There’s a photo of Anna Magnani that fascinated me ever since I first saw it.

Taken in 1961 by Swiss photographer Hans Krebs, Magnani leans against a grand piano in her apartment just off Piazza Venezia. The photograph is intimate; it makes me feel like I’ve walked in on something. The living room is wonderfully cluttered: heavy drapery, candelabras, a portrait, a still life, and -- jarringly -- what looks like a painting of a brutalist tower block. Krebs himself is visible in a gilded mirror, but every time I notice him there, I think for a moment it’s my reflection.

Magnani was Rome before Rome became a tourist backdrop. She was dark-eyed, unpolished, furious, tender. She worked with Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, and Fellini and won an Oscar. But to me, she seemed to belong to Rome more than to her films.

The image, the one that made me feel like an intruder, was the way I pictured her in my mind -- until about a year ago. That’s when Magnani stepped out of the Krebs photo and started appearing on the walls of Rome.

More likely: that’s when I started noticing her appearing on the walls of Rome. Before then, I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.

That changed with The Italian Dispatch, which made me see the city I’d lived in for more than two decades differently, including my regular encounters with Magnani. I first saw her posing as Superwoman in an alleyway; then in a diver’s mask; soon after, she was peering from behind graffiti on a doorway; and then stretched across an outdoor staircase. She even sneaked into the newsletter’s Notes feed now and then.

But Magnani was just the start.

The structure of my weeks changed. I file on Tuesdays -- sometimes not finishing until late in the day -- and then almost immediately begin circling the next idea. It might come from the news, or from a comment a reader left, or from an ever-growing list of essay ideas. By the weekend, I’m usually testing ledes and mulling over which images to use.

I still work full time. The newsletter fits around that -- in theory. In practice, it’s often the other way around.

But there’s a deeper change that’s harder to describe. I think I operate differently now: always observing, always scribbling notes, always bouncing ideas and theories off of friends and acquaintances. It might be an overheard remark, something I read, a charming new restaurant, an architectural detail. Everything feels like potential material. I can’t decide if it’s a burden or a gift.

The Italian Dispatch itself has changed over the year as well. Some things have been consistent -- I still try to reply to every thoughtful comment left on an essay or note, and to avoid cliché in the way I present my adopted home. But what started out as something oriented toward gastronomy and commentary has gradually become essayistic, cultural, and much more personal.

The first essay went out to 27 faithful subscribers, all friends. This one was mailed to nearly 1,400. But what surprised me the most wasn’t the growth -- I didn’t know what to expect there -- it was the conversation. The comment section of most posts is vibrant, smart, often funny, and occasionally argumentative (in a positive way). Readers correct me, add context, and share their own versions of the same story. The newsletter sent to subscribers on Tuesdays is never the same as the one it becomes a day or two later.

All told, there are more than 50 essays and nearly 2,500 comments in the newsletter’s archive, fully available to paid subscribers.

A few weeks back, I walked past the alleyway in Trastevere where Magnani had been posing as Superwoman. But she was gone, torn off the wall, leaving just a faint outline and a few scraps of her dress still clinging to the plaster.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all. But like most of Italy’s past, you can still see it -- if you catch it from just the right angle.

The Best Angle for a Photo

The musicians outside the Cathedral weren’t bad. Then again, they play the same few songs over and over, every afternoon.

I picked a park bench under the trees and facing the 500-year-old church and helped my elderly mother sit. It was late April, and the shade and a modest breeze helped make the midday sun bearable. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes before one of the musicians strolled over to us and started crooning.

Bésame!

Bésame mucho!

Como si fuera esta noche

La última vez!1

This is my mother, I wanted to tell him. But instead, when he finished, I gave him 20 pesos and a smile. His expression was unchanged as he drifted toward the side of the plaza where a white tourist train waited to fill up.

A few minutes later, the tourist train lurched forward and then disappeared around a corner to wind through the narrow streets past well-preserved Colonial-era buildings and dozens of kitschy souvenir shops selling off-brand rum and second-tier cigars, along with the usual magnets, pins, tee-shirts, and shot glasses, all bearing the Dominican flag.

