I'm Italian and for seven years I lived in one of the most touristic city in the world: Rome. I used to see thousands of tourists every day because my university was in the city center, near piazza Navona, piazza Venezia, fontana di Trevi... so, you can imagine how many foreign people I bumped into in those years and, especially, how many weird things I saw them doing. I'll give you a few advices: some of them are silly and some are serious. 1) Be careful choosing where to eat. In big cities, like Rome, there are a lot of lousy restaurants and pizza places that offer touristic menus, especially downtown: generally, don't trust any of them! Always check the reviews on internet and possibly look Italian reviews up. We're quite hard to please speaking about food! 2) Please, don't wear sandals with socks while you're walking across the city! You'll be screaming: I'M A TOURIST! 3) Don't do things that you wouldn’t do in your country... I mean: behave yourself. I often saw tourists acting as they didn’t care at all of rules, order, tidiness. I can understand that our reputation isn’t the most stainless, but we're not beasts. 4) Last but not least: you should never order a cappuccino after noon! 😁

Betty Botter bought a bit of butter; “But,” she said, “this butter's bitter! If I put it in my batter It will make my batter bitter. But a bit o’ better butter Will make my batter better.” Then she bought a bit o’ butter Better than the bitter butter, Made her bitter batter better. So ’twas better Betty Botter Bought a bit o’ better butter.

I'm a huge Potterhead! For those who don't know, Potterhead are people OBSESSED with Harry Potter! I'm not ashamed to admit that I’m one of them! Even if I'm almost 33, I still read HP at least once a year. I felt in love with HP when I was 11, before movies came out, when in Italy was almost niche literature: I perfectly remember that I went searching some others HP readers in my middle school, and I found only a few. I'm proud to have been one of those teenagers who spent hours and hours of their life wondering what would happen in the next volume! I owe to HP if I'm a passionate reader. Anyway, speaking about the topic of this post: in HP many characters die: off the top of my head, I can easily think of Sirius, Fred, Dobby, Remus and Tonks, Snape... but, undoubtedly, the most upsetting and shocking death was Dumbledore's, at the end of the sixth book. I know that he had to die anyway because of the curse to his hand, I know that his death was long planned with Severus Snape, and, most importantly, I know that Harry needed to lose Dumbledore to finally embrace his destiny... but, damn, it was hard!

One of the most important changes that I made in my life was choosing to close my Facebook account! I did it seven years ago. FB wasn’t full of garbage like today (well... it was, but it was a little less trashy...) and at the time it was THE social network: everyone was on FB! I don’t use Instagram or tiktok, but I think FB was what Instagram and tiktok are today. I started realising that every time that I had nothing specific to do, I was scrolling down the FB wall on my phone. Then I noticed that I wasn’t using it only when I had nothing else to do, but when I should have been occupied with my studies and my job as well. At last I realised that even when I was with my friends, my index finger was unconsciously scrolling down. That was the moment when I told myself: That’s enough! I faced the truth that I wasn’t able to use it maturely and I started thinking about closing it. I immediately thought that I wouldn’t have been able to reach some people without FB... that was some nonsense that I was telling myself! I kept it open for two weeks more, and then I decided to stay with my real friends in the real world! I never regretted that choice, and I still think it was one of the best choices I’ve ever made!

That's a really mean meme for (or to?🤔) English learners 😂😂😂

Today I’d like to talk about a serious topic, something that, in my opinion, is one of the most dangerous illnesses of our age. No, I’m not talking about COVID, or any other disease. I’d like to talk about forgetfulness! Obviously, I don’t mean it as a pathological problem, such as one of the consequences of Alzheimer. Nothing like that! What really concerns me is the forgetfulness as a consequence of our system of information. Nowadays we’re swamped with news (real and fake), gossip, details, updates... and we’re becoming like a colander: everything pass through, we don’t hold anything and little by little we forget everything! I was thinking about it when I read the news about the name change of the AstraZeneca Vaccine! “Do you want to clean up your image? Don’t worry, change your name and in a few weeks nobody will remember!”. My fear is that we’re becoming superficial in almost every aspect of our life because we care only about the single instant (or maybe instinct!) we’re living: everything pass by and we don’t realise what’s happening in front of us, we’re happy with the little we know and have and we’re forgetting who we really are! If we don’t recall our mistakes, we’re doomed to repeat them again. If we don’t recollect how much love we received from the others, we won’t have gratitude in our hearts and we won’t love back. If we forget our history, we won’t have a future! Please don’t hesitate to correct the style and the grammar and to comment the contents of these thoughts that I shared with you. Thanks!

I never wore an uniform, in Italy it’s quite unusual. There’s a minimal number of private schools that use uniforms here. Watching TV and movies I’ve always thought it was quite a cool thing! I think that one big pro is the fact that wearing the uniform helps to avoid discrimination based on what you’re wearing: we know that when you’re young that’s quite a huge issue! Of course as a consequence there’s the opposite con: you can’t express yourself with your own wearing style! Did you wear an uniform? What do you think?

What I want to tell you, it didn’t happen today but seven years ago! In that period I was living in Rome. Whoever has ever lived in Rome knows that the only reasonable way to move in Rome is to ride a motorcycle, a motorbike or any other thing with two wheels. Public transportation is pitiful and to drive a car it drives you crazy. I had a motorbike in that period! Once, I left the City to reach some friends at the “Roman Castles”, one of the few villages around Rome. As I arrived I noticed that I was almost out of petrol and I thought: “when I leave I must refuel at the first gas station I find!”. We had a great time with my friends, we ate a wonderful lunch and after that I had to leave early because I had a meeting in the late afternoon. As I started my motorbike, the gas indicator had no intention to get over the red zone! I needed a gas station! While I was driving, I was also hoping and praying to bump into a gas station. I reached the GRA, an highway ring around the Capital, and apparently all the gas stations were on the other direction of traffic. At some point I heard that unmistakable sound: pop, pop, pop... I was out of petrol with no gas station nearby, there were 20 kilometres left, and I was in a hurry! I started pushing my motorbike. I was a little scared because the cars run quite fast on the GRA! After a few minutes that I was pushing, and a large amount of cars that didn’t stop, a motorcycle pulled over! That good Samaritan told me to leave there my motorbike and to get on his motorcycle! Thinking back on it, I was a little rash, but in that moment I didn’t hesitate to trust him. He drove me to the next gas station, I bought a special plastic bag and I filled it with gasoline and then he drove me back to my motorbike! I can’t forget that day, and I still remember that man’s name. After all that I went through, at the end of the day I was happy because I saw that there’s still good in this world!