The shape of the city is unfathomable, all around are hills covered by trees and houses, streets going up or down, old colonial buildings and low colorful squared houses... It's still the same lazy suspicious dirtiness everywhere, just like along the road to the border, in the middle of nothing, piles of trash threw from the cars into the bushes of the beautiful plateau, for miles on end of narrow winding road.
From one of the undescript low bridges of the city me and the Swiss guy assist to an improbable match between Milan and Genoa (so the shirts seem to say), while black birds fly high over our head, because next to the soccer field is a garbage landfill. We just had a coffee at a dunkin' donouts, which was basically the only thing open early on a Sunday, and I don't complain. Even earlier I got into the main church, the local baroque colonial white Duomo, where the bishop himself was conducting the rites. His voice sounded just like that of all the catholic priests in Italy, mellow and phony, and his words equally empty to me... but I was moved because there were so many people in the church, and like I saw happening in Costarica and Nicaragua, they sang a lot during the mass, all together, with strong participation... and I am always moved at the thought of not being part of a group, of being cast aside, by myself, where I only can be.
I fled the church when the bishop started walking down the aisle sprinkling holy water on the herd. Not that I had anything against the holy water.
I think I'll have a meet up with the Irish couple later, or tomorrow, when we'll go together to the Copan Ruinas, at the other end of the country. Travelling at stages with other tourists is good and bad, plus nobody seem to want to actually let the things around touch us. But the loneliness can be unbearable too, sometimes.
From Copan on, it will be Guatemala, which should be grand, as the Irish would say, although my slow homecoming seems to be going so fast now.

Entirely by chance, only because sometimes I browse for fun search sites to find blogs dealing in english with Italy and Italian topics, I bumped into this. It is a regular touristic blog report, like many. The person who wrote it seem to be a nice, curious traveler, not necessarily conventional. To economize on lunch she makes sandwiches out of hotel breakfasts, just as I do. So the present post, which is going to scrutinize certain wrong impressions Rome left on her, is not *against* her, at all.

Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the totally misleading impressions people get from my country. It's the undying misunderstanding that Italy is a country where even the ugly has a romantic beautiful reason to be although it makes everyone's life miserable.

As a disclaimer, I put beforehand that obviously my impressions of foreign countries are probably equally fascinating in their being totally wrong. So, there's nothing personal here. For me it's just an occasion to further bash my country, that's all. I love it when travelers are innocent and when they innocently notice everything that is different, convinced to make discoveries out of the oldest crap, hopefully feeling there must be something behind they don't grasp.
We should create a website and call it something like editedcommonplaces.com. There we could share and correct our wrong impressions as travelers.

1.alimentary impressions:

"...when I saw the sign saying 'Spizzico' I didn't just dismiss it as crappy fast food... I got a quarter of a margerita pizza - and I mean like a quarter of a very very large pizza... Possibly the most exciting fast food discovery of my life - and I pride myself on being a fast food authority"

Spizzico. The insulting birth and spreading of the Spizzico chain dates back to more than 10 years ago. I remember it. Our amazement in seeing pizzas sold in a fast-food set. Depressing. What must be known of spizzico's pizzas and alike is that they are considered toxic on a sanitary level after just ~30 minutes they have been served. That's because they are congealed pieces of half-cooked pasta that pass from below zero to 350 centigrades oven temperature in a jiffy. So not only they are served fast, but they must be consumed fast. Also, they may give the wrong impression of being tasty but their ingredients are an enigma. What kind of cheese decorates them? Certainly not mozzarella. Thus, they are not pizzas and should be avoided without afterthoughts. Even if you're a fast-food authority.

2.vehicle impressions:

"Their love of scooters, for every one motorbike there must have been 50 vespas... Their love of tiny tiny cars,"

Scooters and tiny cars are not used in Rome because people love them. Scooters are incredibly popular because Rome is not only a gigantic garage, the most crowded garage of Italy, but it is also one of the most congested, disorganized and risky garages in the world. Therefore moving from point A to point B is not fun at all and can go on from minutes to hours out of schedule. To park a vehicle is not fun but the most frustrating and suicidal task ever conceived by human beings. Scooters are not repositories of love, but means of subsistence. They can grant up to two hours more of life each day to their bearers. They are a sign of the end of times and the end of civilization and as that they must be looked at, with horror and respect.

3. archaeological impressions:

"Their inability to destroy any old historical stuff."

Right. I am not even going into this. Post ends here. Busy sobbing.

-- wrote in: three hours; reading time: some three minutes.
Read first part here.

The traffic savagely flowing the street, people escaping precipitant staring unfocused in different directions made the swarming horizons aside. The inner part of the town unfolded in its embrace. It was more neon signs glowing about, and all the lights of the cars pointing two against the others, menacing or stupidly or warmly. The shapes of the running paletots emerged and subsided dark blue, red beige among the lights and shadows, the scarfs exaggerated hurrying balanced by pairs of shop bags through signboard poles, over manholes. The city was indescribable, because everything was a repetition of the effort of subtracting the actions before your eyes.

Inside the overheated japanese car Elisabetta lowered the volume of the radio and asked him, dove vai a piedi. He quickly answered, vado a casa, and they smiled to each other unduly. He had felt a sting of admiration in her voice which would have easily & shortly led to have sex or the outline of a relationship sometime in the next future, but he felt it should not happen too soon. The thought of the other car, the dark one, was turning behind the corner. In the following days he would have admired the exceptional passage of fate reserved for him that night, when the aborted affair got substituted so easily by a new conceived one, although previously dressed by glimpses and tones, but at that moment the sensations where just lining up, one after the other, dabbing each other but without recognizing.
Things like these never happen to me, he'd thought. Oceans of void aways are opened up between one happening and the other in my life.

