Lunch with Rita...

Several days ago I had contacted Rita, another “couch surfer”, who is 67, lives over near the Vatican, and had invited me to lunch today. While we had been to the Vatican, her neighborhood was yet another area I’d not been. I allowed one hour to get there by bus and Metro, which was just right.
She has a very spacious apartment on the seventh floor which she owns. Most Italians do not own their apartments.
Off her balcony you can see mountains and the area around the Borghese Gallery.

She served a nice fresh Caprese salad, prosciutto, cantaloupe, fruit, and white wine from Abruzzi, which is where she is from. Rita is a former teacher, who married late (1995). Her husband (a “nice” man and philosophy professor) died the following year, as he had had a kidney transplant which did not take. She sounded like she really didn’t care if she had ever gotten married. Now she travels a lot, does some tutoring, and volunteers. In October, she is going to Lourdes with a group as a volunteer. She was really delightful!
She told me about her father who was in Germany during the war, and he never came back. Of course, he had met another woman. She saw him again for the first time when she was 18; he just wanted to buy her things to make up for lost time, which didn’t work. When the father met her brother again, he cried because of all he had missed. He offered to buy the brother a Volkswagen, and when the father was signing the check to finalize the purchase, he had a heart attack and died. Rita had dreamt the night before that her father had died; the next morning the mailman brought her a telegram saying that he had died.
She has a cousin on Long Island, so perhaps she will come to Boston. Or I may stay with her before I leave Rome....
I didn’t leave until about 4:30, as she got me all sorts of information on line about my next adventure. Tomorrow I need to be at the Green Line office by 7:15 to go on another day trip to Orvieto and Assissi. So she printed out the receipt for that as well as my boarding pass for my September 1st trip to Alghero, Sardinia.
One of these days, I'm going to fill you in on some of the specifics of living here-besides the washing machine! The four key system to get into the apartment,etc. There are no screens on the windows here, so some kind of biting bugs have been snacking on Dayle, Mallory, and me. (We couldn't even see them!) We could find nothng to review the itch, But I just found on-line that tootpaste works! It does!:))