Giving private English lessons was a revelation in how wealthy Roman families lived. Packed onto buses, shoulders weighed down with books, dice, cards, worksheets, puppets in some cases, we nodded hello to doormen, ran up marble stairs, looked at ourselves in elevator mirrors surrounded by velvet and met a lot of Filippina nannies and a lot of strange and wonderful children. One of my first jobs in Rome was with a small company that sent teachers all over the city to teach private lessons. Families paid a fortune and were guaranteed that a licensed native English speaking teacher would show up at their door once a week to coach their…

You might consider yourself a spiritual or a religious person, someone who thinks the Universe or God or some cosmic energy is guiding you down a path. Or maybe you feel signs are not connected to a higher power and you are simply noticing patterns in the fabric of the world around you that seem to point and that’s enough for you to take a direction. Or you don’t believe in signs at all – everything is random, we are the masters of our fate, and in our decisions and our circumstances, we act alone. These days I find myself having conversations along these lines more and more. As a…

How can I phrase this… I’m bad with languages. Even my own. Inept might be a good word. Perhaps even terrible. In school I wasn’t troubled by getting good grades. Calculus? No problem. Art history? A+. Physics: Let’s go. But languages aren’t like any of the other subjects. It’s not about memorization, tests or critical thinking and analysis. To master a language, you have to speak it and that was my problem. I didn’t speak. I’m not sure when my voice started to dry up but it was somewhere in adolescence around the age of 11 or 12. The river of my words slowed to a trickle and the jokes…

I mentioned in my first “Laurenissima” post that my Roman boyfriend Dario had “tried” to break up with me days after I’d moved to Rome. We’d met during my semester abroad in Italy over one and a half years earlier. Most of our relationship had developed over Skype conversations and a couple visits to California so by the time I actually got to Rome, the relationship which hadn’t been built on a whole lot to begin with was on shaky ground. However much sense it might have made to go our separate ways, I had literally JUST gotten to Rome and knew nobody else in the city. He agreed to “see how…

My second English teaching job was with a Dickensian-ly dismal school located near Termini station. In a neighborhood of internet caffes, some of the worst Italian restaurants in town and some of the best Korean, was a building with a door large enough to allow in a horse and carriage. Through this door you followed a rather dingy red velvet carpet up a couple stairs into the school that was located on the ground floor level and in the basement. Every room had been turned into a rabbit warren of tiny booths made of thin particle board, painted white. In each cubicle was a desk, two chairs, a trash can…

My first impressions in Rome seem to echo over and over in the stories I hear from newcomers to the city. It seems that everyone must pass through the mingled initiation of both terror and awe that they experience while careening into the city in a taxi while coming to terms with the possibility that this may be the last few minutes of their lives. The driver is excited to share his city, proud to show off her monuments as if he’s giving a dinner guest a tour of his newly remodeled house. While pointing out the white monstrosity of the wedding cake (Romans hate it, foreigners like me, love…

My first English teaching job in Rome (or first “mission, should I choose to accept it”) was to go on assignment to a school where I’d have two tasks: teach English to a class of seven year olds for an hour and then have a private tutoring session with the Mother Superior. It was a school run by nuns. I told them I didn’t think the class would be a good idea since I really didn’t speak Italian or have experience with groups of kids. Also, I did not consider myself a “kid person.” Unfortunately as a young woman, nobody believes this. You’re female, you must be a kid person.…

Looking for work in Rome turned out to be like a lot of my first experiences in the city: embarrassing, culturally confusing and all about language. The fact that I’m a native English speaker is what got me every single English teaching job I had in Rome. In fact not one school asked to see my English teacher certification. Not. One. The fact that I didn’t speak Italian and had just moved to Rome with almost no money, no job and no visa posed an obvious challenge. Despite having spent a semester trying to study on my own while finishing university and a summer practicing with Rosetta Stone software before…

The gateway job to making it in Rome is teaching English. If you want to move here and you don’t have European citizenship or work for a U.N. agency, then teaching English is your ticket to getting a foothold in the country and paying rent. When I arrived in Rome, I had a 1.5 month sublet set up with the girlfriend of the brother of a guy I’d met in a creative writing workshop in San Francisco (serendipity), $1,000 to my name (after paying for my upcoming teacher certification class and one way plane ticket) and the only person I knew in the country was the Italian boyfriend who said…

I didn’t do it the easy way. Or the legal way. Or the right way. Or the wrong way. A friend of mine that I met in Italy has said: “Rome calls people to her. Those of us who have made a life here are the ones brave enough, crazy enough, and maybe stupid enough to answer that call.” It sounds a little mystical and vague but so are all our answers as to why we are here. Those of us who have stayed say: I feel at home here. I need to be here. It’s right here. Seconds later we are probably screaming at a motorino that has cut…