044 piazza navona

(above: Piazza Navona, which you have surely read about in "Angels and Demons" by now)

Last week, I published a personal ad on Craigslist for an English-Italian language swap. I have received about a dozen responses, some interesting, some humorous, some creepy. The one that was the most interesting was an archeologist named Nicoletta, and I arranged to meet her for gelato last night.

It was a great match - we both are genuinely interested in learning the language, and have a lot of similar interests to boot (history, archeology, architecture). Working in archeology in Rome means working with tourists, so being able to speak English is essential for her.

The idea was to speak in Italian the 1st half and in English the second half. It turns out that we are both pretty proficient at communicating (albeit with some grammatical and pronunciation errors), but surprisingly, we both struggled the most at listening comprehension and had to slow waaaay down for each other when speaking in our native tongues. We chatted over gelato (I had chocolate & raspberry) for a few hours last night, talking about a variety of things. At one point, she asked me where I was living.

I told her all about living with Delfina and Diana, and she replied "Delfina is an unusual name, I met someone named Delfina not too long ago up by Piazzale Clodio, she was with an American girl named Lucia, I wonder if it's the same Delfina?" Uhhhhhhh, yup, that's her. The population of Rome is 2.6 million people in the city limits alone, so the odds of this are statistically impossible. Nicoletta also knows Giorgio Croci, but this is less surprising, since she's an archeologist.

I'm going to call this the Flavia Effect. When I was getting to know Flavia in Auburn, I was always amazed and amused to see how many people knew her in any given part of town. We could be walking down College Street, on campus, in Opelika, but everywhere we went, every 4th person we passed would say - "Ciao Flavia!" "Hey Flavia!" "What's up Flavia!".

TONIGHT: Italy vs. Germany. The winner goes to the championship game Sunday night.

GET JEALOUS: My office hours for the rest of my time here are 8:30 to 2:30.