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When you accept a ride home from a mad scientist with green hair and covered in fake blood, you have to be a little dense if you think it’s going to be an uneventful ride. We’d already dropped off my future employer who had been crouched in the trunk (it was one of those two…

At the end of every month I’d ask Larry if he wanted to settle up. I was recording every client, every ticket, every time I collected, every time I didn’t, setting aside what I was owed from what I had to return to Larry in envelopes of cash tucked into my bookshelf. But he always…

When I gave my first tour seven years ago, it was of the Roman Forum and Colosseum… a two hour “highlights” tour for which I had studied excessively for the previous six months. I listened to podcasts, I read books, I triangulated information and I went on tours with other guides repeatedly until I felt…

In the beginning … everything was cash, tickets and texts.   Larry was in with all the concierges on Via Veneto. This winding boulevard sweeps down from the Porta Pinciana (one of the entrances in the 3rd century Aurelian Walls) to the Piazza Barberini below with its splashing Bernini fountain and gleaming white Barberini palace. The street…

In year three, around the time I moved into apartment number two thousand, I got the whiff of an opportunity for a job that sounded like it combined things I loved (art and history) and things that terrified me in the way other people are terrified of finding a large spiders in their bed (public…

“Can I be honest with you?” Let’s face it, you always want to answer “No” to this question. But you can’t. The only suitable response is, “Oh, of course!” Then one must sit there. Smiling. Holding ones breath. Thinking: Oh, shit. “I don’t think you have what it takes…” My unsolicited observer swiveled the straw…

It felt like falling off a cliff, so abrupt, almost terrifying, was the change in my life. Black and white to color TV. Darkness to light. Depression to dream. When they say, “it seems too good to be true,” they’re talking about situations like this one. At the end of my second year in Rome…

Sometimes you meet people and have no idea that they will change your life. You look back later, shaking your head at how unsuspecting you were with the arrogant wisdom of hindsight. Other times, you meet someone that immediately moves you. You register the shift on a physical level before your brain can catch up.…

The next “season” of Laurenissima begins where all good stories do: at rock bottom. If “happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” then a story containing a bit of hardship and general misery usually makes for good reading (thanks for the pointer, Tolstoy). Year two of life…

In that first year living in Rome I wondered: when will I feel like I belong here? Maybe when I master the language. When I have more Italian friends. When I have my visa. When the country grants me a permit to stay. When I have a job with a contract. I didn’t know it…