It's a wonderful place to visit but would you want to live there? Sari Gilbert, who has lived for close to 40 years in what many have called the Eternal City, answers with a resounding "Yes ... but". A native New Yorker who moved to Rome after finishing graduate school and then became a journalist, Gilbert wrote this book to describe what life is really like in the Italian capital: beguiling, intoxicating and infuriating. Gilbert loves living in Italy: the people, the food, the architectural and artistic remnants of a glorious past. But she has also written a no-holds-barred exposé of the country's stifling bureaucracy, its dead-end politics and contradictory social customs.

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