Excellent English

When I lived in Rome’s historic center, I’d often get stopped by tourists asking directions while I was out walking Mocha.

“Scusi,” the visitor might say, then, with raised eyebrows, “Colosseo?” They’d look at me nervously.

“Preferisce parlare in inglese?” I’d ask -- “Do you prefer to speak English?”

A look of relief would wash over the other person. “Yes, yes, please.”

“Do you want the fastest way or the most scenic?”

We’d often end up chatting for a minute or two. They might want to know Mocha’s name or how old she was, or they’d ask where they could get a good coffee or an authentic carbonara. I was usually happy to help.

Before we parted, they’d look at me with sincere eyes and pay me what was intended to be a grand compliment. “By the way,” they’d say, “your English is excellent.”

“Grazie,” I’d reply.

The local language

Savvy travelers already know the standard guidelines for avoiding tourist-trap restaurants.

A sign reading “tourist menu” is a clear give away, for example. Same for photos of food on laminated menus, loitering waiters trying to cajole passers-by in the door, or windows framing a supposed nonna rolling out pasta.

A lesser-known travel strategy I trust more than the advice of almost any influencer or broad online ratings or listicle-style content: filter for reviews in the local language.

An example: I know a trattoria in Rome that has a so-so score on online ratings sites, dragged down in part by comments about some of the staff’s limited English (some wait staff speaks the language). But filter for Italian-language reviews and the picture changes: the rating jumps and reviews mostly praise the authentic cooking and generous portions.

The place remains among my favorites -- partly because of the food and partly because that mixed score produces a healthy mix of in-the-know locals and sharp-eyed visitors.

The leash test

My best bang-for-the-buck strategy is much simpler: ask someone walking a dog.

Dog owners are almost always approachable: few owners mind a compliment about their pooch. And someone walking a dog probably lives nearby, taking in the neighborhood one step at a time, several times a day. They know the sidewalks, the coffee bars, the wine shops, the bakeries, the shortcuts, the scenic routes. They know which places have lost a step, and they know the newest places locals are enjoying.

I suppose it doesn’t have to be a dog. I have a friend who walks her cat, Bojan, on a leash. And a few years ago, in Testaccio, there was a pig named Dior, who toured the Rome neighborhood with his owner, much to the delight of local children.

But I am partial to dogs, which are beloved across Italy -- especially in Rome, where they are treated like small, opinionated citizens.

📌 And another thing

Having a dog helps a lot in fitting in in a dog-loving country like Italy. I can attest to being far more recognizable around town with Mocha than without her.

ITA Airways has begun making it easier for travelers to bring their pets with them on flights and some European travelers bring their dogs with them when they arrive by car. But it’s still a pretty good bet that someone with a dog is a local -- or at least local enough.

That means that when I’m with Mocha, I get bothered less by peddlers and menu-wavers.

But it can also confuse other residents.

I no longer live in Rome’s historic center and so I don’t get stopped as often by tourists looking for the Colosseum. Instead, I get stopped by Italians looking for more practical information: the closest bancomat, the way to the metro, or maybe the bus to where they’re going. Stopping a dog owner can be helpful no matter who’s asking.

Sometimes Italians seem a little embarrassed. But I’m never sure whether that’s because they asked advice from a foreigner -- or because the foreigner actually knew the answer.

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A million seconds ago, tech magnate Elon Musk was not yet a trillionaire. A billion seconds ago, Italy was still using the lira currency and now-deceased media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi was new on the political scene. And a trillion seconds ago was pre-history: people still lived in caves, animals had yet to be domesticated, and the ground beneath modern-day Venice was more than 200 kilometers from the closest shore.

This month, Musk became the first person with a net worth north of a trillion U.S. dollars -- that’s a number with twelve zeros behind it (as of publication, he’s not quite there in euros).

I need help in understanding numbers that large. Thinking in seconds is one way. Here are a few others: His fortune is around the size of the annual economic output of Switzerland or Saudi Arabia. Collected in 100-dollar bills, his wealth would weigh more than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Musk’s net worth is the equivalent of two-thirds of all the physical euro banknotes in circulation.

These kinds of comparisons may help us understand how large Musk’s fortune is. But they do not tell us what comes with that kind of wealth.

For that, we need Caesar Augustus.

Like Musk, Augustus was the richest man of his time. But in Augustus’s Rome, that was near the bottom of the list of reasons he was important.

