I. The Gelato Order

An American family walks into a gelateria in the center of Rome. Reality is about to be called into question. The fabric of the world will soon be unmade by a confusion about flavors. The place is disorienting. It is not gelateria coded; it lacks the pastello vibes, the relaxed interiors, the colorful exhibition of flavors. This place has a ton of reading material on the wall about the ingredients, as if it were trying to educate you. At the counter, there is only a small selection of fancy flavors under the glass; the gelato is hidden by metal lids.

These flavors sound unusual; what are they? The American family had read in a guide somewhere that this was a good place. It is conveniently located, in the Centro Storico, near the Ghetto Ebraico. But they realize it might not end up providing them the gelateria experience they had imagined. Mother, father, grandfather, two kids. They had bet on this place as a substitute for lunch — it is hot outside. They have the option to leave, as families from other countries would. European tourists have a rude habit of flaking if a place doesn’t conform to their expectations. Americans persevere. The minute they stepped into the air-conditioned air of the small shop, this family knew they were not going to flee the premises without trying whatever flavors the place had to offer. Their curiosity is triggered precisely by their sense of discomfort. They won’t let the strangeness trigger them. They look for the expected, yes, but love a challenge as well, so they prepare to ask the worker behind the counter as many questions as it takes to make this place part of their new and improved notion of what Rome and Italy are.

It’s going to take 30-plus questions, and these are going to be asked by three adults who are not self-conscious at all. The tone of their voice is flat: unassuming but unrelenting. If they’re going to ingest these new gelato flavors, they need to know all there is to know about them. Why isn’t the name of the flavor — gianduia — the name of its main ingredient, nocciola (hazelnut)? Why all the instructions on the wall? Oh, so this is all organic. Oh, so this is, what? Crudista? Oh, it means raw; that’s interesting. 

The gelateria wants to be modern and foodie-ish, not a place for the average tourist. But the family is not to be put off. They feel challenged. They feel alive. They are Americans. They are frontier people. They love a cultural mystery. 

They’re here, in a way, expressly to make sense of all this. To give it value. This amazing gianduia flavor. Oh, yes, we must have tried it in Florence, and we forgot, but this tastes so much yummier than hazelnut-anything. A constant process of evaluation. To them it feels like an existential task. Without their discovering these new flavors, it would be as if they never existed. The colors are unfamiliar; the flavors are not flashy or sculpted into waves like in other shops. The tourists need time to figure out what the experience is exactly. The place is small and moderately expensive. The Rome-based franchise is only three stores deep. It has a pretentious one-word name. This gelateria is not part of any Roman lore or circuit. And crudismo is maybe the furthest thing from Roman cuisine, which is a humble one, everything stir- or deep-fried. The counter is filled with carefully arranged cookies and pralines. The worker always takes their time to fulfill orders.

It might be obvious, to someone who’s not them, that this family is not the demographic this gelateria is trying to appeal to. The gelateria wants to be modern and foodie-ish, not a place for the average tourist. But the family is not to be put off. They feel challenged. They feel alive. They are Americans. They are frontier people. They love a cultural mystery. 

And so, since the family has entered the gelateria, time seems to have reached a standstill. When these tourists ask the worker behind the counter What is gianduia?, time enters its favorite zone. The fabric of time loves American tourists. When Americans analyze a small shop in a foreign country, time stops counting itself on clocks and pondering its own dull finiteness. Now it can pleasurably yawn into the holy hollowness of the 30-plus questions the tourists are asking. Now, everyone around the American family is swamped in the buttery goo of the present, stretched. The other people in the gelateria can’t name the feeling that wraps itself around them. The feeling that time is purring, that time is on the American family’s side.

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I don’t want to talk about my feelings as a Roman yet.

I believe there’s a universal consciousness that is both me and the gelateria worker, and is also the family of tourists and the person who’s reading this in the future. The universal consciousness is witnessing the scene from a place that is beyond the world we can perceive. This particular era of humanity, when tourism is a force of nature, mashing up cultures while polluting the earth and clogging up streets and shops all across the globe, excites the universal consciousness’s curiosity, because it knows that we will never experience a time like this again, and it wants to figure out what all of it will have meant. This is more important than what I personally feel when I see the American family obstructing the view of the counter for an eternity while I have only 10 more minutes to enjoy a coffee and praline before teaching a four-hour class.

The reason I discuss time and universal conscience first is that I’m dissatisfied with the cycle of point of views. My POV as a resident who is finding it harder to live in his city. Then the POV of the worker. I put into words a formal complaint; someone reads it and feels frustrated, then realizes there’s not much to be done about it. Can you ask people not to take trips? Do you want to ration traveling? Or make it even more expensive so that only the posh Guadagnino-movie types will be able to go on vacation? Are you a classist? Are you a racist? The cycle of takes will consume time and electricity and make us dull and morose.

