18 Hours in Rome

This one starts goofy and ends sad, just like my book!

If you offered me a million dollars to tell you what day of the week it is right now, I couldn’t do it. It’s Thursday! I just checked. This week has been a true whirlwind, aided by Aperol Spritzes, pasta, and extremely good-natured Italians. Major shout-out to Sabine and Daniela from Neri Pozza for being my friendly, generous companions, and for publishing this book so beautifully. Grazie mille!

First stop in Rome: artichoke heaven in the Jewish Ghetto. If I could eat this meal every single day, I would.

Cacio e pepe all day, baby. All day every day.

Daniela, me, two glasses of Prosecco, and one door that a poor guy had to literally climb over us to get into. Scusi! Mi dispiace!

Gelato in the piazza, a short poem. (That’s the whole poem.)

EXT. PANTHEON, NIGHT.

INT. PANTHEON, MORNING.

Good lord, Italy is full of beautiful places.

I had about an hour to walk around Rome—not enough time under any circumstances, but enough to admire the tenderness of tourists taking selfies, sit at a cafe table and watch the Taylor Swift video starring Books Are Magic Spokesman Mike Birbiglia, write postcards to my children, and listen to an Agatha Christie audiobook. Not bad.

Then it was many hours of interviews, interpreted (not translated, as an astute newsletter reader pointed out!) by the extremely chic Marina. This is my new friend Giuseppe, and the reason that he looks so frightened of me is that he just told me that he’s friends with Jhumpa Lahiri, and, well, you can see my Crazy Eyes. Poor Giuseppe is going to hire a security detail for Jhumpa the next time I’m in Italy.

This is what happiness looks like. This woman’s daughter stopped me as I was walking out of the hotel, said, my mother is wearing the same skirt, and when I tell you that this woman and I could have talked for hours, and that her twenty-something daughter rolled her eyes for the longest continuous period of time I have ever seen, with a life’s worth of impatience and love, man. It was beautiful.

I cried three times that day—twice during interviews, and once when I saw this, just behind where we were sitting, in the little hotel library. I’d been talking about grief and joy—or trying to talk about it, really, but unable to get through it without crying, and the poor Italian journalists didn’t seem to want to torture me the way that, say, Oprah or Barbara Walters might. But then the matching skirts, and this. One of the things that several of the journalists asked me on this trip—and on my US and UK book tours—was what day I would go back to, if I could, and every time I gave the same answer—I would go back to a family vacation, any of them, as they were all much the same. My brother always found a friend to play with, my mother was always busying around, playing tennis, probably organizing our whole lives, and my father and I would be sitting in lounge chairs by the pool, drinking Coca Cola, each of us with a stack of books beside us. I love thinking about how this copy of my father’s book made its way to Rome, if it was read sitting in a little cafe chair, maybe a father sitting next to his daughter, her with an Agatha Christie, just like me then, and just like me now. And then finishing the book (it’s a good one), and leaving it there in the hotel for its next person. Sometimes grief feels indistinguishable from luck.

That was a lot, so I’ll leave you with my pink dress, in a fancy bathroom in a fancy restaurant tucked inside a museum, and some cannolo.

Thank you again, Neri Pozza! And to all my other foreign publishers—look at all the fun we could have. Ciao for now, friends.