italy.gifAfter have been to San Francisco for christmas and Paris for easter, and this past weekend celebrating my dad’s 60th birthday in Rome; I can comfortable say — Rome is something else.

Surely I can’t objective enough, since I’m half Italian, but to me Rome has something special about it. Might be the atmosphere, the culture, the wether, the food, or; like Willow said — that they basically started the west world civilization. Not many country’s can say they are famous for their:

  • food
  • fashion
  • ice cream
  • cheese
  • car
  • motorcycles
  • football
  • coffee
  • wine
  • shoes
  • empire
  • historical monuments
  • architecture
  • art
  • sculpture
  • big noses, hairy armpits and anything else I might have forgotten

So, if you haven’t been to Rome — please just go.

The weekend has been, as you might have understood; very very nice. As normal a lot of time is spend around the dinner table. Willow made a good observations on one of the reasons why, in Italy, you can spend 3-4 hours around the dinner table.

We went to two very nice restaurant, one for Saturday dinner and one for Sunday lunch. I wish I could share the location or the name of these restaurant, but to be honest I don’t have a clue. They were both situated on the outskirts of Rome, off a small road on a hill, far from truism. One feature with these restaurants, that I really appreciate (which is also quite common in Italy) was; no menus. They waiter just comes out and have a dialogue with the table and the food gets ordered.

Four observations:

  1. the Bulgari store, by piazza di spagna, makes the next store stores; Prada, Gucci, Dior etc, look as pretentious as a local Tesco’s.
  2. having an english speaking girlfriend, a swedish mom and native tough, in the surrounding of Italian relatives is not easy (quite often I find my self stumble over my own tough).
  3. “is quite amazing how mechanics mimic the personality of a culture”, says Willow as the train doors slams shut
  4. (damn, I forgot one… Im sure I had four…)

If you head over to Willows flickr page you can see some photos taken during the weekend. And with that I say; arrivederci.