Last night at Thanksgiving dinner was when I was going to find out what an actual Italian pizza tasted like. Honestly, I didn't think they ate them here. I thought it was some kind of American abomination created by people pretending to be Italian. In fact, pizza shops are everywhere. The little sit-down restaurant where we went had the most amazingly thin crusted pizza, almost like a cracker. Mine was onions, sausage and cheese. Very nice, not covered in the typical red sauce we get in the USA. Across the street from our pizza restaurant was an Irish pub. Why? Because in Italy you need an Irish pub. Their menu was a little more mainstream for the English-speakers in Rome: Turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie. Not for us though. Not on this night. By the end we finished off 3 pitchers of wine and and nine individual pizzas - one for each person. They were the typical 12" personal pizzas, but served on metal pie pans with a delicious puddle of olive oil at the bottom. I won't tell you that it was better than a Thanksgiving Turkey, but with all the activities up to that point and all the hiking from one monument to the next that day, it was easy to lose track of the fact that this was actually Thanksgiving. Off we went then for the hotel. That is, until we spotted a pastry shop with chocolate tartufos in the window. What's a tartufo, you ask? Or rather, what "is" tartufo? Who cares? They were wonderful. It was wonderful... chocolate and ice cream with nuts and some sort of cake stuff underneath.
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San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains) in Rome sits on the end of a tedious trek on top of a hill not far from The Colosseum. We huffed, puffed and perspired (at the request of Deborah, my wife) up the final flights of stairs to the door, only to find that it closes from 12:30 to 3:00 (15:00). "Madonna Mia! It's only 20 minutes til 2:00!" We decided to find a spot to have some liquid refreshment, so we walked past the Universita' Degli Studi Di Roma "La Sapienza - Facoltà di Ingegneria" to a busy pizza shop and espresso bar. Espressos were 1 Euro if you stood at the bar, at least double if you sat on the patio. The rest of Deborah's family, the kids, their mom and grandma sat on the patio and ordered soft drinks - an expensive choice for five people. _We passed the time afterwards by visiting The Colosseum, another series of hills and steps. It was amazing and spectacular, as expected. Eventually, we worked our way back to St. Peter's, dodging Italian men dressed like gladiators goading us to have our pictures taken with them. They were convincing in their representation except for the occasional cell phone and stylish tattoo. Exterior of St. Peter in Chains St. Peter in Chains, from the outside, is a deceptively plain and unattractive place. It's difficult to imagine that there would be anything inside that you'd want to see - until you go inside. According to my wife Deborah, in the 70s, in the days of mini-skirts, she and her sister wanted to go inside St. Peter in Chains but were turned away more than once by the strict watchers of the front door. There was a dress code and a sign admonishing visitors to be respectful and descent in both their behavior and appearance. Her sister tried and tried to sneak in, eventually putting on an overcoat that covered her knees, skulking past the doorkeepers. A few steps inside, she suddenly found herself floating in mid-air. Perhaps it was the rapturous power of the space that enveloped her. Perhaps not. In actuality, it was two guards picking her and carrying her out the door as her feet wiggled underneath her. ("What's that? Oh... My wife just told me that happened at St. Peter's Basilica, not St. Peter in Chains. Oops.") This sausage shop in Piazza Campo de' Fiori had one of those, "Oh take a picture of me, I'm rustic," looks, so I did. Not until I poked my head inside did I realize what kind of world I'd entered. The smell of the prosciutto, sausages and salamis was something I'd never experienced before... a good smell, by the way. I wished I could have sniffed around some more, maybe bought something, but I had to find my wife and her family... eight of them, not including me. I snapped a quick shot of the interior of the Museum of Sausage and ran out, only to realize that I'd completely lost everyone. I had no idea where they'd gone in that few seconds that I took to snap the photo. We found each other eventually. The interior photo I'd taken was too blurry to use. Darn. Maybe I'll have to go back. Dodging scooters in Rome is an ongoing challenge. They're like insects. After a while you realize that they actually don't want to hit you. It's also illegal in most places to kill people with a motor vehicle. This particular guy was tame, and on short business trip.
Trevi Fountain is quite a gathering place, even in November. Most of the popular sites had a healthy police presence - Piazza Navona had two trucks, one a Land Rover type, the other a SWAT-type vehicle with slightly under a dozen serious looking young commando-type police. Trevi, on the other hand, had one lone cop strolling around chatting on a cell phone.
Standing in every possible spot to get a good picture, I walked down into the lower area closest to the water and noticed as I looked up at the crowd above me, that nearly every other person had a little spoon in their mouth having a taste of gelatto This was close to the Pantheon on the way to St. Peter in Chains when we walked past a couple of shops that sold priest-ware: crosses, cassocks, chalices, etc.
This one takes all major credit cards as you can see. I had a credit card but the store was closed. There was another store just around the corner that had an even more amazing array of raiment for religious events. I thought I'd post only the most trifling details of our trip to Italy and Croatia. Here's our first breakfast at the Hotel Ponte Sisto in Rome. I recommend this hotel, by the way. I'm neurotic about scrambled eggs, having been trained by my mother to make them nice and soft, carefully and slowly cooked. These were wonderful. The coffee was wonderful too; dark, dense.
Notice the prosciutto at nine o'clock in the photo. I had to try some, especially while in Italy. It was very tasty. If the only prosciutto a person ever had was from Trader Joe's, I could see not ever craving it. This, a person could crave. Two of my contemporaries within the last 12 hours have uttered the words, "Kids just don't get it," complaining that they (the kids) have no ethics or regard for art, education, the fundamentals of music.
Is that true or didn't I hear exactly the same thing from adults when I was a teenager? I've had a blog for about four years now. Not really for the purpose of blogging, Facebook seems to take care of the social interaction part of life, but simply for the purpose of experimentation. I was curious to see what a blog did and if I could set one up.
That blog eventually got buggy and failed, but that's OK since the only people, other than one old friend, that visited it were people trying to sell Viagra. So here we go again. |
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