Eat, Pray, Love

23 Yesterday afternoon I went to the soccer game with Luca Spaghetti and his friends. We were there to watch Lazio play. There a ...

eccola, ecco—AAAHHHHHHHHH!!! VAFFANCULO!!! FIGLIO DI MIGNOTTA!! STRONZO! CAFONE! TRA-DITORE! Madonna... Ah, Dio mio, perché, per ...

bakery. A small, innocuous bakery hidden in a basement in a nondescript district in Rome. The place was crowded that Sunday nigh ...

24 I am learning about twenty new Italian words a day. I’m always studying, flipping through my index cards while I walk around ...

“Sometimes people live there for years,” I said. In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L’ho provato sulla mi ...

25 There’s a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing against each other to see who shall em ...

gio paintings always make me feel weepy and overwhelmed, but I cheer myself up by moving to the other side of the church and enj ...

izens, and it would take almost twenty centuries before Rome ever recovered the population she had boasted during her height of ...

26 I had shipped ahead a box of books to myself, right before I left New York to move to Italy. The box was guaranteed to arrive ...

“Maybe it will be here next week?” I ask her in Italian. She shrugs: “Magari.” Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, mean ...

27 I met a young Australian girl last week who was backpacking through Europe for the first time in her life. I gave her directi ...

such a gang of tough-voiced, loud-mouthed, generous, nosy dames, all bossy and annoyed and right up in your face and just trying ...

bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stock- holm?” Pizzeria da Michele is a sma ...

ings and my overindulgences, as if to say, “OK, kid, live it up, I recognize that this is just tem- porary. Let me know when you ...

28 It is this happiness, I suppose (which is really a few months old by now), that gets me to thinking upon my return to Rome th ...

This is how it looked to me, anyway, taking into account that nobody (and especially not the children) ever knows the secrets of ...

“And you have to understand how much I love your father,” she concluded. My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, ...

around the world in simple exchange for the keys to David’s apartment. But around ten o’clock that night, I finally get my answe ...

Poor Giovanni! He asks in halting English if he did something wrong. Am I mad at him, maybe? Did he hurt my feelings? I can’t an ...

It’s a reminder—when you’re making a big deal out of explaining something, when you’re searching for the right words—to keep you ...