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Giving private English lessons was a revelation in how wealthy Roman families lived. Packed onto buses, shoulders weighed down with books, dice, cards, worksheets, puppets in some cases, we nodded hello to doormen, ran up marble stairs, looked at ourselves in elevator mirrors surrounded by velvet and met a lot of Filippina nannies and a…

You might consider yourself a spiritual or a religious person, someone who thinks the Universe or God or some cosmic energy is guiding you down a path. Or maybe you feel signs are not connected to a higher power and you are simply noticing patterns in the fabric of the world around you that seem…

How can I phrase this… I’m bad with languages. Even my own. Inept might be a good word. Perhaps even terrible. In school I wasn’t troubled by getting good grades. Calculus? No problem. Art history? A+. Physics: Let’s go. But languages aren’t like any of the other subjects. It’s not about memorization, tests or critical…

I mentioned in my first “Laurenissima” post that my Roman boyfriend Dario had “tried” to break up with me days after I’d moved to Rome. We’d met during my semester abroad in Italy over one and a half years earlier. Most of our relationship had developed over Skype conversations and a couple visits to California so by…

My second English teaching job was with a Dickensian-ly dismal school located near Termini station. In a neighborhood of internet caffes, some of the worst Italian restaurants in town and some of the best Korean, was a building with a door large enough to allow in a horse and carriage. Through this door you followed…

My first impressions in Rome seem to echo over and over in the stories I hear from newcomers to the city. It seems that everyone must pass through the mingled initiation of both terror and awe that they experience while careening into the city in a taxi while coming to terms with the possibility that…

My first English teaching job in Rome (or first “mission, should I choose to accept it”) was to go on assignment to a school where I’d have two tasks: teach English to a class of seven year olds for an hour and then have a private tutoring session with the Mother Superior. It was a…

Looking for work in Rome turned out to be like a lot of my first experiences in the city: embarrassing, culturally confusing and all about language. The fact that I’m a native English speaker is what got me every single English teaching job I had in Rome. In fact not one school asked to see…

The gateway job to making it in Rome is teaching English. If you want to move here and you don’t have European citizenship or work for a U.N. agency, then teaching English is your ticket to getting a foothold in the country and paying rent. When I arrived in Rome, I had a 1.5 month…

I didn’t do it the easy way. Or the legal way. Or the right way. Or the wrong way. A friend of mine that I met in Italy has said: “Rome calls people to her. Those of us who have made a life here are the ones brave enough, crazy enough, and maybe stupid enough…