Inside the Cathedral Primada de América -- free for Dominicans; a small fee for visitors -- the heat and clatter of the colonial zone faded. The bright afternoon light was softer inside, filtered through stained glass. Instead of marble, the Gothic interior is coral and stone, but the atmosphere would feel familiar to anyone who knows European churches.

Back outside, the noise returned.

“The Cathedral is the oldest Christian church in the Americas,” a tour guide droned into a bullhorn. “This is the best angle for a photo.” A group of around two-dozen sunburned visitors held up their phones and momentarily reduced five centuries of history to a backdrop.

The Curse of Punta Cana

I visited the country often as a kid, back when Santo Domingo had the only commercial airport in the country. Now there are eight, and one of them -- near the Punta Cana resort town on the eastern tip of the country -- handles more traffic every year than the other seven combined. The Las Américas International Airport that serves the capital, among the first modern airports in the Caribbean, is almost an afterthought.

Compared to its peers in the region, the Dominican economy is stable and growing at a healthy clip. But sadly, most of that growth flows around ordinary Dominicans, not through them.

Punta Cana is less than three hours from the capital by car, but it’s like a different planet.

Every year, it receives around 11 million visitors -- roughly equivalent to the population of the entire country. They’re drawn by the turquoise water off its beaches, a dozen manicured golf courses, pulsating dance clubs, and all-inclusive resorts, where visitors can eat, drink, swim, and tan without ever venturing off the property. The dominant language is English, not Spanish, and aside from resort staffers and shopkeepers, there are few locals to be found.

I haven’t been there in years, but I can imagine it clearly. Why? Because I’ve been to Italy’s Amalfi Coast, to St. Mark’s Square in Venice, to Cinque Terre in high season.

The Dominican Republic has effectively split into two countries: one built for visitors, and one for everyone else. They rarely intersect.

Italy isn’t there yet. But the direction it’s heading is clear.

The Young American

My first long-term apartment in Rome was just off Via di San Teodoro, in an area that at the time was a thriving, self-contained little community. There was a neighborhood osteria, a butcher, a fruit seller, a small wine shop, a few coffee bars, a furniture repairer, and plenty of residents who’d been in the area for generations.

I was known there as Il Giovane Americano -- The Young American -- because I was the second American to live in the neighborhood, arriving more than two decades after Il Vecchio Americano, who’d arrived after he married a local.

But now, when I go back, there’s little of the old neighborhood remaining. What’s left lingers like a distant, familiar smell.

Like many areas of Rome -- the Jewish Ghetto, parts of Trastevere, Monti, Borgo Pio are at the forefront -- it’s being hollowed out by the spread of B&Bs, souvenir shops, and mini-markets. They’re becoming Rome’s version of the colonial zone in Santo Domingo with its strolling crooners.

And other parts of the country -- we can all name a few -- have become Italy’s version of Punta Cana.

Most of both countries remains unspoiled and genuine, but the balance is shifting -- slowly in some places, all at once in others.

These transformations hurt everyone involved. The locals are pushed out by rising prices and a declining quality of life as their neighborhoods evolve into stage sets. And visitors take over without realizing that the “authentic” experience they want has been replaced by a caricature.

Not a Tourist in the Building

My mother helps support an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, near a town called Bonao. Like Punta Cana, Bonao is within easy driving distance -- but in the opposite direction. It’s part of the country resort visitors don’t see.

Traffic thinned after leaving Santo Domingo. Soon, we were amid rolling green hills punctuated by farms and roadside communities with rustic corner stores, houses with tin or palm frond roofs, and, occasionally, a small church. People were transporting their wares -- coconuts, mangos, avocados, pineapples -- by bike, motorcycle, or donkey. Locals sat in loose circles of plastic chairs, playing cards or dominoes.

It was my first visit to the orphanage, which is small, modest, neat. There are 21 girls between the ages of four and 14 living there, along with three nuns. The tiny chapel on the grounds is dedicated to Francis of Assisi, the medieval mystic and saint from what is now Umbria.

Earlier that day, I stopped with my mother and two cousins at Tipico Bonao, a much-loved local restaurant that served what for me was the best meal I’d had on the entire trip: expertly prepared plantains, fried yuca, rice and beans, local cuts of beef, summer soups.

