Roman (mini) Holiday
Europeans know how to holiday...and never miss an opportunity to practice their skill. I was excited to hear that my new employer starts everyone with four weeks of vacation. By American standards, it's a liberal allotment, which I intend to do my damndest to exploit. Europeans, on the other hand, would scoff at the horror of only having 20 vacation days per year. "You mean 20 days plus all of August?" they might ask. To understand this sense of relaxation entitlement and get some hints on how to use my four weeks, I decided to visit the heart of European R&R, Italy -- where the average worker gets more than seven weeks vacation -- on what turned out to be the first great beach weekend of the year.

Have you ever been to a city twice and experienced it completely differently the second time? Heather and I traveled to Rome a handful of years ago. We gaped at the Colliseum, craned our necks in the Sistine Chapel, strolled around the fountains of the Campo di Fiore, marveled at how every piece of architecture was more than a thousand years old, and watched an ailing Pope struggle to lift his chin off his chest while presiding over mass at St Peter's. We were Americans in a foreign land, hiding our Rick Steves' guide while treading lightly in anything but the sort of sneakers that shout, "Americans coming!" And it was great. But this time, I saw a Rome that doesn't know Rick Steves, the Rome that Romans call home -- courtesy of two of the city's adopted citizens, my old pal Bernhard, a gravelly-voiced, quick-with-a-smile Italophile from Jersey and his charming bride-to-be, Christina, who hails from Perugia.

I traveled on Ryanair from a small airport in the general proximity of London to its equivalent on the outskirts of the Italian capital. That's what Ryanair does. They fly you for dirt-cheap from somewhere in the vicinity of where you are to somewhere in the vicinity of where you want to be. You're only allowed one bag, the seats don't recline, and the flight attendants try to sell you everything short of their own mothers ("Ladies, do you want your man to smell like David Beckham? Then buy him David Beckham's INSTINCT from the Ryanair saver cart for only 17 pounds sterling!"). It's not the sort of treatment anyone could handle for more than a couple hours at a time. But that's the beauty of Europe -- everything is within a few hours by air of wherever you happen to be.

Bernie and Xtina (as she's affectionately referred to on the Internet) picked me up at the airport and gave me a Roman's tour of the city -- which is to say, perpetually lost, heart-stoppingly close to a car on every side, always in danger of ramming a scooter that just ran a red light, and waving it all off with a hand gesture that, conveniently, doubles for Mangia! First stop, an amazing little restaurant where no one speaks English, everyone goes "off the menu" (because there isn't one), and the fresh pasta only just covers a bowl full of off-the-boat muscles, clams, calamari, and fresh tomatoes. We awoke the next morning early to make the trek to Saubadia, a Meditteranean beachtown about halfway to Naples, where we met up with Stefano, Lara, and Davide. Davide loves gelato and has a 3-year-old's preternatural ability to repeat everything, such as the time he recently said to his shocked grandmother, "Grandma, today is a good day to die" (from "Little Big Man"). We retired to Stefano's parents' beach house, where Bernhard stoked the fire and grilled a couple of sea bass and we watched the Italy-US world cup match on a TV about the size of a video ipod. The US team refused to lose and Bernhard, Xtina and I barely managed to escape the tiny town of Italian flags and airhorns.

Day three brought bikes in the park, a trip to the largest of the city's catacombs (the dead cities beneath Rome), where 500,000 Christians were buried, a few bottles of wine at casa Bernie/Xtina and another wonderful meal, over which we debated the merits of French cuisine (great sauce designed to merely cover up an inattention to the actual ingredients, Bernie argued, while Xtina nodded approvingly), versus an Italian's religious attention to the actual ingredients and active avoidance of any sort of sauce that would detract from the flavor of the dish itself. (With a sidebar on the curious notion of truffle-covered sushi.) I'm not wholly convinced of the argument, and fully intend to empirically test it over the next few weeks. But for now, I was happy to go along for the rhetorical ride -- and it's not like I could have argued with all that fresh pasta and Italian wine in my mouth. When in Rome...