Pasta! Vino! Hill Towns! Coins in the Fountain will transport you to Italy where you can find out what it’s really like to live the expatriate life. It's all here in the story of a couple who said “NO!” to middle age boredom and made a dash from a small-town in Oregon to cosmopolitan Rome when the author went to work for the United Nations.

In between actually working there were Italian weddings to attend, music to be heard, a close-up with the Pope, travel with the wine club and country weekends in Umbria where the Etruscans still seemed to be lurking about. Nights spent “sleeping” on cardboard, a brush with the Italian medical system, an auto accident with the military police, a fall in the subway, interactions with an excitable landlord, and picking grapes at harvest time all became part of their daily adventures.

And of course there were many new friends like the countess with her butt-reducing machine and the count who served as a model for statues of naked horsemen. Unexpectedly taking up early retirement, the author’s husband met strange vegetables in his valiant efforts to learn to cook Italian-style.

When not struggling in the kitchen he played golf on a course where the rough featured snakes and unexploded bombs and crewed on a sailboat he saved from sinking on the way to Greece. Part memoir, part travelogue to off-beat sites in Rome and elsewhere, you will be amused and intrigued with the stories of food, friends and adventures.

You, too, will want to run away to join the Circus (the Circus Maximus, that is). And before you depart Rome, you will never forget to throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain to ensure a return to beautiful Rome and enchanting Italy.

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