CET Student Correspondent News: Costantino is all over Rome

By Claire Costantino, Student Correspondent

Vanderbilt-in-Florence relocated to Roma for a few days this week, and it was soooo cool! Italians talk about Rome the way people in Small Town, USA talk about New York city: this magical place where everything is cool and stylish and perfect. They weren’t far off. We went with a school trip, so we just about toured ourselves to death, but we were still able to rally and have a good time. Funny fact: the hip cool neighborhood in Rome, Trastevere, reminded me a lot of Florence. So basically I get to spend my semester in an entire city that’s like the best Rome has to offer! I won’t bother telling you how cool the Colosseum was, how much I wish I could spend all my time in Villa Borghese, or that the Sistine Chapel blew my mind — that's obvious.

5 unexpected things that made Rome awesome:

1. Although their wine wasn’t as good as Tuscany’s Chianti, the food was SO GOOD. The further south you go, the more you wish you could just eat all the time and be Jabba the Hut-style fat. Roman specialties include spaghetti alla carbonara, spaghetti all’amatriciana, and fried goodness. I knew about the pasta, but the Roman habit of breading and frying just about anything they can think of was a delicious surprise that made an otherwise chic and cool city seem eerily like the Texas State Fair.

fried fiori di zucca. the 8th wonder of the Roman world...

2. Green space! Florentines seem to think grass is lethal, so they just cobblestone over any earth they find. Romans, however, embrace greenery. Villa Borghese is basically what Le Cascine wishes it could be, and most streets have trees and ivy instead of just graffitti.

3. Tourists dumber than me! This is probably more because I’ve been here for a while now and I’m getting my bearings and less because Rome attracts more idiots than Florence, but I felt so smart there! I could muddle through some Italian-only interactions and I knew facts about the places we visited! Some of these video camera-toting tourists were so hopeless that I almost felt bad for them, especially the man that walked by the “School of Athens” in the Vatican and then shouted “WE ARE NOW ENTERING THE SISTINE CHAPEL” into his video camera. An embarrassing mistake made worse by the fact that he will always hear a tour guide’s judgmental cackle on that video.

4. Fountains!

Everywhere you look there’s a cool fountain! One to commemorate a sunken ship by the Spanish steps, the Trevi, and my favorite: one by Bernini in Piazza Navona where the figures all look disgusted and shield their eyes because they don’t want to look at the “ugly” building in front of them because Bernini was mad he wasn’t commissioned to do the building as well.

5. My favorite thing about Rome: I’m everywhere! Costantino is all over that city! I’ve got a triumphal arch, a salon, like 2 columns in the phone book (yes, I looked), and some cute restaurants.

Claire and the Arco di Costantino

Claire Costantino,
CET Florence Fall 2009 Student Correspondent