I have a confession to make: I don’t love Rome. I respect Rome immensely, and always enjoy the majority of my visits there, but as yet the city hasn’t found a place in my heart the way cities like Venice and Florence have. Rome usually leaves me exhausted and overwhelmed, and in the past I’ve found it hard to locate those little quiet pockets where I can recuperate from the chaos of the city itself. That is, I hadn’t found a quiet pocket in Rome until my last trip, when I finally made my way to the Trastevere.
The Trastevere (tras-TEH-veh-reh) neighborhood in Rome is located on the opposite side of the Tiber river from the Roman Forum, just south of Vatican City. The name “Trastevere,” in fact, means “beyond the Tiber.” I’d heard travelers rave about it before, namely because it’s the place to go in Rome if you’re young and looking for cheap eats and good nightlife, but in previous visits I’d never made it over there. This time, however, after another glorious visit to St. Peter’s Basilica, I just walked along the Tiber until I got to the Trastevere neighborhood - and it was like a revelation.
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During my last trip to Italy I saw posters advertising upcoming concerts in various cities, many of which were already out of date or sold out. When I’m at home, I know where to look to find out if the musicians I like are on tour so I can contemplate forking over the obscene ticket prices to see them perform. In Italy, however, I had no idea how to do that, other than look individually at every artist’s website. Well, I may have found the answer. It’s called Pollstar, and it’ll tell you all about concerts in Italy.
With Pollstar, you simply put the name of the city you’ll be visiting in the “For” box in the upper left-hand corner of the page. (If you’re visiting more than one city, you’ll need to do this search multiple times.) Type the city name in with its English spelling (Venice instead of Venezia, for instance), and don’t worry about trying to type Italy or anything in. Doing that just confuses the system. You’ll be able to choose the proper city from a list on the next page.
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After seeing my post about the hottest Italian soccer players, a few of my male colleagues kept hinting that I should do a similar post about the hottest Italian WAGs (which is short for “wives and girlfriends”). See, I’m the only girl in the office, and the boys thought I should be more equal-opportunity in my posts about hotness. For awhile, I claimed that it was my blog, and I didn’t have to be equal opportunity. But I’m feeling rather generous today, so here are my picks for the hottest Italian WAGs - Italian women who are dating or married to soccer players.
I should note here, for those of you who aren’t so much into soccer (or football, if you’re anywhere outside the U.S.), that in many parts of the world the women who are married to the big players are almost as famous as the athletes themselves - and in some cases, more so. Soccer greats have a tendency to marry (or at least hang around with) women who are often photographed wearing little to no clothing, so you can see the appeal. At any rate, the good news for me in doing this post is that the folks over at The Offside Italy soccer blog have a long-running series on the WAGs of the guys who have played in Italy, so all I had to do was go through them and pick my favorites from among the women who are actually Italian themselves.
So, without further ado… And in no particular order…
Ilary Blasi - Blasi is also known as Mrs. Francesco Totti, and routinely ranks among the hottest soccer WAGs from any country. Since marrying Totti, Blasi has mainly been a wife and mother, but before that? Well, you need look no further than her former career as a model and showgirl to see that she had no aversion to being photographed in the nearly-nude. Blasi has had the honor of being the only woman featured three times on the Italy Offside in their regular WAG feature (here, here, and here), so I think that alone earns her a spot on my list. If that wasn’t enough for you, however, there are lots more images of her online.
Giorgia Palmas - Palmas is apparently dating Bologna’s Davide Bombardini, and despite her non-Italian sounding name, she was born on Sardinia. (Not that you care where she’s from, with all these nearly-naked pictures of her.) In 2000, Palmas suffered the heartbreak of only finishing #2 in the Miss World competition, but she’s recovered nicely with a career as a (surprise!) model and showgirl. She appeared twice on her own on the Italy Offside - here and here - and once with her BFF Elena Barolo (but you’ll have to scroll down for that gem).
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This addition to the Italy Q&A posts is an interesting one. In it, James wrote:
I am a high school teacher in Canada. I have been taking students to Italy every second year since 1997. I have developed a course titled “Cultural Tourism”. Students study the art, the architecture, the culture and the language prior to the trip. Students are currently learning basic Italian in preparation for the March 2009 trip.
On our last trip we visited Cassino War Cemetery. We placed flags at all 855 Canadian graves as well as wreaths at the 3 monuments and wreaths at 2 soldiers whose lives we had researched. This was an incredible experience for us as teachers but even more so for the students. They were astonished that so many soldiers buried there were not much older and in some cases their age.
The purpose of my email is to ask for help in finding information on self guided tours of the battle fields in the Liri Valley, especially around Pontecorvo and Aquino. This is the area where the 2 soldiers whom we have researched died May 1943. We cannot afford to pay a guide to lead us we will have a bus and would like to find some old fortifications in this region.
