I wrote the orig­i­nal out­line for this post over the Atlantic, but I didn’t find the time to actu­ally com­plete it until now. Two months later. This is just a bunch of assorted things I found inter­est­ing, intrigu­ing, or just plain weird about Italy.

• Cats. Cats were very much fed and cared for by the com­mu­nity. The Lago Argentina in the mid­dle of Rome was a cat sanc­tu­ary that con­tained a large amount of what we might call street cats. Here large felines, scarred by count­less bat­tles, lived amongst ancient tem­ple ruins. They are cared for by a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion. Early Sun­day morn­ing in Peru­gia we looked over a rail­ing to see a mid­dle aged man feed­ing around 8 very grate­ful cats, and he seemed famil­iar with each one, yet they did not appear to be “his” pets. Even in a lit­tle town on the Amalfi Coast, where the only access was thou­sands of stairs and no cars existed, there was a sin­gle cat hang­ing out in the lit­tle area out­side the church.
• Dogs. Much like their feline com­pan­ions, dogs were inde­pen­dent minded. Well fed dogs could be seen in the ruins and through­out Rome, but were rare as pets. The canines I did notice which seemed to be fam­ily pets roamed freely through­out the streets, only occa­sion­ally both­er­ing to check on their owner. Leashes seem to be an unknown item!
• National Mil­i­tary Police Force. In a con­cept for­eign to many Amer­i­cans, Italy is pri­marly policed by a sin­gle national arm of the mil­i­tary known as the Cara­bineri. They are a heav­ily armed force with an omnipresent deploy­ment strat­egy. Every town, from Rome to remote moun­tain vil­lages, have local Cara­bineri posts. This highly mech­a­nized force uses equip­ment rang­ing from Land Rovers, trans­port trucks, to attack heli­copters in enforc­ing Ital­ian law. The sol­diers (police?) them­selves are armed with sub­ma­chine guns, rifles, and full bat­tle armor.
• Emer­gency Vehi­cles. Sirens are much dif­fer­ent. Instead of the whooooooOOOOOOOooooooo style of police, fire, and med­ical emer­gency ser­vices in the states, they have a tone that is more of a low noise with a two tone war­ble. It’s almost like a siren ver­sion of bag­pipes. This noise is very effec­tive at get­ting your atten­tion, because it’s unnat­ural, but is not that par­tic­u­larly loud, whereas state­side vehi­cles  require much louder noise lev­els. Fur­ther­more, sirens are more of rec­om­men­da­tions for dri­vers, who usu­ally attempt to get out of the way, and don’t pull over to the side of the road. Finally, you see “lights on” emer­gency respon­ders much less often, for what­ever reason.
• Chil­dren and Play­grounds. Our Ital­ian teacher said that Italy has a neg­a­tive birthrate, and that Ital­ians, while usu­ally not hav­ing chil­dren in the city, do very much enjoy the pres­ence of chil­dren. Not many chil­dren were present in Rome proper, but it’s still a sight to see there is a fam­ily with kids. They’re the most pop­u­lar thing around. And play­grounds? Well, they don’t exist.
• Parks. As one would expect for a city that pre­dates the year zero, urban plan­ning and green spaces are basi­cally non-existent. Find­ing a tree or spot of grass at street level is a rare find in most parts of Rome. Most of the veg­e­ta­tion  is on the out­skirts of town or on the rooftops.
• Toi­lets. The bath­room sit­u­a­tion is a lot bet­ter than many may imply. Most toi­lets in restrooms that you would find in hotels, restru­ants, and pay pub­lic stalls are of the typ­i­cal sit-down type of which we are so famil­iar with. The only major dif­fer­ence is that the water lev­els are extremely low, only a few inches from the bot­tom of the bowl. Find­ing out the flush­ing mech­a­nism, how­ever, is a dif­fer­ent story. They can be found at foot level, on the toi­let itself (rare), or some­where else in the restroom. And usu­ally there are a few but­tons that will send out dif­fer­ent amounts of water. The infa­mous “holes” we encoun­tered only once, at the train sta­tion in Perugia.
• Police Party Pun­tos. In case you weren’t famil­iar with the model, a Fiat Punto is a very small and com­pact auto­mo­bile. They are not par­tic­u­lary notable, except for the often sight of see­ing a Cara­bineri dri­ving one around with lights and sirens. I’ve seen five mil­i­tary police head­ing off to some dis­tur­bance in these tiny cars… it was quite sim­i­lar to a clown car as far as fit­ting them all in was con­cerned. On another occa­sion I saw one Cara­bineri dri­ving around what appeared to be his friends around town. Hmmmm…
• Car Size. Speak­ing of cars, the size of cars was extremely small. You did not see trucks or SUVs, but instead lots of Smart Cars, Pun­tos, and other autos of sim­i­lar dimen­sions. Once glance at the city streets made the rea­son for this abun­dantly clear–there was sim­ply no room for larger cars to park, drive through, or even move.
• Ital­ian Urban Plan­ning. Is not a phrase com­monly used or thought, I sus­pect. As with most older cities, there is no coher­ent plan for streets, thor­ough­fares, or any sort of sense in get­ting peo­ple from one place to another with any par­tic­u­lar effi­ciency. Wind­ing cob­ble­stone streets will sud­denly open up and inter­sect with a 6 lane artery through­out town.
