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The Baroque Triangle: Sicily’s trail of the Renaissance’s gift to architecture

Noto's Chiesa di San Domenico is an example of the Baroque architecture that began during the Italian Renaissance in the 16th century and spread around the world. Photo by Marina Pascucci.

My girlfriend, the uber-talented photographer Marina Pascucci, and I continued my 60th birthday celebration on the trail of what is known as the Baroque Triangle. It’s a series of small towns dripping with Baroque architecture. Baroque style was born in Renaissance Italy during the late 16th century and designed to show off the wealth and power of the rapidly expanding Catholic Church. Baroque churches are extravagant, abnormal, garish and, depending on your taste, either ostentatious or jaw-dropping gorgeous.
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Turning 60 in Sicily: Growing old can be beautiful and delicious

In front of Fontana Aretusa, where the water supply was once the Greeks' main water supply when they were here 2,700 years ago.

You want to know how to feel 20 years younger when you turn a year older, even at 60? Go to a beautiful place with a beautiful woman. I spent four days in Syracuse — the one in Sicily, not upstate New York. How an industrialized city in a North American icebox could be named after a beautiful, sun-splashed town on the banks of the Ionian Sea is like calling your pet iguana Beyonce. In Italian it’s called Siracusa. Maybe Italians have been to New York and tweaked the name.
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AcquaMadre: Thermal baths are a true taste of La Dolce Vita from Ancient Rome

AquaMadre began 10 years ago in Rome's Jewish Ghetto but reflects what thermal baths were like 2,000 years ago.

I’m in AquaMadre, a thermal bath in the heart of modern Rome. It is only 10 years old but once you walk past the modern lobby and descend into the soothing pools below, you’re transported into the depths of Roman history.
Two millenniums ago, when Rome was the most powerful empire that would ever exist, these types of baths covered the city. They were called “thermae” or “hammam” and were the direct descendents of our modern spas. Most of the citizenry cleaned themselves in places like this. The wealthy Romans, the landowners, the rulers, the ex-generals, had their own bath houses on their estates. I once took a bike ride up Appia Antica, one of the original roads that led from Rome to the Adriatic Sea. To this day, you can see remains of ancient baths on estates long turned into ruins.
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Jog around Circo Massimo more history lesson than calorie burner

This is where Circo Massimo stood 2,500 year ago when it held more than 150,000 people for chariot races.

I live about three-quarters of a mile south of one of the three largest sports stadium ever created. It was where wild horses tore passed more than 150,000 spectators, carrying brave Roman men hanging on for their dear lives. It was where bodies were dragged off the track after getting horribly disfigured and where some of the biggest religious festivals in the Roman Empire were held.
Circo Massimo (Circus Maximus in Latin) is still around.
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Ex-drug dealer talks of life in the violent streets of Tor Bella Monaca, maybe Rome’s scariest neighborhood

De Santis in front of his building where his brother threw himself off of and where Carlo still lives today.

I met De Santis while hanging out in Bar Pasticceria where owner Rocco Sansotta educated me about the life and times of Tor Bella Monaca [LINK] in Part II. My good Australian-Italian friend, Robert Della Vedova, lived here for six months and remembered De Santis as one of the regulars. He remembered he had a good story to tell.

Did he ever. It’s one of poverty and drugs, false hope and fleeting wealth, of painful crashes and shaky rebounds. It’s of violence, of betrayal, of prison.
It’s of Tor Bella Monaca.
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Tor Bella Monaca bar owner has seen it all in his 20 years

Rocco Sansotta moved to Rome from London, Ontario, in 1986 and took off his dad's bar in 1996.

Via dell’Archeologia stretches along five of the most dangerous blocks in Rome. On one side is a series of drab, gray, seven-story apartment houses. On the other are 15-story apartment towers, yellowing like last year’s newspaper. The buildings could be in any lower middle-class neighborhood in the world, except for one element.

You’ll find it in the back of the buildings. Or it’ll be below. It’s away from foot and car traffic, away from eyes that, in this neighborhood called Tor Bella Monaca, are usually averted.

“NOOOOO! I don’t go behind there,” says Rocco Sansotta who owns a bar in Tor Bella Monaca. “It’s like the Bronx. They say, ‘You don’t go there.’ I don’t go there. They say, ‘You don’t go back there. You don’t go underneath the garages.’

“I hear stories.”
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Tor Bella Monaca: The Black Hole of Rome is city’s dark underbelly of drugs and violence

Only nine miles east of the Colosseum but a million miles socially, Tor Bella Monaca is arguably Rome's most dangerous neighborhood.