As I ate, I kept thinking of people I know from Italy, from Florida, and from other parts, who’d I be thrilled to take for a meal there. But that wasn’t just because of the good food. It was also because it didn’t seem like there was a tourist in the building.

📌 And another thing

When I arrived in the Dominican Republic on this latest trip I didn’t intend to write about it in The Italian Dispatch. Aside from Christopher Columbus -- the Genoese sailor who planted the Spanish flag on the island’s shores more than 500 years ago -- what connection was there to Italy?

But a few days into this trip, after a visit to the Zona Colonial and a few conversations with friends and relatives about the country’s resort enclaves, the idea for the main essay came into focus.

But even before that, a grittier similarity emerged: bureaucracy.

The main reason for this trip was to accompany my elderly Dominican-born mother from her home in Florida, her first visit back in four years.

But there was a secondary objective: to make progress on the long, drawn-out process of becoming a Dominican citizen. The hitch seemed minor: the U.S. registrar who recorded my birth certificate misspelled my mother’s middle name. I have a formal U.S. document correcting the error. The challenge was to convince the Dominicans to accept the correction.

Luckily, a cousin had gone through something similar and pointed me in the right direction. But I handled most of it myself. I didn’t expect things to move quickly -- and they didn’t.

The offices were crowded, disorganized. Bachata blared from TVs showing music videos, and people swayed to the rhythm in their chairs. Two weary dogs slept near a doorway. An old woman made her rounds selling fried snacks.

I came prepared for a long afternoon: I brought a book, headphones, a thermos of water, and a small bag of mixed nuts. I carried pesos in small denominations in case they didn’t have change. Under my arm: a thick folder with original documents, passport photos, receipts, all in duplicate.

Four different offices in six hours, the third one a 25-minute drive away. Then, back at the main office, where a contradiction emerged. I was about to be added to the system: I just needed to pay a small fee. But I couldn’t pay the fee myself because I wasn’t in the system.

I started thinking about which cousin could make it there before closing. Then I noticed a kind-faced middle-aged woman sitting across from me, knitting. I leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder.

Señora, necesito su ayuda -- “Ma’am, I need your help.” The Spanish-language version of a phrase I’ve used many times in Rome.

The woman studied my face as I explained the situation and then suddenly stood up and took me by the elbow. We pushed to the front of the line, where she said a few high-pitched words to the clerk behind the plexiglass window. She gestured toward me, then looked up toward the heavens as if to ask for help. The clerk chuckled, told some others to step aside, and let me know how much I owed.

I had the exact change. My many experiences with Italian bureaucracy prepared me well.

Nota bene: A paid subscription is the locals-only section of The Italian Dispatch. Access the full archive: now up to 50 essays and counting. Click here for more information on how you can help keep the newsletter sustainable.

1

Kiss me!
Kiss me a lot!
As if tonight
were the last time!

Bésame mucho is a 1940s classic written and recorded by Mexican singer Consuelo Velázquez and covered by many dozens of artists over the years, ranging from The Beatles to Elvis, from Frank Sinatra to Andrea Bocelli, and from Nat King Cole to the guy in the Zona Colonial.

P.S. I promise the lyrics sound much better in Spanish.

Know someone who still thinks all tourism is mostly harmless? Send this essay their way.

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I don’t rattle easily. I’ve covered wars, jumped out of airplanes. I’ve interviewed presidents, been blessed by a pope, attended parties with Hollywood celebrities. Then there was the afternoon when I spotted John Updike having lunch near the Spanish Steps.

He was seated at an outdoor table with a woman in her 50s. Short sandy hair, navy-blue blazer. She could have been his Italian publisher or agent. He wore a plaid coat and a pale tie. They were talking easily. Their plates were gone but the water glasses were still on the table, along with a small, neat stack of books.

I was on my way to the Anglo-American Bookstore, then still years away from closing down. As soon as I saw him, I changed my path to walk toward their table. Words were already forming on my lips: “Hey, John Updike!”

They both looked up before I could make a sound. And I suddenly froze, then turned, then disappeared around a corner.

“Hey, John Updike?” Really? No -- too trite. I needed to approach them like a peer, not a fan. I smoothed out the tuck of my shirt and patted down my hair.

