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A weekend of righteous Roman pleasures

Claes Britton | Mar 21, 2008 | 1 comments

Too many years have passed since I last found time to honor the Eternal City with my personal presence. When I, together with my dear father and brother, at last returned the weekend past — the second of three or even four visits in my second homeland this spring season, blessed be my soul — I was relieved to find that most of it, in general and on the whole, remains pretty much the same more or less after all these milleniums. I’m delighted to share with you some private pictures of poor quality from our fifty plus hours under the sweet Roman skies, where we were hosted, once again, by my father’s old friend Giuseppe Visco, whose kind hospitality I’ve used, abused and badly battered time after time again over the years, both in his patrician Rome residence and in his splendid eagle’s nest villa on the cape of the Sorrento peninsula In Campagna, with a breathtaking 270-degree vista over the Gulf of Naples, Capri and Vesuvius. There was time enough to enjoy a sunny morning jog in the Villa Borghese, a vintage Roman family lunch with all extras and accessories, the Roma-Milan showdown in the Olympic Stadium, where the home team was able to turn it all around and escape with the victory in final stretch, though our friend Francesco Totti merged among the field’s anonymous middle classes on this night, a luncheon visit at the exclusive Tiro a Volo (”Shoot at the Bird”) bird shooting and tennis club at the crest of one of seven Roman hills, where time unfortunately forbade us to duke it out with the Roman veteran elite on the invitingly red clay courts, some hours uf purposless wandering amongst the monuments, ruins and human herds of the city centre, as well as a couple of gargantuan dinners and bar rounds on top of that — yes, we were even able to squeeze in quick meetings with the Swedish Ambassador and a distinguished former Italian Minister of Industry.

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