What we’re doing is touring Tor Bella Monaca at night. Travel guides list a few things you don’t do in Rome: Don’t take photos inside art galleries. Don’t order a cappuccino in the afternoon. Don’t drink in excess. It says nothing about touring arguably Rome’s most dangerous neighborhood after sunset, an area simply known as the Black Hole of Rome. When I told my Roman friends my plan, they all said I needed counseling. I knew exactly what I was doing. And it wasn’t thrill seeking. I wanted to write about crime in one of the world’s most glamorous, most beautiful tourist cities in the world. I wanted to dive head first into the dark underbelly of Rome, a part of the Eternal City that outsiders never see nor know about. I also wanted to show how crime in Rome doesn’t compare to crime in American cities.
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FC Trastevere shows grass is often greener in Italian soccer’s bush leagues

Campo Vittorio Bachelet, home to Serie D FC Trastevere, sits high above Rome next to Doria Pamphilj park.

This lower level of Italian soccer is where I’m finding new joy. I’ve peeled away the sterile veneer of Serie A, Italy’s top classification, and uncovered an all new level of culture. It’s kind of like cooking in Italy. The longer you’re here, the more different pastas you discover and cheeses you can try. Some are better than others but they’re all good. It’s at this level, these Italian bush leagues, where I found myself enjoying a very different Sunday afternoon in Rome.

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Puglia wine tasting brings back memories of long coastlines and purple-red wines

At the Wine Tastings of Rome Meetup at the Hotel Imperiale (from left): Alessandro Castellani, Vanessa Rispin, Robert Della Vedova, me.

Wine Tastings of Rome, a terrific Meetup group that could only have a more attractive name if Beyonce held its sign, brought in wine makers from around Puglia to one room at the Hotel Imperiale. Built in 1895, the Hotel Imperiale is as elegant as it sounds. It’s a gold palace with small balconies overlooking tree-lined Via Veneto, perhaps Rome’s most glamorous street where its rich and famous once preened for panting fans and fought with prying paparazzi. Walking into the snow-white interior, I felt thankful I wore a sportcoat as “retired journalist” and “elegant” aren’t usually found in the same sentence. The Hotel Imperiale makes you at least try to look the part.
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Two-year anniversary inspires all new list of why I love living in Rome

Two years ago today I landed in Rome. Ever since, it has been one "Saluti!" after another.

Two years ago today I landed in Rome with three bags, fewer friends and more risk than a mob informant. But today, I am approaching my 60th birthday in two months at the apex of my life. My happiness is growing like the lemon tree on my penthouse terrace overlooking the Tiber River. Retirement in Rome was the biggest chance I’ve ever taken but has made me happier than I’ve ever been. Looking forward to retirement, folks?
Retire to paradise, wherever you consider that is.
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Roman waiters’ service puts their American counterparts to shame

Me with Marco Uras, a waiter for 30 years, at Mamma Venerina near the Vatican.

Let me tell you how to wait a table. It is courtesy of one Marco Uras, a terrific veteran waiter at Mamma Venerina, one of my favorite restaurants in my old neighborhood, Prati, near the Vatican. Uras has been a waiter for 30 years dating back to his childhood home in Sardinia. Uras represents what restaurant wait service in Rome is all about. Respect. Professionalism. Efficiency. Kindness. Patience.

This is what restaurant wait service in the U.S. is all about: tips, overbearingness, tips, questions, impatience and more tips.
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Jubilee year off to slow start in Rome, allegedly near top of Isis’ hit list

St. Peter's Square after Pope Francis gave the opening speech at the Jubilee. Hotel occupancy is down 20 percent at the start of an event expected to attract 33 million pilgrims.

I wanted to see how Rome handled security. Ever since the Paris attacks, I’d seen camouflaged soldiers carrying machine guns in subway stations. Police cars clogged busy street corners. Every government building had extra security.
So I took a bus across the Tiber River to Prati, my old neighborhood near the Vatican. I walked down Via Porta Angelica, one of the main tourist thoroughfares into St. Peter’s Square. An army truck with armed soldiers manned one corner. Dozens of men and women wearing green neon and navy coats with “Protezione Civile Volontariato” stood on the street. A Red Cross truck and a bevy of medics in red and white outfits stood outside the Vatican wall, as if ready to move at the first sound of a bomb or the first view of a flying body part.
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