Augustus, who called himself Princeps, or First Man, was also the head of state, commander of every military legion -- legions whose soldiers swore their oaths to him, not to Rome -- and the culture’s highest religious authority. He transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble.

Imagine Musk with his fortune and the presidency of the United States and command of the Pentagon and the papacy. That’s a modest description of the reach of Augustus’s power.

Of course, Musk is more than his trillion-dollar net worth. He builds the rockets the U.S. uses to get to space. His satellites have redefined the rules of war. He owns a global version of the public square. And for a season, he even had an office inside the White House, where he dramatically slashed government aid programs.

The power of both men spilled beyond their bank accounts and into the machinery a state depends on. Both were strategic. Both were ruthless. If there’s a modern-day Augustus, it’s Musk.

Yet he doesn’t come close. Almost everything Musk has is conditional. He has paper riches he cannot easily sell. He owns shares in companies whose valuations can fall, contracts that can be canceled, platforms users can abandon, and political favor that can be withdrawn.

Musk holds his power one economic quarter at a time. Augustus held his position by law, for life, and he handed it to an heir.

That’s the difference between the richest man in the world and the First Man of the world.

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The Borrowed Chevy

A few days after I turned 16, a freshly issued driver’s license in my wallet, my father held out the keys to the family car, a Chevy station wagon. It was going to be my first solo drive. But before handing them over, my father held up a finger.

“Treat it,” he said, “as if it were yours.”

Of course, I didn’t.

I got into so many little fender benders as a young driver that it became a running joke in my family. Once, when I came home with a broken headlight, my mother said the car looked like it was winking. For years, whenever we’d see a dented or scraped car somewhere, someone in the family would turn to me with raised eyebrows and ask: “Eric …?”

I often think about our poor station wagon when I watch visitors “borrow” my adopted city with the same carelessness I had as a teen driver.

Roma! Roma! Roma!

When I first arrived in Rome, I lived in a neighborhood beneath the Campidoglio and looked forward to shopping in Campo de’ Fiori, the closest outdoor market to my apartment.

There, I’d sometimes run into chefs, including the one from my favorite neighborhood restaurant, shopping for the day’s produce. Beneath the stare of Catholic radical Giordano Bruno, vendors showed me how to pick the best Romanesco broccoli (look for sharp tips on the spirals) and puntarelle (the shoots should snap when bent). There was even a gritty coffee bar the Roman stallholders preferred that made me nervous to walk into the first time. But after a few visits, the barista started calling me carissimo.

Today, the Campo de’ Fiori market has turned into a stage set: perfectly arranged baskets of flowers, dried spices, truffle-flavored products, souvenirs. Last time I was there, a man selling Italy-themed aprons, grappa in bottles shaped like the Colosseum, and penis-shaped pasta was standing on a chair shouting, “Roma! Roma! Roma!” The gritty coffee bar? It now has colorful banners outside advertising takeaway coffee and Spritz cocktails.

Campo de’ Fiori isn’t alone. Neighborhoods all over the city -- all over Italy, for that matter, and across Europe -- are loosing their identities. But ordinary Rome hasn’t disappeared, it’s just moved further out.

An Amusement Park

A few weeks ago, someone in the Rome forum on Reddit asked for advice on non-touristy places to visit and eat outside the city center. I gave my thoughts on southern Rome: “There are many non-touristy places in Garbatella, Ostiense, and San Paolo,” I wrote. “There really isn’t a touristy place beyond Testaccio on that side of town. So, just pick one based on what it looks like, or look for online reviews and filter for Italian [comments], and then pick a highly-rated one near where you are when it’s time to eat.”

I posted my comment and felt like a generous Almost Roman.

Then came the responses, all in Italian. “I ask you to edit your message to exclude the few places where we citizens still manage to live in peace,” one guy wrote. “We young people … only suffer the consequences, watching our city increasingly transform into an amusement park.”

I was dismissive in my response, something about him over-estimating the reach of a single Reddit comment.

The young Roman’s reply: “Your answer will remain on the Internet forever, for whoever searches for ‘non-touristy places in Rome.’”

We All Live Here

San Paolo, where I live, is a non-touristy part of Rome, despite being home to one of the city’s four great basilicas and sitting only two metro stops outside the ancient city walls. But in a way, it suffers from the same problems as the historic center -- too many people just passing through.

In the case of San Paolo, though, they’re the students at Roma Tre University.

