Pickpocketing in Rome has a thousand stories. In actuality, you have at least 300 a day. According to Bob Arno, the self-proclaimed “Pickpocket King” who has gone from thief to victims advocate, that’s the number that is allegedly reported to police in Rome. According to the Huffington Post, Rome has the second most pickpocket incidents in the world, just behind Barcelona and just ahead of Prague.
The lifestyle in Rome, however, has built-in safeguards. Like Romans, I walk everywhere. When I lived in Centro Storico, I didn’t need public transportation for two months. Rome is one of the world’s great walking cities and I would walk four to six miles a day. Even when I wasn’t going anywhere, I’d just wander.
I’ve had a weird fascination with Benito Mussolini ever since I read about him during my first stint here from 2001-03. He was fierce nationalist who tried to make his country a player on the world stage. He had some leadership qualities that any general in the U.S. could admire. The son of a socialist blacksmith in the small Emilia-Romagna town of Dovia di Predappio, Mussolini fought against growing communist factions and did a lot of good in his early years. He helped nationalize a language in a country fractured by dialects and millenium-long regional rivalries. He turned the swamps outside of Rome into commerce centers and charming, livable villages. And, as his legacy still states, he got the trains to run on time. He did nothing with the bus system, which still sucks, but that’s Rome’s problem now. His problem was he had this weird crush on Adolph Hitler, which, obviously, became the ultimate fatal attraction.
It’s called a mille-feulle. A mille-feuille is a French tradition that dates back to the late 17th century. Also called a Napoleon, mille-feuille means “thousand leaves” in French. It’s vanilla cream in between pastry cream and sandwiched between a sugar-coated crust. Covered in fresh chantilly, France’s orgasmic whipped cream, it was absolute heaven. I never felt so good waddling out of a cafe.
I have found a new home, a new home in Rome. My dream apartment pales in comparison to what I eventually found. What do you do when reality surpasses your dreams? Here’s what I did: I got out of bed, opened my glass door and walked out on to a 350-square-foot terrace overlooking the Tiber. At my penthouse balcony five floors up, I could see joggers chugging up Lungotevere, the long street that snakes up the river from Centro Storico in the heart of the city to Rome’s gritty southern edge. If I cut down a couple of trees, I could see St. Peter’s Basilica. I asked my new landlady where I could find a chainsaw in Rome.
I’ve been to the Amalfi twice before. How much do I love it? A framed oil painting of Positano, my favorite town in Italy, hung above my TV in Denver for 11 years. Whenever I got stressed, I would lay on my couch and stare at the multi-layered rows of bed & breakfasts, pensions and villas that cascade down a steep hill toward the turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea. I could be devastated by a diagnosis of brain cancer, the ax murder of a sibling or a pending trip to Nebraska and stare at that painting. I’d smell the sweet fragrance of lemon trees from the Amalfi. Suddenly, life is sweet again.
I know Obika’. In 2006 I wrote about it in A Moveable Feast, the traveling food column I wrote for The Denver Post for eight years. Obika’ comes from the Neapolitan word “obica,” meaning, “We are here.” However, the Neapolitan alphabet has no “k.” The Neapolitan owner, Silvio Ursini, is a Bvlgari jewelry exec who started Obika’ in 2004 due to two obsessions: mozzarella and Japanese culture. He switched the “c” to a “k” to give it a Japanese bent and an accent on the end just to be hip.
The problem is Roman men don’t do barbers. They either live at home and have their mothers cut their hair as short as when they were 10 years old or they never cut it and let it hang down the back of their necks. Lots of guys walk around here looking like Fabio. You ladies wonder how Roman men can have such long, flowing, jet-black locks? There are no barbers.
If you’ve never been to the Forum, you must let your imagination wander. It’s a series of temples missing half their Ionian columns, halves of buildings and scattered blocks of marble everywhere. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think you came across a training camp for vandals. But if you close your eyes — particularly after a bottle of Chianti — and let your mind drift, you can imagine beautiful Romans in bright white togas, strolling down marble lanes between palaces, basilicas and temples.
Palermo’s Ballaro neighborhood once was home to Norman court officials in the 11th century. Now it’s home to Palermo’s growing number of African immigrants who are trying to add some spice and life to the darkest, dustiest streets in the city. It’s just across the major boulevard, Corso Turkory, from my B&B and I quickly went from a bustling street full of retail stores, small groceries and cafes to dark, narrow streets lit by lone lamp posts hanging next to dreary beat-up apartment houses.
I counted 50 people packed into a room no bigger than my 200-square-foot living room down the alley. I sat on an end table under a row of shot glasses from which the actresses kept grabbing. With my limited Italian comprehension, I believe it was about an Italian bordello from the ‘50s. A sleazy journalist is one of the customers (I deny ANY connection) and he seemed to try and convince the ladies that he should write an article about their dead hooker. I think. I don’t know. It may have been about a small Tuscan boy coming of age on an olive farm.
I arrived on a cool, cloudy day which means I saw the lake different than nearly every Roman who has visited it. It was practically empty. Normally, its sliver-narrow beach is lined with umbrellas from Romans escaping the heat. Yesterday, the 22-square-mile lake had only a couple of passersby. One middle-aged man in a heavy coat stood on the bank and held his head up to the sky with his eyes closed, trying to will some glimpse of sun onto his face. The lake isn’t massive but is so close to Rome it looks like the Pacific Ocean. It’s cobalt blue and surrounded by the rolling hills of the rugged northern Lazio countryside.