“Are you by chance John Updike?” Better. Then: “My name is Eric. I’m a journalist here in Rome.” They’d say they were happy to meet me and maybe they’d invite me to join them for their after-lunch coffee. I’d laugh at one of Updike’s wry observations.

I strode confidently around the corner and toward the table. They looked up at me again and I thought, wait, who am I to them? I retreated again around the corner. I was in the part of Rome Henry James admired most; Stendhal and Gabriele D’Annunzio had roamed these streets; I was steps from where John Keats breathed his last.

I was furious with myself. Two times? But I can fix this. I’m good with words. I needed to be sincere, polite, gracious. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. After a moment, the right lines came to me.

“Mr. Updike, please excuse the interruption. But your books have brought me a great deal of joy over the years and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to shake your hand and say, ‘thank you.’” Who wouldn’t appreciate an honest comment like that?

I puffed out my chest and strode out from around the corner for a third approach. Updike and the woman looked up again -- and this time both visibly sighed. We were separated by only a narrow stretch of Roman cobblestones. But I couldn’t make myself take another step.

Updike would be on any shortlist of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century, a man who could file a person away in one or two sentences.

“She is a small woman whose skin tends toward olive and looks tight, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness. Just yesterday, it seemed to him, she stopped being pretty.”

That’s from Rabbit, Run, the thoughts of Updike’s protagonist, the restless Rabbit Angstrom, describing his wife.

Or take Sammy, a teenage cashier in Updike’s short story, A&P, describing a woman who caught him charging her twice for a box of crackers.

“She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows. And I know it made her day to trip me up.”

I remembered his precision there on the cobblestones. My sudden fear was that months or years later, I’d be flipping through The New Yorker and would come across a passage only I would recognize as myself. What adjectives would he use? Well-intentioned? Please, no. Unaware? Eager?

Nobody else would figure it out. But I would know.

There was no fourth approach, no visit to the bookstore. I turned and walked back up the steps. And then I ran. Just like some fool in an Updike novel.

Nota bene: Unlike me on those cobblestones, a paid subscription requires only one approach. Access the full archive: 49 essays and counting. More info here.

How it starts

Imagine this: the most powerful man in the world refuses to see the pope in Rome as a moral counterweight, but instead considers him an impediment -- out of touch, meddlesome. Then the pontiff fires back, warning against the vice of pride, the seduction of power, and the be…

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I recently spoke at a university campus in Florence, prepared to discuss Italy’s unwritten rules -- the subtle codes and conventions that make daily life in Italy both maddening and legible. Those “rules” have become a central theme of the Dispatch.

My outline covered territory well known …

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The Weirdo

When I was around twelve, my brother and I spent many summer days in different friends’ backyards playing a version of dodgeball I think we might have invented.

Everything was fluid: you could run, be chased, hide behind bushes, push another kid toward the ball holder, deflect or dive out of the way when the ball came at you. When you were hit, you became “it,” the one chasing everyone else.

We could keep going for hours -- sweating, screeching, laughing so hard we teared up -- until our mothers called us home for dinner. Each kid would head back with grass stains on his clothes, dirt under his fingernails, cheeks and hair covered in dust, exhausted. Good times.

One day, one of the kids’ fathers stood at his patio door, deep in thought, hands on his hips, vacantly staring into the yard where we were racing around and giggling. He was surely younger than I am now, but he seemed old -- thinning hair, a slight stoop.

After a while, one of the friends stopped in front of him and asked what he was thinking about. The rest of us gathered to hear.

“One day you kids are going to play together for the last time,” the father said. “Only you won’t know it was the last time until much later.”

Weirdo, I thought.

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The biggest mistake most travelers make in Italy is wasting time.

You can’t blame them; it’s easy to get distracted. There’s always another church beyond the one you read about, another piazza around the corner, some hole-in-the-wall coffee bar full of locals. There are villages nobody’s heard of, and unpronounceable dishes listed on osteria menus.

It’s…

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Once a man

A 2,000-year-old human skull is lighter than I expected, like papier-mâché dusted with dry soil. Fragile, too. I held it in both hands.

This had once been a man -- someone who’d lived and died in ancient Rome. Until a few weeks ago, he was in the ground, hidden beneath an unremarkable univer…

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‘Who helped you?’