Almost every night, when I’m walking my dog Mocha, I see groups of students gathered on the neighborhood’s staircases drinking and laughing until late. Then, in the morning, when Mocha and I walk to my go-to coffee bar, we pass the same spots littered with left-behind beer bottles, pizza boxes, and cigarette butts.

The students obviously aren’t tourists. But, like many tourists in the city, they don’t have a stake in the place.

Some nights, Mocha catches a student’s attention, and we’ll end up chatting briefly about her. When that happens, I’ll eventually say, “Ragazzi, we all live here. Have fun, but please throw away your trash.” There’s always enthusiastic nodding and then in the morning, almost always, no trash is left behind.

If I’m correct that the students need a reason to belong, then it turns out that a man with a dog and a foreign accent saying “we all live here” can be enough to give them one.

The $800 Honda

The young Roman on Reddit was right in diagnosing the problem, but he was wrong about the cure.

The solution to over-tourism can’t be keeping places off the map, to un-write parts of the city and hoping nobody finds them. The solution must be about giving visitors a stake in the place -- convincing them to treat where they are, however briefly, as if it were theirs.

I’ve been making this case for a while: urging travelers to slow down to allow time to know a place, against too much dependence on the tourist economy, for rules requiring 15- or 30-day minimum stays for B&B rentals in high-demand areas, and about the virtues of off-season travel. Underneath all those essays is the same idea: Try to know a place well enough to do more than simply consume it. Try to become A Thoughtful Tourist.

A few years after my family traded in the battered family station wagon I bought my first car: a used, copper-colored Honda Civic that cost me $800. There was a rust spot on the hood and if I took my hands off the steering wheel, it drifted to the left.

But it was mine. I washed it, waxed it, refused to let passengers eat inside. But it wasn’t about ownership, it was about responsibility. Unlike the Chevy, a dented door on the Honda was mine to fix.

You can never own a city. But you don’t have to own it to feel responsible for the dents left behind.

📌 And another thing

One of the problems with over-tourism is that it can seem beautiful from a distance.

That’s one of the uncomfortable lessons of The Siege of Paradise, a soon-to-be released documentary about Cinque Terre that I recently watched as a media screener (watch the trailer). The film has gorgeous panoramas, it’s at times funny and ironic, and is ultimately gentler than its title suggests.

Director Gar O’Rourke skillfully weaves together the stories of winemakers, restaurant owners, local officials, aging residents, fishermen -- and two Chicago influencers who burst onto the scene, phones in hand.

The two women would be easy to mock, and the film briefly seems to be doing that, showing them talk about beaches, spritzes, the perfect selfie, and “Italian culture.” But The Siege of Paradise is more nuanced than that. They’re not monsters. They aren’t even especially bad tourists. They seem to become more self-aware over the course of the film.

The film sidesteps the cliché that cast visitors as villains and locals as saints and instead shines a light on a place caught in an impossible trap: the tourists are exhausting, they are ruining what they came to admire, and they are absolutely necessary for the local economy to survive.

It’s a bleak story being repeated in small, fragile places across Italy -- the Amalfi Coast, Civita di Bagnoregio, Lake Como, even Venice -- and far beyond.

A big city like Rome can absorb much more, reinventing itself neighborhood by neighborhood. But small villages have no place to hide.

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A special tip of the cap this week to , , and , whose comments in previous discussions (here and here) helped inspire this essay.

I’ve become an absentminded swirler.

The habit took hold over years of conducting and attending wine tastings. And in that context, it makes perfect sense. Swirling releases a wine’s aromas and helps reveal its character. But nowadays I often find myself swirling drinks that make no…

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A quick note: This Dispatch Digest is the first of a new look back at the previous month’s essays -- standout reader comments, additions, and the connections that appeared after publishing. Starting in July, it will be emailed to paid subscribers on the first Thursday of each month. But this first one is for everyone.

No straight lines

It’s tempting to think about understanding as something that accumulates in a straight line.

We learn a new fact. Read a new book. Have an unexpected conversation. Visit a new place. One by one, pieces are added to each other and over time our understanding of the world takes shape.

But sometimes, important insights arrive differently. Sometimes there’s nothing new except our point of view.

Looking back on May’s essays, I realize every essay ended up being about that kind of change in perspective.

And it turns out that shift doesn’t stop once an essay is published. The conversations continue in the comments section, where “finished” essays often turn into collaborations.

There was the routine bike ride that made me a witness to the tragic fate of a young woman. Or the examination of why one of the most beautiful corners of Italy is overlooked by locals. A trip to the Dominican Republic that made me reconsider Italy’s tourism challenges. And how the simple act of writing this newsletter forced me to see my home city through new eyes.