I have to say first of all, James, that by making these trips to Italy about more than just museums and architecture I’ll bet you’re really making them even more memorable experiences for your students. And on top of that, you’re helping to teach them about the cold realities of war, which can be tough to do.
As for your specific question about self-guided tours of the Liri Valley battlefields, I have to say that’s a bit of a conundrum. I don’t know the area myself, so I can’t write up a self-guided tour for you, unfortunately. I did find a few websites that make mention of the battlefields in the Liri Valley, however, and some of them have contact information which might get you more detailed answers, too.
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One of the biggest headaches about paying a visit to the Vatican Museums is that it’s often an all-day affair - and I’m just talking about the uber-long line you’ve got to wait in! So when I saw a link for a tour company that lets you book visits to the Vatican (among other sights in Rome) without needing to still stand in an hours-long line, needless to say I was skeptical… But intrigued.
Museum Rome is a company offering guided tours of Rome’s great tourist attractions, and the front page boasts that their service lets you “enter the Vatican City without the hussle [sic] to line up at the door.” Well, technically entering Vatican City doesn’t require you to line up, but I think I get their point. You can book a tour for your group, or join a tour as an individual, depending on the attraction. The tours I was particularly interested in learning about were the ones that included the Vatican Museums, and there are two of those - both include the Sistine Chapel in the package, but one is private and the other is a group tour.
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September in Italy is, at least so far, my favorite time of year to be in the country. You still get the after-effects of a hot August, but without the heatstroke-inducing temperatures; and while there will be crowds of people in even the second tier tourist attractions, there’s something about the color of the light when Summer is changing to Autumn… It’s hard to explain, but I know I’m not alone, because vacationing in Italy in September is really popular.
While the weather in Italy won’t be an issue for most of September, you can run into brief moments of less-than-perfect weather. During one mid-September visit to San Gimignano in Tuscany, after spending a glorious day driving from one unidentified tiny hilltown to another, I got caught in a sudden and fairly violent rainstorm back in San Gimignano - complete with thunder and lightning. It lasted throughout the evening and into the night (and I don’t mind admitting that I was a little nervous with all that lightning and all those city towers), but by the next day it was back to glorious weather. What I’m saying is that in September, you either have to be prepared for a downpour by having an umbrella with you, or you’ll end up like I did - running through the rain from restaurant to hotel, getting thoroughly soaked and laughing the whole way.
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Who says genetic flaws are inherently bad? This baby deer found in a park in Tuscany would be just one of the crowd if not for its genetic mutation - instead of two horns, this little fellow has one. And it’s smack dab in the center of its forehead, making it - sort of - a real-life unicorn.
The deer/unicorn in question can be found near Florence, in a Prato park called the Center of Natural Sciences, and it’s already attracting quite a bit of attention from the international media. The park …
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Some Italian news for your Sunday reading pleasure:
Remember the couple who was caught having oral sex in a cathedral confessional box? They’ve apologized to the archbishop, who accepted their apology.
Tom Hanks is in Rome at the moment, filming “Angels & Demons,” the prequel to Dan Brown’s hit “The Da Vinci Code.”
Apparently Italy can’t clean up its own trash - Germany is hauling 160,000 tons of the garbage in and around Naples back to Germany in order to incinerate it.
It’s official from the Guinness Records folks - Italy has created the world’s …
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It makes sense that now, at the beginning of the summer travel season in Italy, that there should be new reports released which list the environmental ratings of beaches in Italy. But what I can’t understand is why there’s a need for two completely different reports, and - even more confusing - why they’d come up with different results. Still, if you’re heading for the beaches of Italy this summer, you’ve got no excuse for not knowing which ones have been declared clean - here are the basics of each of the two reports, along with links where you can find out more.
Blue Flag Beaches
The first report was released by the Foundation of Environmental Education (FEE), which is an organization that inspects beaches all over Europe - not just Italy - and produces a report each year with a list of the beaches which have been determined to have clean water and sand. The criteria the FEE uses include water quality, environmental information, safety, cleanliness, and provisions for recycling. The FEE designates these beaches with blue flags, and in 2008, 104 beaches in Italy made the blue flag list.
Tuscany and Le Marche tied for the most blue flag beaches this year, with 15 each, followed by Liguria with 14, and Abruzzo with 13. One thing worth noting about the 2008 results is that there are 18 new beaches on the list which weren’t there in 2007, and 13 of those are in Central and Southern Italy, so it’s exciting to see environmental progress being made.
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Italy is, not surprisingly, a profoundly Catholic country - in name at least, if not in practice. The overwhelming majority of Italians self-identify as Catholics, although it’s a much smaller number who regularly attend any kind of church services. Still, when I’m told that one of the worst Italian swear words is “porco dio” (coupling the words “pig” with “god”), I know that it doesn’t matter how religious the Italians are in practice - the Catholic church is still central to the Italian identity.
So, you can imagine the consternation when a couple was discovered in a cathedral in the …
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