American tourists still feel to me like a liberation army that got stuck in its pattern of conquering and inventorying and now, almost a century in, has grown cumbersome, bloated, unhelpful. But they still like the adventure, and we still want them to come.

One thing is more important than our takes. An empire. An empire that decides what is real and what is not. The only important thing to keep track of is the movement of these American tourists around the globe. These are the people that call the rest of the world “overseas.” I am interested in how they feel traveling. 

The way they do tourism is teaching the world what tourism is, and it works on frequencies that trigger me, yes, but that also talk to me on a deeper level.

These American tourists are crowding my city with the conviction of soldiers facing the Nazis. That must be how it started. U.S. soldiers landed in Anzio, marched to Rome, regaled starved Romans with powdered dehydrated eggs and bacon. Romans boiled water, cooked pasta, and invented carbonara. American tourists still feel to me like a liberation army that got stuck in its pattern of conquering and inventorying and now, almost a century in, has grown cumbersome, bloated, unhelpful. But they still like the adventure, and we still want them to come.

When cities across Europe protest against overtourism, Rome doesn’t. Come free us from the invisible Nazis, use the spending power of your dollar. Come rescue us. Come give us meaning. We squandered our own sense of purpose after the fascists took power. Italy created a useless war. Please come give meaning to our postwar existence. Please do it for the next century. Drown our trauma in your gelato orders. Maybe we’re stuck. Maybe we enjoyed that feeling of partially outsourcing liberation. The feeling that we were being subject to a protocol. Cleansed. Rock and roll, the Marshall Plan, freedom. Bring it on. We know there’s a history of Italy from the mid-nineteenth century to fascism, and then a history after that. We know that after allying with the Nazis, we had to reboot, and the rebooting is Gregory Peck riding a Vespa with Audrey Hepburn along the streets of Rome. Where do you go from there? Do you ever grow up? 

What I’m trying to say is, the same way Americans need to visit the world and find meaning, we need them to come, to flood us like some contrast liquid and give us meaning.

These American tourists, who are never “on vacation” but come to take stock and attribute value, are crucial for Italy. We haven’t had a proper industrial strategy in forty years; we can only sell you the trappings of a national identity. We are selling what we, among ourselves, call il made in Italy. Our genius loci, the great shit we’re able to create. We’re selling vibes, textures. A sunset on the hills in Chianti, riding a bike on an island in Sicily. Imagine us discussing it in parliament with an Italian accent: l’importanza del made in Italy. We use the English expression unironically. It’s aimed at Americans.

So American tourists are supposed to come and check in on us, see how we’re doing. Do we still have what it takes to thrive in a fast-paced geopolitical environment? Are you enjoying our linguine? Are we still selling the good gelato? Is this “made in Italy” thing working? Only now, it’s been going on for so long that the contrast liquid is clogging our system.  

All these families pay a visit to businesses and monuments overseas and rate them, set their price. The system is completely taken over by this all-seeing eye.

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Let’s get to my POV.

When there’s an American family at the counter, I wait for my turn at one of the small square tables. Everybody who lives in a tourist city or town knows the feeling. As the family asks questions, I can feel their brains adjusting to the place.

Put another way, they’re playing a videogame called knowledge, and we’re its nonplayer characters. Reality starts glowing as soon as they learn a new thing. Before the learning, it is dark; we don’t exist. That’s the main aspect of an empire surveying the land.

Their slowness is not the thing that bothers me. I stop there for coffee and a treat before teaching classes; I try to take my time; slowness is good. Still, they make me nervous. Their job of giving value and meaning to our city is so important to them; they don’t seem to realize we are not as excited as they are about their discovery of gianduia.

Put another way, they’re playing a videogame called knowledge, and we’re its nonplayer characters. Reality starts glowing as soon as they learn a new thing. Before the learning, it is dark; we don’t exist. That’s the main aspect of an empire surveying the land. American tourism is a part of America’s intelligence work. Even if, for the individual tourist and their family, it is often just a prize for a year of hard work.

They use their hard-earned money to do this selfless intelligence gathering. They’re parsing the land. They want to know why this gelato is different from the other gelatos in Rome and around the world. They inquire about every flavor, unsure whether to try to replicate what they imagine an “authentic” gelato experience to be or to embrace this random gelateria as a sort of flavor or philosophical or historical side quest.