During lunch, years ago, I told my landlord, Massimo, I needed a new part-time assistant. It was a work-from-home job: producing daily news summaries, setting up interviews, answering correspondence in Italian and English, and arranging travel.

“I’ve got just the person for you,” Massimo said.

Federica was the younger sister of Massimo’s wife’s closest friend. And she was not a good fit.

Before I could ask a single question, she told me she couldn’t start working right away because her family would be at their beach house for two weeks. She thought starting work at 8 a.m. was too early. She didn’t speak much English. She didn’t own a personal computer.

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The Colosseum has survived earthquakes and fires, the collapse of the Roman Empire, being looted for parts, wars and invasions, and the urban stress of traffic and pollution.

Now it is facing the angry wrath of the disappointed modern-day tourist.

“Past its prime,” wrote one tourist from California. “Takes up an absurd amount of space,” quipped another visitor, this one from Colorado. A tourist from the U.K. said it was “nothing more than a dirty, crumbling eyesore,” while another Brit called it “the worst of all tourist attractions.” From another Coloradan: it “seemed like it hadn’t been used in years.” And in what might be the most succinct of all the Colosseum’s negative reviews, a visitor from Australia labeled the site simply “a big pile of rocks.”

Of course, the Colosseum isn’t alone.

An Indian tourist described the nearby Roman Forum as “a big hole near the Colosseum where all the rocks are kept.”

Further afield, a Scottish traveler blamed the Leaning Tower of Pisa for being “much smaller than I imagined.”

The Uffizi in Florence? Filled with “low-quality art … [and] gratuitous nudity,” according to a Californian, while another from the same state called it “a complete waste of time and money.”

A tourist from Alabama said Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection was full of “third-rate works … [that] would never make it to the wall of the average American living room.”

But few reviews can match the insight of an English visitor who complained that the Grand Canal in Venice “was under water when I saw it.”

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We were discussing refugees and migration. Antonella, a native-born Roman, was a supporter of the anti-migrant Lega political party, and she’d seen me on Italian television arguing f…

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With my trolley suitcase trailing behind me en route to the airport or train station, I like to dangle my keychain, looped through a finger on my free hand. If I can, I’ll make a phone call in Italian -- gesturing, speaking a little louder than normal. I’ll walk with purpose and attack crosswalks aggressively. I don’t take photos. If my dog, Mocha, is trotting at my side, all the better.

These aren’t nervous tics; they’re camouflage. It’s learned behavior in a city where the line between resident and visitor has grown uncomfortable. And I don’t want anyone to think I’m part of the problem.

Tourist go home

People have been complaining about the noise and crowds the center of Rome since ancient times. The city was Europe’s first true “must-see” destination, after the sprawling network of safe, well-marked Roman roads made it easier for people to visit the Eternal City simply for leisure. By the early days of the Empire, Caesar Augustus was already redesigning the city specifically to impress outsiders.

Today, the problem of over-tourism spreads far beyond Rome. Tourist centers like Florence, Venice, and Naples are strained to near their breaking point. Ditto for smaller hotspots like the Amalfi Coast and Cinque Terre.

The problem has spread across the continent. Resentment between locals and visitors is on the rise. Last summer, massive demonstrations protesting against over-tourism erupted across Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Frustrated lawmakers have responded with piecemeal measures: tourist taxes, parking fees, restrictions on where visitors can sit or stand. I’ve seen city walls bearing spray-painted slogans including “Tourist Go Home,” “Your Airbnb was my home,” and I’ve even seen one reading, “Tourism = Terrorism.”

Fairly or unfairly, over-tourism is blamed for contributing to everything from housing shortages and rising prices to falling birthrates, stubborn unemployment, and behavioral changes that follow when residents lose ownership over their neighborhoods.

No bursts of laughter

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Two men walked around the corner and past our table. “Does that work, warm milk?” one of them asked, in Italian.

“My mother used to add some olive oil to it,” the other said. “But warm milk is the main thing.”

Another minute or two passed, and then I got up to figure out if there was a problem. That part of the restaurant was a labyrinth. Then I heard a distant voice and followed it: a maintenance worker, broom in hand, a half-full plastic trash bag to one side. He was facing a closed door.