The Zebra-Print Shoe … this one was among the most difficult things I’ve ever written, mostly because it forced me to confront events I remember vividly but spent years purposely not writing about, examining my role as a witness to a death nobody was meant to notice.

Note: this one is darker than the others. If you’d rather skip it, jump to below the next photo to pick up this post further down.

called the essay a “high wire act” -- a combination of personal essay and reportage, plus a slice of memoir. I think that’s what made it so hard to write. Even now, two weeks later, I still feel a bit drained by it.

“What is so striking in this haunting account is the cynicism, both of the pack of cyclists, so dismissive in their language, and the cops in the area,” wrote , a fellow journalist who spent years writing about human trafficking in Italy. She went into details the essay could only nod at.

There were many comments praising the kind-hearted captain.

“Sometimes the ugly stories also contain moments of goodness, and I think it’s important to be honest about both,” wrote . Ditto for , who joined the cycling team mentioned in the essay a year or two after the events in the story. He said the captain was “a great example of a not unusual experience in which an Italian person goes out of their way, beyond what a stranger would expect.”

But the comment that extended the essay most was from , who asked whether anyone had tried to identify the poor woman in the essay and whether there had been a service for her in Rome. I didn’t know. “So many people are born, struggle, and die without the world really acknowledging them,” I replied, a succinct summary of the essay itself.

The 40-Minute Problem was a gentler essay, where I made a case for visiting the Castelli Romani, a group of more than a dozen hill towns surprisingly close to Rome, but which Romans seem to avoid because the area reminds them of their awkward adolescence.

In one comment, made a case for the Castelli as a “should-be” tourist destination better than I could, even singling out Pagnanelli, a restaurant I’ve been visiting for years. Long-time readers may recall the essay Everyone Was Trying to Help, where my date got charmingly stranded in a restaurant bathroom. That took place in Pagnanelli. I’d kept it anonymous in the original essay, but the comment outed it.

Another reader, , asked a question I’d been bracing for: Was I worried that “by shining a light on this area” I’d invite over-tourism? Part of my reply: I’m not anti-tourism; I’m anti-over-tourism. “The Castelli have a long way to go to reach that point,” I wrote.

I traveled to the Dominican Republic with my mother in late April and early May. I didn’t intend to write about Italy from a park bench in Santo Domingo, but the over-tourism parallels were hard to ignore. The result was Two Countries, One Warning.

Reader visited Italy three times across 50 years, and on his most recent trip to scout property in his ancestors’ Calabria he started off on the wrong foot when he heard U.S. pop music being piped through loudspeakers in Lamezia Terme. “My idealized remembrances of Italy started to fade,” he wrote. By the time he faced the crowds at Cinque Terre, he abandoned his plans to buy property.

, a dual citizen who just moved to Italy from the U.S., was looking for solutions to the problem of over-tourism. She brought up tax policies, incentives for start-ups, and better civic engagement. That made me think about university students in my own neighborhood, San Paolo in Rome, who leave beer bottles and cigarette butts on public steps because, I believe, they’re essentially visitors who don’t feel invested in the area. I think that’s the same detachment that lets a tourist consume a place without noticing the damage to it.

The argument got flipped in a comment from . Instead of asking whether tourism was good or bad, she discussed “who deserves to travel and on what terms.” Her comment focused on the pitfalls of the “easy” answers: tell people to stay home and you entrench provincialism. Require some minimal understanding of the language or culture? That tips toward authoritarianism. Meanwhile, opening the gates presents devastating problems. Monica had obviously been mulling over the topic for a while: soon after her comment, she published her own provocative post delving even deeper into the topic.

Rome, from the Right Angle marked the one-year anniversary of The Italian Dispatch. I used a fascinating 65-year-old photo of Roman actress Anna Magnani in her cluttered apartment to illustrate how I’d always imagined her. Then the essay traced how writing The Italian Dispatch helped me see Magnani in a different context -- in street art.

greeted the essay with Nannarella, Magnani’s old Roman nickname, one I hadn’t heard in a while. Elfin floated a theory I’m still thinking about: that Magnani has come back into fashion more than half a century after her death because her unpolished style suits 2026 better than it did her own era. Nannarella stuck, too -- I had a Note ready calling her La Magnani, but I switched the reference before posting it.

