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Public services make Italy resemble a Third World country

Me Wednesday at the In Caffe where I wrote while dressed more appropriately for a football game in Buffalo.

I am here because in Italy’s never-ending quest to become the most backward industrialized country in the world, my Internet shut off Monday night. I had finished a phone interview, and my laptop screen just zapped. No warning. No explanation. Nothing. Just SNAP! Gone. On my screen appeared vague instructions to type my name in a little box, an act that produced nothing but my expanding vocabulary in Italian profanity. I called Roberto, my advisor in the WIND Internet office, as he readied to lock his office door. He looked up my account. It said I hadn’t paid my bill.

Huh? My records showed I paid my bill in November. So the next day I crossed the Tiber River to the WIND office near the Vatican and Roberto looked at my account again. Yes, I paid my November bill. I didn’t pay my August bill. I never GOT a bill. Even if I did, why didn’t they warn me? Send me an email? Send me a text on my cell phone it also provides? Roberto laughed with open arms in that Italian way that pretty much says, “My friend! This is Italy!”
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Mercato Testaccio near Rome’s old slaughterhouse can make a bad cook into a good cook

Alessandro holds stuffed ravioli in one of the 100-plus stalls in Rome's Mercato Testaccio.

Shopping in Italy is different. The food here is so fresh and so natural, I shop in the Mercato Testaccio every day for what I’ll eat that day. Supermarkets are safety nets in case I can’t make the market before it boards up at 1:30 p.m. My local supermarket looks like something out of rural Eastern Europe in the ‘60s. Dingy lighting with dodgy meat wrapped in cellophane and random cheap boxed goods stacked on dusty shelves. I figure if I don’t make my market by 1:30, I’ll eat like a peasant.

Mercato Testaccio is worth every ounce of sweat to arrive on time. I have my usual routine. It’s a circuitous route among the 100-plus stalls that begin with cheap clothes and household goods on one end and goes to fresh produce and meat on the other. In the middle sits a thriving coffee bar where neighborhood women gossip over foamy cappuccinos, a half dozen brown plastic food bags at their feet.
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Umbria’s eight-course meal stretches the boundaries of gastro excellence, not to mention waistlines

The pappardelle cinghiale, the sixth of an eight-course meal at Quintana Restaurant.

In 2007 a real popular book about healthy eating came out called “Why French Women Don’t Get Fat.” Someone could easily write one today entitled “Why Italians Don’t Get Fat.” And they don’t, regardless of what you believe or see on goofy TV shows or the streets of New Jersey. Only a third of Italians are overweight, half that of the United States. Here’s the reason in one sentence: They eat healthy food in smaller portions and walk instead of drive.

With one meal in Umbria, some friends and I blew that theory right into the Adriatic Sea.
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Why do we get headaches drinking wine in the U.S. and not in Italy?

Benny Rossi of Il Podere del Falco winery outside Rome says U.S. wines cause headaches when winemakers don't have confidence and add too many sulfites.

Today marks my 11-month anniversary back in Rome. That same sized Excedrin bottle a friend brought me last spring (I should’ve asked for a couple of those sample sizes from 7-Eleven) has barely been dented. Most were inhaled two months ago during nine days spent in an alcoholic fog in Mexico. It begs the time-honored question, one I’ve asked ever since I was old enough to buy a drink and mature enough to use a passport.

Why don’t Italian wines give me a headache while wines in the U.S. send me screaming to pharmacies?
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Calcata: A hill town in the clouds is a perfect artist’s landscape

Calcata has only 70 people but artists have been coming here since the 1970s.

I’ve visited Calcata four times. The experiences form a continuous loop in my mind when I think of the true Italy: Sitting at the end of a tiny alley, looking out over the cliff, talking to two long-haired artists who had dropped out of Rome’s rat race; munching paninos in a tiny but warm tea shop on a shivering cold winter morning; seeing the fresco Jimi Hendrix painted on an 18th century building; discussing life with a musician from his perch on a balcony overlooking Calcata’s tiny piazza; a congregation of purring cats rubbing against me in one of the town’s many dark corridors illuminated only by moonlight creeping through the roofs; waking up and looking DOWN at fog settling just below the treeline.
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Thanksgiving in Rome: Great food, great people, great turkey trot home

Peter Bloom and his wife Gretchen have been preparing Thanksgiving in Rome for the past 10 years.

