Trastevere travails

This morning while putting out today’s garbage – plastic, cans and glass –  on the street as required, I checked out the compost bin inside our building and yet once again found that someone had dumped a bag of unseparated garbage, ignoring the bilingual warnings not to discard anything there but food remains. No plastic. […]

The Metro C – a work (very, very slowly) in progress

  Well, I hope you all have a lot of patience (and a lot of lifetime left) because the latest reports say that the Coliseum metro station that will allow the new Rome subway C line (see the Green line above)  to bring people to the Roman Forums and to intersect with the older B […]

No smoking in Rome’s parks this summer. Right or wrong? Useful or not?

My favorite mayor, the generally-inept Ignazio Marino, may win kudos from environmentalists now that he has ordered anything involving fire – barbecues, firecrackers, explosives and now pipes, cigars and cigarettes – to be banned from all of Rome’s parks this summer. The barbecues were already off bounds last summer, as were fires set to burn […]

Are there any dress codes in Rome?

  Have a look around and the answer (a resounding “no) will become immediately clear. Some time ago, Romans, and many other Italians as well, decided to emulate us Americans and go casual, and they have done so with a vengeance, although men and women have chosen different routes (more about the ladies in a […]