When you accept a ride home from a mad scientist with green hair and covered in fake blood, you have to be a little dense if you think it’s going to be an uneventful ride. We’d already dropped off my future employer who had been crouched in the trunk (it was one of those two seater mini cars) and we were whizzing across Ponte Garibaldi when it happened: my knees were inexplicably colliding with the dashboard and suddenly we were stopped in the middle of the tram line. “I guess we’ve had an accident,” said the mad scientist. I really wasn’t in the mood for a Halloween party. I was…

At the end of every month I’d ask Larry if he wanted to settle up. I was recording every client, every ticket, every time I collected, every time I didn’t, setting aside what I was owed from what I had to return to Larry in envelopes of cash tucked into my bookshelf. But he always just texted back: Let’s do it next month.  Shall we compare accounts anyway?  Lauren… don’t worry about it. Oh right, I thought, don’t be the crass American bringing up money all the time. You’re “amici” after all and to imply that you were working for money (radical concept!) was so…so… oh let’s just not, shall…

When I gave my first tour seven years ago, it was of the Roman Forum and Colosseum… a two hour “highlights” tour for which I had studied excessively for the previous six months. I listened to podcasts, I read books, I triangulated information and I went on tours with other guides repeatedly until I felt ready. I was ready to create a grand narrative, sweeping from the foundation of the city on Palatine hill (remember that word, it comes back later) to the development of the Roman Republic to the slow decay of democracy and the emergence of an empire. I had names. I had dates. I had anecdotes. I was ready…

In the beginning … everything was cash, tickets and texts.   Larry was in with all the concierges on Via Veneto. This winding boulevard sweeps down from the Porta Pinciana (one of the entrances in the 3rd century Aurelian Walls) to the Piazza Barberini below with its splashing Bernini fountain and gleaming white Barberini palace. The street became the symbol of Italy’s Dolce Vita, immortalized by Federico Fellini’s film of the same name and attracting stars like Audrey Hepburn and Anita Ekberg. Now it boasts Rome’s big, swanky hotels and perhaps the city’s widest sidewalks in a neighborhood where everyone takes taxis and private cars. Over that summer I passed through swishing…

In year three, around the time I moved into apartment number two thousand, I got the whiff of an opportunity for a job that sounded like it combined things I loved (art and history) and things that terrified me in the way other people are terrified of finding a large spiders in their bed (public speaking). My main motivation was escape. I had been teaching English in Rome as a way to get by while seeking other opportunities that would a) pay the rent and b) be something I may actually enjoy and imagine doing in the future. I could barely sustain myself on the sporadic nature of English lessons…

“Can I be honest with you?” Let’s face it, you always want to answer “No” to this question. But you can’t. The only suitable response is, “Oh, of course!” Then one must sit there. Smiling. Holding ones breath. Thinking: Oh, shit. “I don’t think you have what it takes…” My unsolicited observer swiveled the straw in his seltzer, drawing a line under his casual judgment, “…to be a journalist.” I’d spent about an hour wandering around Rome with this guy, wondering what kind of role he was trying to take with me and had decided it was somewhere in the disconcerting mire between paternal and flirtatious. He’d been introduced as…

It felt like falling off a cliff, so abrupt, almost terrifying, was the change in my life. Black and white to color TV. Darkness to light. Depression to dream. When they say, “it seems too good to be true,” they’re talking about situations like this one. At the end of my second year in Rome I fell so hopelessly and recklessly in love with the Pilot that I had the dizzying feeling of stepping out of one life and directly into another. “Dress up,” he’d say, “I’m taking you out.” Heels, tight skirts, jewelry, cocktails, expensive watches. As clean as walking through a door from one room into another, I…

Sometimes you meet people and have no idea that they will change your life. You look back later, shaking your head at how unsuspecting you were with the arrogant wisdom of hindsight. Other times, you meet someone that immediately moves you. You register the shift on a physical level before your brain can catch up. There’s a shift inside you. The feeling of pieces fitting together in a new way. A resettling. You’ve rounded a corner on your journey and realize there’s a whole new vista, a new land to explore that you’d only before imagined. That’s what it felt like to meet the pilot. He was tall and he…

The next “season” of Laurenissima begins where all good stories do: at rock bottom. If “happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” then a story containing a bit of hardship and general misery usually makes for good reading (thanks for the pointer, Tolstoy). Year two of life in Italy almost broke my resolve to live here and by the end I was sure I’d be moving back to California. Of course, it had all started out very differently. After nearly breaking up then falling back in love in my first year in Rome, my boyfriend Dario and I were moving in together.…

In that first year living in Rome I wondered: when will I feel like I belong here? Maybe when I master the language. When I have more Italian friends. When I have my visa. When the country grants me a permit to stay. When I have a job with a contract. I didn’t know it would take me so long to reach these things. Many years. I didn’t know that my belonging wouldn’t come with achieving them. Anyone who has moved abroad knows the moment that is the most confusing, most jarring, that makes you feel the most out of place doesn’t happen in the country you’ve moved to. It…