Street Benches: Monteverde

Public housing projects exist in almost every neighborhood beyond the historic center, thereby creating mixed communities of rich and poor, ...

The Asphalt Jungle: Rome's Sidewalks

Rome has lousy sidewalks.  Yes, sidewalks.  Americans may be shocked to learn that sidewalks are not the same world wide (as if RST could c...

Late-breaking news: Nanni Moretti in Scooter Accident

We interrupt our coverage of one Moretti (Luigi) to bring you this bulletin on another (Nanni - no relation).  Back to Luigi in a couple of ...

The Streets of Rome: Made for Walking

....me and Mamie O'Rourke Tripped the light fantastic On the sidewalks of New York Some 115 years after they were written, these lines f...

Not Quite a Christmas Story: A Bar and a Church

In the early years of the last century, a Roman family bought a nice piece of land in Monteverde Vecchio, then sparsely developed.  They hop...

The "Retro Snobs" find themselves with the "in" crowd (and where to find a good lunch)

We’ve been called a lot of things, but “retro snobs” may be the best fit. Imagine our shock – and delight – to find that the tiny no-one-kno...

The Curves of Modernism

We're admirers of curvilinear modernism, a 20th-century architectural style that combines the ordered discipline of pure rationalism wi...

Monteverde Stories 1: Skyscrapers, Devil Woman, School Tragedy

In April, when we first scootered down the hill from our Monteverde Nuovo apartment on Piazza Madonna della Salette, and around the big, gen...

Obamamania Italian style

Russians may be cool about him, but Italians are crazy for Obama, in our experience. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (he of the gaffes and ...