Living la vita trasloco

Xtina and I are in our final hours here in Monteverde. Yep, stiamo traslocando. Moving.

A single rep from the moving company arrived this morning, a massive Eastern European of indistinguishable nationality who's worked through the day, disassembling everything in a blur of quiet productivity. Leaving, he asks if he can come a half-hour earlier tomorrow to finish. Gotta love EU expansion!

Scanning the flat, we are in a strange place, technically it's still ours till Thursday, but it will be stripped bare in the next day. At the moment, boxes are piled to the ceiling and dust bunnies the size of Fiat Cinquecentos tumble down the halls, High Noon style. I better get the aspira polvera ready.

What does this all mean for Il Sette Bello readers? Readers should continue to communicate with us electronically. The physical post will be no better in Garbatella. Also, we will be vagabonds for the next, at a minimum, six weeks, which could explain the lack of posts. Oh, and it's summer too.

Rome, from pilgrimage to pub crawl

Once again Peter Kiefer at the Times writes a gem about life here in Rome, this time about those hard-drinking, hard-partying tourists who, to the chagrin of the locals, turn Campo dei Fiori and Trastevere into heaving party spots when the sun goes down. I've had a few drinks with Peter in Campo dei Fiori. He knows what he writes about.

Not sure I understand fully this quote though:


“Why would you come to Rome to drink beer when you can do that anywhere else in the world?” said Giuseppe Strappa, an architect and professor who has written extensively on the changing face of Rome’s historic center. “The value of Rome is its urban tissue.”

Urban tissue? Must be what the young clubbers are taking these days.

Recycled chic

A few weeks ago Xtina came back from the Philippines trailing a monster duffel bag filled with local handicrafts, the labor of some enterprising locals who live in extremely impoverished conditions. The crafts were put up for sale this weekend as part of a charity event for Xtina's NGO to raise some much-needed funds for these communities back home: financing things like school supplies (where there are schools).

The products were of a remarkably high quality. But that wasn't the real draw. The locals crafted the bags out of refuse. One woven bag was made of pages ripped from the phone book. If you looked hard, you could read off surnames, partial and whole, like "Cruz" and "Sant-something". Others were made from soda cans, juice packs and plastic shopping bags. Recyclable chic! I couldn't help but think these handbags would be all the rage in the funkier parts of Shoreditch and the East Village.

Not surprisingly, they sold pretty quickly to the trendy shoppers (and Luca). Here, the lovely Giulia models the juice pack bag:



and nostro Luca with the phonebook-weave bag, presumably a gift for one of his many admirers:



Please give a hand to our models. Che belli!

"Thought I'd seen it all in Rome until..." No. 38

Watching TV news last night. Rai 3. The news ticker is scrolling. Headline: "Climate: Hottest since 1298".

Perugia homage to "The Sopranos"

Within hours of the finale, city planners went to work renaming streets while locals now drop the last vowel on all meat products.