Eric Beall from added to the essay’s closing image of Magnani as Superwoman in Trastevere torn from the wall, reduced to a faint outline. He’d recently walked past a Donald Trump-as-a-brownshirt mural in the same area, also peeling away. He saw it as “a reminder that time sooner or later erases a lot of the posturing and posing of those in power.”

And reader did the most fitting thing of all: she kept looking. Mb saw the Lediesis mural of Magnani as Superwoman I used in the essay and then recognized a different mural -- this one of the Madonna with the infant Jesus strapped to her chest -- by the same artist in Bari, then more of them in Rome. Like me, Mb started seeing the murals everywhere.

This Dispatch Digest is available to all. Future editions will go out by email to those with a paid subscription, which also includes access to the full archive: more than 50 essays and the conversations that followed each one. Annual paid subscribers in the E.U., U.K., or U.S. also receive a welcome package -- a vintage postcard and a Dispatch refrigerator magnet. The three most recent essays are always free to read.

To first-time visitors, the towns of the Castelli Romani feel like a private discovery: Rome spread out in the distance like a stage set, St. Peter’s dome recognizable through the haze, volcanic lakes that remain cool even in August, inexpensive easy-to-drink wines, Renaissance villas, even the pope’s summer palace.

But for many Romans, the Castelli Romani feel like a return to adolescence.

For them, they can recall fidgeting at weddings, long lunches with friends of their parents, their first hangover, or awkward sexual fumbling in the back of a borrowed Fiat. So, as adults, they’re more likely to book a trip to the Dolomites or Sardinia than to the Alban Hills, less than 20 kilometers from Rome’s city limits.

There’s a Lombard phrase I learned while in Milan for the Olympics earlier this year: La tròppa confidenza la fa perd la riverenza -- “Too much familiarity makes you lose respect.” I heard it in connection with a restaurant I thought should be better known. But the phrase could just as easily apply to Romans’ attitude toward the familiar hills in their backyard.

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Note: this essay discusses violence against women and may be upsetting for some readers. --Eric

The Cyclist

I was halfway through a Friday morning bicycle training ride near the sea, turning around to head back to Rome, when a woman’s zebra-print shoe caught my eye at the bottom of a roadside embankment.

I made another pass, stopped, and a dark-skinned leg near the shoe came into focus, partially obscured by the brush. I carefully laid my bike on its side and looked both ways. “Hello? Buongiorno?” I called down the hill. Then, after a moment: “Jambo?” -- the only Swahili word I knew. No movement.

I started to make my way down the embankment but stopped after a couple of steps. She was probably dead. Did I want to risk trampling over evidence? And if she was alive, she didn’t need me, she needed a doctor. I climbed back up to the road and found a rock to mark the spot. As I raced toward Ostia, the closest city, I practiced what I wanted to say in my head.

Before even getting there, I found a police car on the side of the road and two officers leaning against it, smoking. I pulled up to them and announced: “Ho trovato una mignotta morta!” I was out of breath.

The Cops

“Che?” one of the officers asked -- “What?”

“I found. A dead. Prostitute,” I repeated, in Italian. I didn’t yet realize how ugly the word mignotta was. I’d learned it from other riders on my cycling team, where I was the only non-Italian. Sometimes one of them would shout it when we rode past certain women standing on rural roadsides during late-in-the-day rides.

“Where did you learn Italian?” the other cop asked.

I repeated the phrase a third time, pronouncing each syllable with more emphasis.

“Allora,” the first officer said, “dov’è questa famosa mignotta morta?”

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There’s a photo of Anna Magnani that fascinated me from the first time I 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.

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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

I am with my mother, I wanted to tell him. But instead, when he finished, I gave him 20 pesos (around €0.35) 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

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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.

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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 belief that military strength alone cannot settle questions of right and wrong.

It quickly escalates beyond a war of words, with accusations that the pontiff is clinging to outdated values and “a policy, which, while good in other centuries, is no longer appropriate to the century in which we live.”

But the pope doesn’t back down. He doesn’t have his adversary’s armies, resources, and his knack for humiliating adversaries, but the leader of the world’s Catholics is convinced he has the moral high ground.

That political leader was Napoleon Bonaparte; the pope, Pius VII. Their standoff was in 1809. And if the story sounds familiar, that’s the point.

The familiar script

The current clash between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV has so far been mostly rhetorical -- aside from an apparent Pentagon threat that reopened a 700-year-old wound about when the papacy was forced to abandon Rome for 68 years (more on that below).

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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.

But these aren’t nervous tics, they’re camouflage. I’m describing a 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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