Free The Food of Love by Anthony Capella

Remember to tell your
    waiter you wanted clean cutlery for each course. Everything was
    shut between two-thirty and five for siesta, and on Mondays and
    Thursdays most shops were closed all day, which was a real pain
    but you got used to it. Girls should wear a wedding ring to deter unwelcome attention. The university could provide a trained
    counsellor if you got really homesick, though there were so many social activities on offer that you were unlikely to have time to get depressed.
    ‘What else?’ Casey had mused. ‘Well, CNN is on channel sixteen.
    MTV is on twenty-three. There’s a good American music
    radio station called Centro Suono. Italian music is truly awful, by the way, but not as bad as Italian TV. They use the same two
    voices to dub every American show - there’s a guy with a butch
    voice, and a girl who’s supposed to sound like a sex kitten, which is kind of weird when you’re watching Friends-which, incidentally, is on every Thursday evening.’
    By the time Casey sat down to a scattering of applause, Laura
    felt a bit like a moon-colonist - safe as long as she stayed inside her air-tight capsule with the other colonists, but surrounded by a
    deadly atmosphere outside.
    The next person to stand up was the elegant figure of il dottore.
    ‘Bienvenuti a Roma, la cittd eterna,’ he began. He spoke in
    fluent Italian for a minute or so, then switched to English.
    Welcome to the birthplace of Western civilisation. I promise that you are about to have the most extraordinary year of your life.’
    This was more like it. Laura listened intently as Kim Fellowes
    told them which art galleries had ruined their treasures with
    restoration, and which were closed all day Monday. He told them
    Which galleries had introduced half-hour time limits on viewing, which famous sights were ghastly, and which were exquisite. The torrner included almost anywhere frequented by tourists; the latter included most small churches. He even told them which guidebooks to buy: ‘Whatever you do, don’t get Fodor’s or the Lonely
    Planet, unless you want to be taken for a tourist. Baedeker is probably still the best one. And some of the Italian-language art guides
    are quite good, if a little insular.’
    Laura had wondered if by the end of her year she, too, would
    be reading guidebooks in Italian and, even more impressively,
    finding them a little insular. She resolved to throw away her
    Lonely Planet guide just as soon as she got back to her room.
    ‘But,’ he concluded, ‘if I could say just one thing to you about your year in Italy, it would be this. You are not only here to study the Renaissance, but to live it. This is the only city in the world where Renaissance masterpieces are housed in Renaissance masterpieces, where the drinking fountains, the bridges over the river,
    the churches, even the city walls, were designed by the likes of Buonarroti and Bernini. To walk the streets, to eat in a restaurant, to have a conversation with an ordinary taxi driver about his football team, or to buy some fruit at a market stall is to be part of a
    living work of Renaissance genius. Open yourself to Rome, and
    Rome will open herself to you.’
    ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Casey said, standing up as Kim Fellowes
    sat down. ‘The main place we hang out is an Irish bar, the Druid’s Den, particularly on Saturday nights. And there’s a baseball team that plays every Sunday.’ The cheer that greeted this remark
    seemed to indicate that the majority of Laura’s fellow students
    found Irish bars and baseball a rather more enticing prospect than Bernini fountains.
    Luckily, Laura got on well with her roommate - better than she
    had expected to, in fact. Her own reproduction Caravaggios and
    Judith’s posters of death-metal rappers shared the apartment
    peacefully enough, as did their owners, even if Judith’s vast
    hairdryer tripped the apartment power-breaker every time she
    plugged it in. The phial of blood, however, proved