He's haggard, looks at her glowing red face in the cars stop light, her large cheekbones and bright black eyes on the thyroid inflated complexion, mouthful, erotic, not tired. Her car now seems to buck, now tails back with others in a row, behind the huge buttocks of a orange numbered milanese tram. Inside, the tram's already crowded, and who cares for them he thinks. The next night they will meet near Corso Garibaldi, if it's okay to you, and look for a place to eat. It's okay she said, she will bring a large fantastic yellow umbrella and they will walk together, embarrassed under the yellow dome in the light rain peeing over Milan.

-- wrote in: two and a half hours; reading time: some five minutes

A thin dim orange blue light envelopes the roofs over Milan, at the end of the avenues the best colors given the Place and Time diagonally layer, but the bottom of the whole dribble is covered by blackening square-shaped volumes heaving smokes & steams up in the sky, at the early end of another day when this winter scene from the above is just a series of canals carved into a desert open space, the roofs glint and the foreshorten gray brown yellow white, dirt, crap facades of the buildings throw their vanishing shadow against the canals. Somewhere in the middle humans planted the greenish creatures called planes lindens hackberries chestnuts, just to make sure it is on the earth the city is carved in, as from the earth trees like these come up.
At the baseline of the canal streets, where other ditches intersect, flashing lights declare the presence of humans, and the areas are flickering with minor constant movements, these are the cars, as soon as you realize it, not looking at them you are seeing them all as the usual comparing wants, are ants.

He gets out from one of the squared buildings in the picture, the white one all tiled with prefabricate panels of some synthetic material, before him she walks out too under the mentioned white synthetic tiles glowing in the acid neon light. Her curly hair for a second glimmer in the unforeseeable reagent red.
Signaling its four orange lamps a dark car waits for her as a firefly at the margin of the scene, or floating as a spaceship alongside the driveway. This causes her husband to pick her up.
Few minutes earlier up in the jumbled office room they kissed, they hugged and rubbed each against the other, and she quite catastrophically said, ma poi mi sposi tu, and he grimaced, dabbed her lips with his. Their department chief was working into his office and listening, across the corridor. He let them know by eagerly coughing once in a pause. That was a great help, but they started talking then, and it was like the words consumed any force in suspension.

She now climbs the green car, and he walks away southward not barreling the same sidewalk. It's the third time since my twenties I'm love with a married woman, he thinks, even though this time she is younger than me.
This gives him the vague sensation he lost something in the meantime, didn't dismounted at some intermediate stop. He was likely reading or at the computer.

Nothing more in this story is going to happen between this two characters though, because she refused him to betray, and he's committed to never want her again, because she's such a bourgeois twat, which is not true, or it is.

Now is the shape of the street that morphs into a rounded square were the rolled up tram waits for the passengers. The square so swamped with neon signs, tabacchi panificio enalotto polleria banca popolare. At the center of the circle in the dark where the neon signs do not arrive: three motionless adult males loaf on three of the four benches, as resisting to the ungrateful task of going back home, someplace near in that peripheral neighborhood in Milan.

He loudly sighs then, so that he knows he's not really in love.
That is the moment when he hears another surprised voice to call his name, not loud just a tone over the crushing rumble of the milanese cars.
The passenger seat in the silver car is vacant, the smile from the driver's window is inviting, it seems so brighter because the luminosity changed again, and the twilight just ended.

"...we are the first country for number of mobile phones, televisions and cars" (Berlusconi, here).

Alegher¹.

I'd rather live in the first country for romantics, Nature lovers, creatives, book readers, and anticlericals.
Everybody has his dream I guess.

_{1. Alegher, in the milanese dialect, means more or less "what fun". But as in the best milanese style, in a very, very sarcastic way.}

music: none. leaning over the din of the awakenings, the crawlings of the cars, creakings of the balcony doors, the plane rumble approaching Linate airport, trite thunder not visible through the uniform white sky, the dense humid transparent gas floating up from here to the top over the pale lapsed human bodies.

So it happened again. Out of boredom, those stoned kids must have drop the stone again. On the freeway. From the overpass. Just out of boredom.
What happened is that a car hit a large fallen rock laying on the asphalt of he freeway, got knocked over a couple of times, got the engine block detached and lost in the middle of the middle lane, where another car hit it, rolling over a couple of time, killing the man at the wheel.

I've said already there's nothing into news.
No real hints about what reality is, at least in its basic, perceivable forms.
That is not what you want to know about it.

That all the overpasses upon italian freeways are already fenced by high metal barrier, so high they even bend inward upon part of the overpass breadth. That this is because, for few summers few years ago, some youngsters were used to throw stones from the overpasses on the passing cars. Eventually they made victims. A band of them got arrested. The overpasses fenced, visibly numbered.
That they remind you of the hostile idiocy of your fellow humans while you travel.
That now they're up to it again, and strangely enough, with a very large rock.
How possibly they could throw it from the bridge is inexplicable.
That the tag word today, is boredom. Because that is what keep plaguing the vast, unknown, unlearned, hazed italian province.

And that we usually don't go around speaking about it, but we know nothing gets well there.