Eat, Pray, Love

29 My sister’s arrival in Rome a few days later helped nudge my attention away from lingering sadness over David and bring me ba ...

pion. She answered the phone in the middle of the night whenever I was in distress and made comforting noises. And she came alon ...

“See, Liz?” she says, “See how they just slapped that nineteenth-century façade over that brickwork? I bet if we turn the corner ...

ter in prayer again later that same day—when she drops to her knees in the middle of the Ro- man Forum, clears away some litter ...

30 I am so surprised sometimes to notice that my sister is a wife and a mother, and I am not. Somehow I always thought it would ...

Who would financially support the babies? Who would feed the babies in the middle of the night? I remember saying once to my fri ...

In the end, though, I was most guided by something my friend Sheryl said to me that very night at that very party, when she foun ...

interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous. I’m lucky that at least I have my writing. This ...

31 Over the next six weeks, I travel to Bologna, to Florence, to Venice, to Sicily, to Sardinia, once more down to Naples, then ...

32 Florence is just a weekend, a quick train ride up on a Friday morning to visit my Uncle Terry and Aunt Deb, who have flown in ...

I don’t recall now if it was before or after Lucca that I went to Bologna—a city so beautiful that I couldn’t stop singing, the ...

I can speak this language! The kid thinks I like him, but it’s the words I’m flirting with. My God—I have decanted myself! I hav ...

The whole town is peeling and fading like those suites of rooms that once-rich families will barricade away in the backs of thei ...

Paul’s Veal Sticks?” She is a firefly, this Linda. In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a c ...

33 I step off the train a few days later to a Rome full of hot, sunny, eternal disorder, where—immediately upon walking out into ...

“What do you mean?” He said, “Don’t you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn—what is the word ...

I asked Giulio, “What’s the word in Naples?” He knows the south of Italy well. “FIGHT,” he decides. “What was the word in your f ...

Out on the street after my delirious hours of lingerie shopping, I remembered this line and repeated it to myself in a whisper: ...

34 Luca Spaghetti’s birthday falls this year on America’s Thanksgiving Day, so he wants to do a turkey for his birthday party. H ...

World War II. The Romans were shocked by these deaths and the city closed down the day the boys were buried. The wide majority o ...