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.

Rome’s criminal history goes back farther than any other civilization this side of Greece. The Ancient Romans had their own form of punishment. The Emperor Diocletian killed 17,000 in the Colosseum in one month. Caesar Augustus, considered one of the most popular emperors in Rome history, killed 10,000. They covered Christians with pitch, stick them on giant stakes high in the air in the middle of the Colosseum and set them on fire. They were considered the first “night games” in sport history. The Christians burned incense to erase the stench.

The Hash House Harriers bills itself as “A Drinking Club with a Running Problem.” They meet every Sunday for what’s a combination run/scavenger hunt through parts of the city you’ll never find in “Lonely Planet.” Everyone has punted their Christian names long ago. They are given “hash names,” all based on embarrassing pratfalls, obvious physical abnormalities and just plain dumb luck. That’s why I wasn’t startled when a French woman in the group approached me, held out her hand and said, “Hello. Eatamypussy.”

I took a bar stool and sipped a larcenously priced 6-euro pint of Nastro Azzuro the young American bartender seemed almost embarrassed to price for me. Watching football in foreign countries is foreign in more ways than one. You get the curious, not the fanatic. Rome is filled with American exchange students. One salivating male art student explained to a ditzy blonde in tight, TIGHT leather pants the rules of American football. She was not Italian. I think she was Californian.

Cell phones are as much a part of Italians’ lives as pasta. They’re connected to their ears like a growth. Land lines went out in Italy about the time of chariot races and cells, or cellulari as they’re called here, have become their lifeline. Italians have the fourth highest usage per capita in Europe (If you care, Lithuania is first), with 1,346 cell phones for every 1,000 people. Yes, that’s right. Italians even have backups.