This morning I meet my hosts at 11am and we once again head for the beach, where we will have lunch at a seafood restaurant before heading back into Rome for ‘a friend’s birthday party in a park’.
Did I mention that I am LOVING this job?
Pre-lunch, I spend a while pushing Benedetta on the swings and generally being chattered away at in Italian, not one word of which I understand. Neither she nor Beatrice seem to mind. They then move to the slide, where they delightedly whiz up and down a couple of times each, squealing.
Beatrice (pronounced in Italian ‘Bee-tree-cee-ah’, I have now learnt) is climbing up the slide on the outside to the confusion of a little German boy who is observing when Alberto appears and asks two of my very favourite questions: ‘Do you like lobster? Do you like white wine?’
***
Lunch is, once again, a spectacle.
We begin with muscle bruscetta (brusCetta), which is quickly followed by the most enormous plate of seafood I have ever seen. I genuinely worry for a few seconds about whether there are actually any crabs/ octopuses/ squid/ salmon/ whitebait left in the waters that surround central Italy, considering the gargantuan size of our mutual lunches. There is more seafood on my plate than I know what to do with.
How they eat this much every day I have no idea, but still, I begin the epic battle to scale down the crabmeat mountain. It isn’t too difficult, actually. It is the best crabmeat I’ve ever, ever encountered. But still, I can’t finish it. The amount is blatantly ridiculous.
So. I am about to surrender, whilst considering the fact that never in the UK would a lunch be so bloody huge, and then...
And then.
It wasn’t even the main. There is an ENTIRE BOWL OF SPAGHETTI coming towards me. Sat on top of it is a huge, spiky lobster.
I had wondered where the promised lobster had got to. But, seriously now.
I drink my lovely white wine and try to pretend that this lobster/ spaghetti feast isn’t for me. But it is. There is no denying it, even though I try, right up until it is clearly placed in front of me on the table and Lidia is demonstrating the best way to negotiate eating spaghetti, the Roman way, so it doesn’t end up variously splattered across the front of THE BLOUSE.
I tuck a napkin into the front of THE BLOUSE (wouldn’t want to destroy the mutual BLOUSE that is also owned by my lovelies Katy Shaw and Leah McGregor) whilst Alberto watches me and then says regretfully, ‘Sorry, it is not nice. But we must save our shirts.’
I agree.
We then have a long conversation about the Bellomos’ hatred of the Pope, confession, priests, the Virgin Mary, ornate cathedral busts and Catholicism in general. I am brought a lemon sorbet that I am informed has liqueur in it, and Lidia tells me that being in a convent school until the age of eighteen has put her off all forms of religion for life. Alberto then goes on to talk politics, which ends up being a heavier conversation that I anticipated, culminating in him telling me that the government in Italy is entirely corrupt, that basic things like fuel are running out, and that the only things good about Italy now are the art, the food, and the landscape, which is being built on and thus destroyed by profiteering developers. I tell him I had no idea Italy was in such dire straits, and he answers that Berlusconi is ‘destroying his beautiful country’.
Erm... crikey?
After the absolute mission of destroying the lobster, Benedetta buys a Barbie bracelet from a vending machine and we get back in the car to drive further down the beach, where a watersports festival is going on.
Lidia drives, whilst Alberto takes his life in his hands by placing one wriggly twin on each knee in the passenger seat.
The watersports festival is pretty buzzy, with a DJ playing and a sea full of Italians on paddleboards, casually floating around. There is a crowd gathering at the edge of the water so we head there, and are treated to the hilarious spectacle of one windsurfing Italian man after another being pulled along by a jet ski only ejected at a random time, thrown into the air, and fall back into the water with what can only be described as painful slap followed by painful slap.
Futile attempts to show off fully enjoyed, we head away from the sea and find an area where various land-based activities are going on. Beatrice practices tight-robe walking, before joining Benedetta in the surfing section, where they drag miniature surfboards onto rolling cylinders and attempt to practice their boarding technique whilst clinging for dear life onto the corrugated iron fence.
***
The friend who is having a birthday party in the park turns out to be Alan Lyle, an American who has recently moved to Rome with his wife and various collected family members. The selection of guests at this soiree at first seem to be mostly Lyle family and work colleagues, and American they most certainly are –they all have names like ‘Aaaaashley’ and ‘Beth Aaaaaan’. I overhear sentences including ‘I’m so majorly excited to be at the park right now!’, and ‘I’m taking off right now, because the Lions are about to kick the All Black’s asses on cable!’.
An American girl (Aaaaashley, from Detriot) asks me how I know the Lyles, which leads into me explaining that I don’t know them at all, actually, and that I’ve only been in Rome forty eight hours. It turns out that Aaaaashley and her fiancé are both also temporarily in Rome, her interning and him working, before she graduates from law school. This is very exciting, and she takes my Italian number so she can text me about lunch this week, where she will introduce me to another American girl that she has met whilst she’s been here.
I also meet a British man who is there with his impossibly willowy French-Italian wife Marie and their beautifully European children Augustin (4) and Clelia (18 months), a New Englander named Debbie who appears to be holding court from her position on a blanket, mildly precocious Rebecca, B&B’s friend, who informs me that her Italian is very good despite her being from North Carolina, a lad from Nottingham named Andy, and a yappity dog called Jack who belongs to Debbie and I’m pretty sure does not appreciate the mauling he is getting from the collected children.
On the way back Lidia points out a church that she recommends I visit, just down the road from our hotel. I may go for an explore tomorrow morning before I meet her for lunch.
Still full from the seafood mountain, we have a dinner of peaches, pears and grapes. Then B&B get into their pyjamas and I read them five stories before they are ready to go to sleep. All I can say about this is that children’s books have got bloody well weird since I was at the age to be reading them. The most peculiar, entitled ‘Little Blue and Little Yellow’, reads like something out of an acid trip and tells the story of two brightly coloured little blobs (‘Little Blue and Little Yellow’), who are such good friends that when they hug they become a Big Green. This sounds questionable to me, but it gets even stranger when their parents (Big Blue and Big Yellow) tell them off, causing them to cry so much they disintegrate into tiny speckles of blue and yellow and almost vanish completely.
Could someone who knows about children explain this to me please, because I’m sure Bene and Bea were thinking exactly the same as me, i.e., what the bloody hell is this pile of tripe?
Mildly confused,
Lucy
xxx
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