That’s what’s compelling about them, to me at least. Americans think they are alone in pushing the wheel of history and progress forward. It’s frustrating for Italians. Because we know that, at least twice in history we thought of ourselves as people who can do so, who can peek into the future. (We had our own empire, the Renaissance.)

So when the American family slows down time to reflect on gianduia, or pistacchio, or arachidi salate, it feels as though they are not reflecting on flavors with us, they are talking to us as if we were curiosities of history, oddities, eccentricities, exotic pralines with the gift of speech. They love to hear us talk, explain our gelato flavors. We are the funny-talking people who explain flavors. They are the protagonists of history; we are not. They are slow because they are the main characters; they own their time. They own time.

Other tourists are also slow, as slowness is the main aspect of not knowing where you’re going — a relative slowness compared with the people around you, busy with the tasks that make up their life. An American family’s slowness is something else altogether. They don’t feel rushed. They have the kairos that you get from being at the center of an empire. Their time is blessed, and their thirst for knowledge is something everyone must submit to.

Their questions at this specific gelato counter bless the choices that made this small franchise what it is. They are discovering gianduia gelato, and when my turn comes to order some affogato — gianduia gelato drowned in a cup of espresso — if I’m asked what it is by a tourist, they will watch me with the satisfaction of someone who knows that now, for me, that affogato will taste more special than ever, now that they have blessed it with their imperial nod of approval. You have to develop a sort of Stockholm syndrome to accept that you’re a satellite to one of the most appealing empires in history. (I wrote appealing without even realizing it. That’s Stockholm syndrome for you!)

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So my POV is what? Half inconvenience, half humiliation for not being a player in history? Can I write my cahier de doléances on such a brittle foundation? 

The structure of a tourist’s city is mostly hidden. We don’t read on plaques which funds now own a building or a business. We don’t read about how little of tourism money trickles down to society by way of decent wages and taxes.

A better understanding might come from the worker’s point of view. That is the pressure point of this whole scene. The worker’s tasks are: Scoop gelato, make coffee, put the pralines and cookies on little plates, handle the cash register, rush to the small room where the shaker is, and prepare the green smoothies. The worker can only go to the employee toilet downstairs (there is no toilet for customers) if a regular is in the premises and can watch the place while they’re in the basement peeing. This worker is the nexus of all the systemic energy that put money in this shop, and in the American family’s pockets. All the invested money can only bring the desired results for both actors — owner and tourist — if the body of the worker can keep up. 

The structure of a tourist’s city is mostly hidden. We don’t read on plaques which funds now own a building or a business. We don’t read about how little of tourism money trickles down to society by way of decent wages and taxes. Here’s what’s not hidden: For the whole enterprise to work, the business owner must employ only one employee at a time, or else they will not reach whatever wealth they were dreaming to get when they opened the place. So only one worker. A worker can be seen as a body that, after it is exerted for hours, comes to amount to a sack of urine. The universal consciousness has gently plucked a teeny tiny part of itself and put it in a human body to see how well it can do under the circumstances. Will anyone come to help the worker? the universal conscience wonders.

Today, the worker can go to the toilet because I’m a regular. In a way, I am being surreptitiously employed by the owner for two minutes. Pull back the curtain, and you start seeing the void over which the entire economy hovers.

II. The Cold Brew Order

A quick word on the intellectual elite of America. When they come visit, the elite are way less curious than the normal people, the ones who ask questions at gelaterias. While the troopers of tourism do the dirty job of gathering intelligence, the elite are often smug and think they know everything, so they don’t learn anything.

My buddy and I are sitting at a sidewalk table at one of our usual bars; it’s the middle of the morning, and I guess we’re on a coffee break. Sitting opposite us, three American tourists in their thirties are having a conversation. One of them gets up and goes inside for an order, then comes back and tells his pals “They have no cold brew.”

They all sound disappointed. After deliberation, the guy goes back inside and orders some other kind of cold coffee. He comes out with a glass of espresso on ice that looks like something the waiter improvised, considering the weather and the ask.

No one here would prepare bottles of cold water with filters full of coarsely ground specialty coffee best savored after at least eight hours of infusion. The tourists’ expectations blind them. Even if they have a word for it, “dive bar,” they only apply it to bars and not to coffee shops, because even if they have money to travel, they never see things. They don’t know about these kinds of coffee shops.

My buddy is a Communist, the son and grandchild of Communist politicians. His grandma fought as a part of the resistenza against what we call nazifascismo and was arrested and sent to jail. His grandma’s mother was Jewish, and her father was a prominent fascist figure from a small town near Rome (a port town where, these days, cruise ships spew out throngs of tourists headed to the city). I write these bits of information because I think everything that is happening with tourism and food culture is best savored in combination with international politics, and especially the history of World War II and the world it created. To me, it sends electric charges of meaning. 

