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

Renato e Luisa

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 […]

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

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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. […]

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

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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 […]

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

Photo by Marina Pascucci

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.), […]

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Mamma Mia! Skopelos and Sporades Islands are specks of paradise in the Aegean Sea

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SKOPELOS, Greece — Three times a week for the last few years, the little Attikon Open Air Cinema on Skiathos has played “Mamma Mia!” Besides being the worst movie Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan ever made (There’s a reason none of her 21 Oscar nominations were for her singing, and James Bond DOES NOT sing.), it is a chick flick of nauseating proportions. It’s so […]

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Bolt reunion in Greece: He’s alive and well and didn’t remember us

Bolt opens eyes

We found this month-old kitten near death atop a gutter on Skiathos three years ago. Today Bolt is thriving, with some bumps, at the Skiathos Cat Welfare Association. Marina Pascucci photos SKIATHOS, Greece – We were going to go viral. I was sure of it. This reunion had all the trappings that pull on heartstrings, from Facebook links to the Animal Planet channel. Everyone would […]

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

Paulo Fonseca

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 […]

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Lazio wines rising on the Italian, international wine scenes

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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 […]

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

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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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