tuscan Sun.” Frances Mayes never mentioned anything about cleaning up day-old chicory off a floor.
First, putting on a Thanksgiving affair in Rome is an ordeal nothing short of packing for relocation to Mercury.
(To read more, click here.)

November 22, 2016

Life as an extra is as dull as a cardinal’s but working with actor Jude Law makes it worth it

Viewers won't notice us individually but tourists sure did one day as we walked to work.

Being an extra is like being a bird. You do nothing for hours and then must provide a few moments of window dressing before flying away without being noticed. Sometimes you are. Take the cardinal whose cell phone went off twice during one of Law’s speeches. Or the cardinal who wouldn’t stop talking after “ACTION!”
Or me blowing a scene with one turn.
(To read more, click here.)

November 15, 2016

Italian rugby: The new trend goes All Black with visit from New Zealand power

New Zealand's All Blacks are two-time defending World Cup champs and defeated Italy Saturday, 68-10.

As I sat in jam-packed Curva Sud, the A.S. Roma ultras’ one-time home that has long since gone quiet, I sensed for the first time this growing phenomenon on the Italian sporting scene. Italy, the winner of four soccer World Cups and where soccer rivalries resemble provincial wars, has gone rugby mad. And on Saturday, the rabid rugby fans were treated to the Alabama Crimson Tide of world rugby. New Zealand’s All Blacks won the last two World Cups in 2011 and 2015. They won the inaugural one in 1987.
(To read more, click here.)

November 10, 2016

Reaction in Italy soothing as I wonder when sun will rise again

When you’re retired in Rome, you don’t have many bad days. Mine usually consist of not getting enough foam in my cappuccino or getting in a fight with my landlady. Stress and anger left my life when I left America nearly three years ago. But for one horrific 12-hour stretch over Tuesday and Wednesday, I was in the middle of a country I no longer knew. I was trying to ward off a right-wing mob scene’s maniacal fervor of uneducated, fascist, sexist and racist Americans from towns I’ve never heard of and now never want to visit. Donald Trump’s election was the worst day of my life since 9-11.
(To read more, click here.)

November 1, 2016

Singing “Our Father” in Latin on camera is too much for this extra in “The Young Pope”

The 140 cardinals wait to take center stage in the filming of "The Young Pope."

Have you ever read Latin? It reads like something off an Egyptian wall. It’s a language nearly as dead as Gaelic. Even the Catholic Church campaigned to bring it back into services around the world.
Now try memorizing it.
Now try singing it.
Now try singing it for TV cameras which are currently showing to millions of people around Europe and, in February, all over the U.S. It is my second scene of my “acting” debut. I am one of 120 men dressed like Vatican cardinals inside a hangar-sized studio in Cinecitta, Rome’s legendary old movie complex.
(To read more, click here.)

October 24, 2016

Playing an extra in “The Young Pope” teaches me the cardinal rules of film business

Director Paolo Sorrentino needed tall Americans. I'm tall. I'm American.

I play an American cardinal, one of the many nameless bodies that form a fluid red or black background as Jude Law maneuvers through scenes. We’re shooting a breakfast scene and I’m sitting two chairs down from a cardinal who’s about to die. My job is to eat slowly, look over calmly and appear expressionless as the cardinal falls to the floor. But did I eat too many grapes? Could Sorrentino tell I was choking? I KNEW I should’ve eaten the breakfast roll!
(To read more, click here.)

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