• Pedes­tri­ans. In the nar­row streets, cars and pedes­tri­ans will be shar­ing the same space, as side­walks are not found on these roads. Pedes­tri­ans are expected to move out of the way when a car moves, and are expected to clear the road quite quickly, as the car is often careen­ing down the nar­row streets. When cross­ing a busy 6 lane road, pedes­tri­ans should not rely on traf­fic lights, as they usu­ally don’t exist. I learned to be fear­less and just start walk­ing out into traf­fic, since this is the only way Ital­ian dri­vers will stop for peo­ple cross­ing the street.
• Water. Rome is the city of water, and it is a cel­e­brated resource. Foun­tains are plen­ti­ful, and water is con­tin­u­ally run­ning from spig­ots and faucets. Once you have a water bot­tle, you won’t need to buy any more water, as the water flow­ing from the foun­tains in any city or town is drink­able and won­der­fully refreshing.
• Exact Change, Please. At the mar­ket where we usu­ally shopped, there was this one clerk who always expected us to have exact change ready imme­di­ately upon ring­ing up the total. I actu­ally think she expected us to add every­thing up in advance an just be ready to pro­duce the change. When­ever we didn’t have exact change, which was often, she would often scowl and reluc­tantly accept our inex­act amount.
• Ruins, Ruins every­where. I don’t think I was pre­pared for the amount of ruins that Rome con­tained. It was quite lit­er­ally filled with them. An old struc­ture thou­sands of years that would be a national trea­sure in most parts of the world were almost neglected and ignored in many sit­u­a­tions. You would often just turn the cor­ner into some old exca­va­tion site.
• Tourist Sea­son. We arrived dur­ing the end of tourist sea­son, and got to watch as the city turned back into a place for Romans. The natives were return­ing from their hol­i­days at the coast, and sou­venir stands, ven­dors, and entire attrac­tions such as the Traste­vere party along the river just dis­ap­peared. As the tourists left, it was an inter­est­ing exer­cise see­ing as the qual­ity of food went up, they cared more about the pre­sen­ta­tion, and the sou­venir carts thank­fully bid their farewell until the next spring!
• Fruit Qual­ity. The fruit is gen­er­ally not as fresh as in the United States, but the toma­toes and basil were the excep­tion. Both were out­stand­ingly fresh and good, which is not entirely a surprise.
• McDon­alds. Yes, they do exist.
• Mex­i­can Food. Does not exist.
• Trains. The train net­work is one that I’m very jeal­ous of. Their “milk trains” were well over 100mph, quite well fur­nished, and very rea­son­ably priced. Trains left often, towns were well con­nected, and choices plen­ti­ful. Seats were not reserved for the slow trains, but for the other two classes of trains, Innercity and Eurostar, seats were reserved and the com­part­ments com­fort­able. The extra bump in price is well worth it after a long week­end of explor­ing and you just want a place to set­tle down in some com­fort­able seats and cruise to Rome in style.
• Campo Char­ac­ters. Since our apart­ment was on the 1^st floor over­look­ing the Campo, and because as a result of this we spent much of our free time around the Campo, we became quite acquainted with some of the local char­ac­ters. Every morn­ing we would awake to That God­damned Prego Guy, who had a cart every morn­ing right in front of our apart­ment sell­ing lemonchello. His trade­mark was the very loud and annoy­ing “PREGO FREE TASTE HELLOOOO” every 14 sec­onds, begin­ning at 6am. He became an object of hate amongst the Campo dewllers, and we secretly wished he would explode or some­thing. One of our fel­low res­i­dents said that he got the sense that the other ven­dors nearby were begin­ning to become hos­tile to his loud and annoy­ing ways. Another Campo denizen was The Mime. The Mime would appear at night when the ven­dors left and the campo opened up for evening relax­ation. He would appear with his lit­tle speaker on a cart, and would always lay out a piece of car­pet before begin­ning this oddly sooth­ing musi­cal trance/yoga CD. The only prob­lem is that we had no idea what he was mim­ing, despite view­ing his rou­tine approx­i­mately 40 times. This annoyed us, but we found his music sooth­ing and his very poor mim­ing eas­ily ignored. Late at night the Creepy Mouse Dude would creep out of the shad­ows. He would walk around with a fake mouse on a stick and a whis­tle in his mouth, and gen­er­ally act creepy towards females a third of his age. One day we heard this won­der­ful rhyth­mic drum­ming and flutes play­ing, and the Fun Cultists showed up! They wore the cult cloth­ing so often stereo­typed, passed out lit­tle pieces of paper, and gen­er­ally looked like they were hav­ing way too much fun.

That’s about it for my thoughts and obser­va­tions that I didn’t really men­tion in my pre­vi­ous posts. If you have any­thing you might be curi­ous about, feel free ask in the com­ment section.

In other news, I uploaded my edited pic­tures from the trip, you can view them at the link below.

Italy Photo Album