Sybilla Oritur

I haven’t been driven to buy an academic book “just because” in a long, long time. It was supposed to be skimmed for a paper, but as i couldn’t put it down, i ended up having to ask for an extension. I can’t recommend it enough.
Imperial City: Rome, Romans and Napoleon, 1796-1815 focuses on the [...]

August 1-2, 2009: Beginning the Goodbyes
Saturday morning I had an appt at Prima Sole, a beauty salon recommended to me by Giulia from Rosso e Vino – I was apparently their first Canadian customer ever. Freshly defuzzed, I climbed back to San’Angelo, my favourite tanning spot in the entire city, and enjoyed some sun’s rays [...]

I wish that i could find the motivation to wake up in the morning for sunrises - the closest i have come thus far was a close-call to a nuit-blanche spent reading Stranger in a Strange Land. Finally in possession of my photos from Rome and now inspired to start being a shutterbug in Perugia, [...]

Getting up yesterday was ROUGH (did I mention that I only went to bed at 3am?), but I didn’t let it affect my incredible Roman plans too much. After a breakfast downstairs, I spent forty minutes in line at tourist information figuring out which bus to take to the Appian Way and the Catacombs of [...]

The past few days have been sort of jam-packed with adventure in the way that one hopes time in Rome will be. Monday morning I got on the Metropolitana towards the Colosseum and spent an hour reading about its building on top of the site of Nero’s personal, artificial lake when the Emperor Vespasian won [...]

One cannot get a chai latte in Terminal 3 of JFK – it may, in fact, be the largest distance one can travel in New York without crossing a Starbucks (or a Subway as I think of it). The previous time I was there was the middle of a blizzard and the terminals were deserted [...]