Eat, Pray, Love

wherever. To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More
beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way
as French women, which is to say—no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like
show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud. The men here, in their
beauty, force me to call upon romance novel rhapsodies in order to describe them. They are
“devilishly attractive,” or “cruelly handsome,” or “surprisingly muscular.”
However, if I may admit something not entirely flattering to myself, these Romans on the
street aren’t really giving me any second looks. Or even many first looks, for that matter. I
found this kind of alarming at first. I’d been to Italy once before, back when I was nineteen,
and what I remember is being constantly harassed by men on the street. And in the pizzerias.
And at the movies. And in the Vatican. It was endless and awful. It used to be a real liability
about traveling in Italy, something that could almost even spoil your appetite. Now, at the age
of thirty-four, I am apparently invisible. Sure, sometimes a man will speak to me in a friendly
way, “You look beautiful today, signorina,” but it’s not all that common and it never gets ag-
gressive. And while it’s certainly nice, of course, to not get pawed by a disgusting stranger on
the bus, one does have one’s feminine pride, and one must wonder, What has changed here?
Is it me? Or is it them?
So I ask around, and everybody agrees that, yes, there’s been a true shift in Italy in the
last ten to fifteen years. Maybe it’s a victory of feminism, or an evolution of culture, or the in-
evitable modernizing effects of having joined the European Union. Or maybe it’s just simple
embarrassment on the part of young men about the infamous lewdness of their fathers and
grandfathers. Whatever the cause, though, it seems that Italy has decided as a society that
this sort of stalking, pestering behavior toward women is no longer acceptable. Not even my
lovely young friend Sofie gets harassed on the streets, and those milkmaid-looking Swedish
girls used to really get the worst of it.
In conclusion—it seems Italian men have earned themselves the Most Improved Award.
Which is a relief, because for a while there I was afraid it was me. I mean, I was afraid
maybe I wasn’t getting any attention because I was no longer nineteen years old and pretty. I
was afraid that maybe my friend Scott was correct last summer when he said, “Ah, don’t
worry, Liz—those Italian guys won’t bother you anymore. It ain’t like France, where they dig
the old babes.”
Eat, Pray, Love