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I needed to make some friends. So I got busy with it, and now it is October and I have a
nice assortment of them. I know two Elizabeths in Rome now, besides myself. Both are Amer-
ican, both are writers. The first Elizabeth is a novelist and the second Elizabeth is a food
writer. With an apartment in Rome, a house in Umbria, an Italian husband and a job that re-
quires her to travel around Italy eating food and writing about it for Gourmet, it appears that
the second Elizabeth must have saved a lot of orphans from drowning during a previous life-
time. Unsurprisingly, she knows all the best places to eat in Rome, including a gelateria that
serves a frozen rice pudding (and if they don’t serve this kind of thing in heaven, then I really
don’t want to go there). She took me out to lunch the other day, and what we ate included not
only lamb and truffles and carpaccio rolled around hazelnut mousse but an exotic little serving
of pickled lampascione, which is—as everyone knows—the bulb of the wild hyacinth.
Of course, by now I’ve also made friends with Giovanni and Dario, my Tandem Language
Exchange fantasy twins. Giovanni’s sweetness, in my opinion, makes him a national treasure
of Italy. He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frus-
trated with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm
and said, “Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.”
Sometimes I feel like he’s older than me, what with his solemn brow and his philosophy de-
gree and his serious political opinions. I like to try to make him laugh, but Giovanni doesn’t al-
ways get my jokes. Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you’re as
serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, “When you are ironic, I am
always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder.”
And I thought, Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and I am the steel! Bring to me your
leather, take from me my lace!
But still, he has not kissed me.
I don’t very often see Dario, the other twin, though he does spend a lot of his time with
Sofie. Sofie is my best friend from my language class, and she’s definitely somebody you’d
want to spend your time with, too, if you were Dario. Sofie is Swedish and in her late twenties
and so damn cute you could put her on a hook and use her as bait to catch men of all differ-