Rome If You Want To...

The following is an e-mail I sent to family and friends during my May 2005 trip to Italy and Sicily.

Ciao Amici!

Warm - make that hot, very hot - greetings from Italy, where the Atkins diet has not quite caught on yet. I swear, trying to find a salad here is like a detour challenge straight out of The Amazing Race. I can just hear host Phil Keoghan say: "Teams must now navigate the hot, narrow streets of Rome in search of fresh lettuce... the last team to find it will be eliminated."

Here is my interpretation of the Italian food pyramid:

                                                      Gelato
                                           Espresso/Cappuccino
                                      B r e a d / R o l l s / P i z z a
                                  P          A          S          T          A

As for the transportation, since we've been here, there has been a train strike, a vaporetto strike (those are the water buses in Venice) and believe it or not, they discovered a WW2 bomb under the train tracks between Rome and Naples which forced us to take a different train - the slowest train in the world. It made Muni (SF) seem like Nascar. After sitting still on the tracks for most of the day, we finally started moving... backwards. Ah, all in a day's travel in Italy!

Anyway, I'm probably making it sound much worse than it's actually been. Highlights of the trip so far include flying over the Dolomites and having an aerial view of Venice before landing at Marco Polo airport, being invited into the home of a little old Italian woman for a cold drink in Burano, being flashed by a young man in the very same Burano, driving through Rome at night listening to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time", and seeing the new Pope, Papa Benedetto, in St. Peter's Square.

I didn't think I would be that excited to see him because he isn't John Paul II, but for one thing, from where we were standing they look exactly the same! And besides, when he came out and zoomed around the square in his Pope-mobile, organ music blasting and people going crazy - it was like being at a rock concert. Popestock, I guess.

The very next night my Mom was driving around Rome with a friend when they were stuck in a traffic jam caused by the Pope's procession. Looking out the window she saw a bunch of people standing around by the car waiting for the jam to clear, and one of them was actor Willem Dafoe! So she rolled down the window and said, "Se grande!" - "You're great!" and he shook her hand. So there you go, she saw the Pope AND Jesus while in Rome.

Anyway, I didn't think that could be topped, but it was - two nights later in Capua, an area outside of Naples where part of my family comes from. We have been staying with a friend of my Mom's, and we actually had the chance to chat with my Dad via webcam from here to Ontario, NY. I'll bet my ancestors could have never imagined that happening in their wildest dreams! (And props to my Dad for handling those Mary Kay orders while my Mom is out of the country.)

This just in... I just got back from dinner where I finally managed to get a salad... of course it was on top of a pizza, but one can't be picky. The girl next to me got a pizza that was COVERED in french fries. South Beach it ain't.

Alright, I have to get going... I'm exhausted, I have mosquito bites on my face and cappuccino stains on my jeans. Tomorrow we're off to Capri and after that it's on to Sicily! I'll see if I can find a copy of the Sicilian food pyramid, but I have a feeling it looks something like a bunch of stacked cannoli.

As I used to say in the 4th grade,
Ciao for now!
Love,
Tootsie