The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims by Elizabeth Gilbert Page B

even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say—no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud. The men here, in their beauty, force me to call upon romance novel rhapsodies in order to describe them. They are “devilishly attractive,” or “cruelly handsome,” or “surprisingly muscular.”
    However, if I may admit something not entirely flattering to myself, these Romans on the street aren’t really giving me any second looks. Or even many first looks, for that matter. I found this kind of alarming at first. I’d been to Italy once before, back when I was nineteen, and what I remember is being constantly harassed by men on the street. And in the pizzerias. And at the movies. And in the Vatican. It was endless and awful. It used to be a real liability about traveling in Italy, something that could almost even spoil your appetite. Now, at the age of thirty-four, I am apparently invisible. Sure, sometimes a man will speak to me in a friendly way, “You look beautiful today, signorina ,” but it’s not all that common and it never gets aggressive. And while it’s certainly nice, of course, to not get pawed by a disgusting stranger on the bus, one does have one’s feminine pride, and one must wonder, What has changed here? Is it me? Or is it them?
    So I ask around, and everybody agrees that, yes, there’s been a true shift in Italy in the last ten to fifteen years. Maybe it’s a victory of feminism, or an evolution of culture, or the inevitable modernizing effects of having joined the European Union. Or maybe it’s just simple embarrassment on the part of young men about the infamous lewdness of their fathers and grandfathers. Whatever the cause, though, it seems that Italy has decided as a society that this sort of stalking, pestering behavior toward women is no longer acceptable. Not even my lovely young friend Sofie gets harassed on the streets, and those milkmaid-looking Swedish girls used to really get the worst of it.
    In conclusion—it seems Italian men have earned themselves the Most Improved Award.
    Which is a relief, because for a while there I was afraid it was me. I mean, I was afraid maybe I wasn’t getting any attention because I was no longer nineteen years old and pretty. I was afraid that maybe my friend Scott was correct last summer when he said, “Ah, don’t worry, Liz—those Italian guys won’t bother you anymore. It ain’t like France, where they dig the old babes.”

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    Yesterday afternoon I went to the soccer game with Luca Spaghetti and his friends. We were there to watch Lazio play. There are two soccer teams in Rome—Lazio and Roma. The rivalry between the teams and their fans is immense, and can divide otherwise happy families and peaceful neighborhoods into civil war zones. It’s important that you choose early in life whether you are a Lazio fan or a Roma fan, because this will determine, to a large part, whom you hang out with every Sunday afternoon for the rest of time.
    Luca has a group of about ten close friends who all love each other like brothers. Except that half of them are Lazio fans and half of them are Roma fans. They can’t really help it; they were all born into families where the loyalty was already established. Luca’s grandfather (who I hope is known as Nonno Spaghetti) gave him his first sky-blue Lazio jersey when the boy was just a toddler. Luca, likewise, will be a Lazio fan until he dies.
    “We can change our wives,” he said. “We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team.”
    By the way, the word for “fan” in Italian is tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In other words—one who is mightily fevered.
    My first soccer game with Luca Spaghetti was, for me, a delirious banquet of Italian language. I learned all sorts of new and interesting words in