In my previous stint in Rome in 2002, my then-girlfriend and I tried introducing our Italian friends to Thanksgiving. It was an absolute disaster. The turkey took three more hours to cook than we expected (our starving guests started gnawing on the furniture) and our oven could only handle one dish at a time. And have you ever seen chicory that’s been on a kitchen floor overnight? It looks like a snarl of black snakes. Last night I got invited to the Blooms, my dear retired friends from the Food & Agricultural Organization who have lived in Rome 17 years. They’ve done Thanksgiving dinner for the last 10. The people you meet in Rome is one of the most underrated aspects of living here and last night’s Thanksgiving was a smorgasbord of fascinating people. I met:
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The Permesso di Soggiorno: The quest in Italy for an immigrant’s holy grail

This prized possession allows me to be a legal resident of Italy for a year.

The source of my joy is a little 2 x 4-inch plastic card. It sits next to my laptop like a Bernini sculpture. It’s a Permesso di Soggiorno. That’s Italian for resident’s permit. It allows me to stay in Italy, legally, for another year. I no longer have to worry about a government paddy wagon hauling me into the back with a bunch of squatting West Africans and Albanians and deported in the hull of a slow freighter. I picked it up Tuesday morning, ending a process that took only two months. Keep in mind Italy is as famous for its non-functioning bureaucracy as it is for its pasta. The amount of red tape in this country could wrap around the Colosseum and make it look like a Christmas present. Getting legal in Italy is torture, and the Permesso di Soggiorno is the government’s version of waterboarding.
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Clubbing in Rome: The Piper still shaking its booty after nearly 50 years

Alessandro Castellani, Robert Della Vedova and me at Seventies Night at the Piper, a landmark since 1965.

Unlike Studio 54, which closed in 1991, the Piper is still around. It’s an unassuming place from outside. The name is lit up in red above a single door leading down two flights of stairs to a sprawling room the size of a small opera house. I took a long time walking down the stairs, not because my intense loathing for clubs made me feel as if I was descending into the Inferno of Italy’s greatest writer, Dante Alighieri. It’s just that I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures in the stairwell. There was Jimi Hendrix with his afro and microphone in hand. Tina Turner, when she was the appropriate age for her micro miniskirts, was dancing on stage. The Italian pop singer, Patty Pravo, whose iconic “La Bambola” (The Doll) helped me learn Italian in language school so many years ago, looked hotter than any of her American contemporaries. The Piper really is an institution. Unfortunately, it caved into 21st century marketing strategy and is now just another disco for Roman youth who think Jimi Hendrix is Germany’s goalkeeper.
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Cantina di Montefiascone is a wine outlet store off Rome’s oft-beaten path

Me and Alessandro Castellani with our loot for one of the cheapest wine and pasta stores in Italy.

I came to Montefiascone, home of EST! EST! EST!, one of the most intriguing white wines in Lazio. The story goes that in the 12th century, a German bishop about to visit the pope sent a high church official to Rome on a scouting mission to find the area’s best wines. When the prelate reached this village, now with only 13,700 thousand inhabitants, about 60 miles north of Rome, he found the best. To indicate where the bishop must stop, he wrote on doors “EST! EST! EST!” (Latin for “IT IS!”) Thus, the wine EST! EST! EST! was born.
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Rio Secreto underground river tour goes right through dark heart of Yucatan

Rio Secreto is 2 million years old and stretches 50 miles underground near Playa del Carmen.

Where I went yesterday there was no sun. There was no light. I walked, floated and swam through a half mile of pitch-black darkness while bending over to make sure my 6-foot-3 frame didn’t get gored by a million sharp stalactites. I did a tour of the Rio Secreto, one of the wildest river cruises in the world. The difference is you do it without a boat. It’s just you, a life vest, a wetsuit and a lighted helmet. That and a guide who stood between seven of us being hopelessly lost forever 60 feet underground.
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Chance encounter with monk brings opposites together to find the eternal truth

St. Peter's reach envelopes the Catholic world and the city of Rome.

I was coming back from a scambio, the Italian word for language exchange, near Piazza Navona when I crossed a street in Piazza Venezia next to a young man in a long black monk’s robe. We had to sprint to escape some mad speeding Italian. The monk said to me, “Stay behind me. I’ll get hit first.”

It was quite funny coming from a man who probably doesn’t hit too many comedy clubs. He was an American monk/priest from California finishing his fifth year of study in the Vatican. We had an interesting conversation.
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Tulum tour is 10-stop shopping for Mexican souvenirs

This temple was the center of Tulum's social and execution network from 1200-1500 AD.

Tulum isn’t what I expected. A couple years ago I went to Ek-Balam, a former seat of the Mayan kingdom north of here. That featured everything from living quarters to warehouses to an acropolis. Even though Ek-Balam’s influence faded later during the empire, I got a feel for what the complexity of a major Mayan city. At Tulum, the first thing we saw as we pulled into a parking lot was a souvenir emporium the size of Wal-Mart. Is there a country that has more souvenirs than Mexico? This place makes Rome look like a fishing village in Greenland. Mexico seems to have as many different brands of tequila as dirty T-shirt messages.
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