“Mi scusi,” I said. But he was focused on the door.

“Just try to relax!” he said forcefully, in Italian. “Try to think about something else! Think about anything else!”

That’s when I heard my date’s frustrated voice from the other side of the door. “Sono bloccata,” she said. “Sono bloccata….”

She wasn’t a strong Italian speaker and seemed to be crying. But her voice lifted when she realized I was there.

She was trapped in the bathroom, she told me. The warped wooden door was wedged into an ancient stone frame. The metal handle had come off when she pulled on it.

The maintenance man stood back, eyes wide, as I rammed a shoulder into the door. After a few tries, the door swung open. She breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Here’s the punchline. Literally, “Sono bloccata” means “I’m stuck.” But coming from the ladies’ room, it can also mean, “I’m constipated.”

The two warm-milk guys and the think-about-something-else man weren’t confused. They were trying to help.

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It’s how damn unflattering they are.

These were rich and powerful men -- the highest echelon of Roman society -- and yet they are memorialized with sagging skin, hook noses, uneven features, tired expressions, and wrinkles from age, worry, and conflict.

Some statues from the Roman Republic are so intensely veristic that modern-day doctors can knowledgeably speculate about the underlying health conditions of many of their subjects, recognizing scoliosis, goiters, and even neurological disorders.

Public life in the middle and late Republic must have seemed long and brutal. Influence wasn’t inherited neatly, and leaders were not yet claiming it by divine right. Power accumulated slowly: through service, survival, compromise, reputation. It was built with great effort over decades. And it showed.

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Rome doesn’t make it easy for people -- visitors, especially -- in a hurry.

It’s more than a question of crowds and geography. Entire centuries sit on top one another without explanation. The city’s rules and customs are unwritten, knowable only to those with curiosity and patience. There are no good sh…

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Near the end of the day, during my move to a new apartment three years ago, the man I’d hired to help stopped in the living room and shook his head.

“Un attimo!” he said, wagging one finger. “Wait a minute! Where are you going to put the television?”

“I don’t have a television.”

He was puzzled. “Then what do you do at night?”

A few days later, one of my new neighbors offered to loan me an old TV she had in storage.

“Just until you can get your own,” she suggested.

A while after that, I was headed toward the dumpster with the oversized box my new dining room tabletop arrived in when the owner of a nearby restaurant smiled and held his hands out in front of him.

“Finalmente!” he said. “You finally got a television!”

Fortunately, over time, people in my new neighborhood began to pay more attention to my dog Mocha than to my home entertainment preferences. I was still an outsider, but I began to settle into a routine.

Every morning, I’d run errands while walking Mocha: first the coffee bar, followed by one or two stops -- maybe the supermarket, butcher, dry cleaner, fruit seller, bookshop, bakery, or pet store. Then I’d usually have another coffee.

It didn’t take long for the barista at the coffee bar I went to most often to learn my order and make it without being reminded. But he remained formal. Each time, he’d set my caffè macchiato al vetro down with exaggerated care and quietly say, “Lei è servito” -- “you are served.”

It worked that way for months. Then, one day, randomly, at least half a year in, he asked if I was a tourist.

“No,” I said. “Of course I’m not a tourist. I’ve been coming here for months.”

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I noticed sometimes you come in here early, sometimes late, sometimes after lunch. Do you have a job?”

“I work at home.”

“What kind of work?”

“I’m a journalist.”

“But you’re not Italian,” he said. “Where are you from?”

“I grew up in America.”

There was a pause, and then his eyes lit up.

“Yes! I’ve heard about you!” He stood up straight, smiled, and crossed his arms and said, “You don’t have a television!”

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There were around 20 vines growing in the garden of the building where I lived at the time. When I asked, a neighbor who’d b…

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Garibaldi occupies a unique place in Italy’s history: a swashbuckling general and a folk hero whose thousand red-shirted volunteers helped stitch nearly a dozen kingdoms and duchies into a sing…

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Over the course of an evening, the setting might change, but the atmosphere around him is constant. He doesn’t answer every question he’s asked, but fascinating stories from his long career flow nonstop. Food and drink come in waves. Acquaintances drop by the table to shake his hand or exc…

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