After witnessing the reaction of the trio, my friend tells me, “They are disappointed there’s no cold brew. They didn’t realize this place cannot have cold brew. They didn’t look around. Do you see P.?” That’s our friend behind the counter, a drifter with an alcoholic mother, who’s a big character in the local scene. “Do you see this bar? This is a lost place. They don’t see any of this. They must have picked it because it’s next to the Airbnb, and they thought it looked the part. They picked this neighborhood because they must have read about it. The neighborhood must have been compared to other neighborhoods around the world. Hip, lively, with a nightlife. Now they expect to have cold brew, but they cannot see that this place could never have cold brew.”

No one here would prepare bottles of cold water with filters full of coarsely ground specialty coffee best savored after at least eight hours of infusion. The tourists’ expectations blind them. Even if they have a word for it, “dive bar,” they only apply it to bars and not to coffee shops, because even if they have money to travel, they never see things. They don’t know about these kinds of coffee shops.

“They’re here, but they’re not here. See how they’re talking now? The tone of their voice? They have passed their judgment on the place, and then they’ll leave and will never know where they were. And yet, even if they’re not here, their arriving to this neighborhood signals that the place is changing. They have arrived. And if they have arrived, the cold brew will arrive. And still, they have no idea about this place where they sat and ordered coffee.”

Every time I have to write about Rome for some publication abroad, I feel like I’m either selling out parts of the city or snitching on friends to foreign secret services. I find myself withholding information. If I described that bar, I’d be both doing promotional work and putting people on Palantir’s AI files. 

The cold brew order is no new behavior. We know what it is. The American empire is just the fourth incarnation of what started as Roman, became Christian European, and then predominantly British. We know what it is. We still have it in our veins, the disdain these tourists are showing. Their carelessness and abstraction. They are the rulers, the ones who believe they are giving meaning to reality for the first time. They have put something in motion. Now that they have asked for cold brew, a set of invisible quakes and rumblings will bring about a moment, very soon, when someone like these three smug yuppies will stop by the dive bar to find that somebody has, in fact, steeped ground coffee in cold water the night before. If they stop by. And eventually some company or fund, maybe even one owned by a relative of these 30-something Americans, will buy both the business and the building. That’s what the elite naturally do. They put the territory in a chokehold.

Come to think of it, the family ordering gelato is such a wholesome scene.

Of course, this trio of more refined tourists picked a more interesting place than the gelato-order family did. The gelato scene took place in a random piazzetta where two bars offer shelter from sun and rain to one of the thousand streams of tourists crisscrossing the historical center. The cold brew trio, on the other hand, showed they belong to the elite by doing research and landing at an interesting corner of the city.

And here I realize I’m resisting the professional duty to describe the corner in question.

A couple of years ago, an important publication in the United States where I would have loved to publish my work asked me to write about a place in Rome. I picked my favorite club, then realized I didn’t want to write an ad for it and see more elite 30-year-old Americans show up at the club and order the nighttime version of a cold brew (a Perfect Manhattan?).

I feel that writing has become a combination of copywriting work to sell stuff and a form of international espionage. Every time I have to write about Rome for some publication abroad, I feel like I’m either selling out parts of the city or snitching on friends to foreign secret services. I find myself withholding information. If I described that bar, I’d be both doing promotional work and putting people on Palantir’s AI files. 

This must be taken into account, for tourism is not made only of the actual bodies that enter gelaterias on a Friday afternoon. Tourism is all this data. The market for all this data. These guys noting that there was no cold brew in that otherwise very lively part of a very important city might really go back and involve some wealthy relative or friend to come buy real estate and market-correct the neighborhood. 

So I’m resisting describing the bar and the neighborhood. Every description will put the described people in the AI eye of Palantir while bringing more international investors to this part of town.

Just imagine a paragraph here where I tell you what the trio has missed by only asking the yes or no question about cold brew and by not paying attention to anything else. Imagine the interesting descriptions of the owners of the coffee shop. The outrageous life the older owner has lived. The sketchy past. The sketchy present, for crying out loud. Imagine me romanticizing the owner’s life and then waxing poetic about the younger owner, a real legend in local night life. Just imagine the Zolaesque description of the bar’s regulars, the various cliques, the debauched sex life, the romantic drug-addled breakdowns. A whole Mubi watchlist of city types. Imagine me writing copy for this corner of the city so it’s there for real estate to come and get it. 

To write fiction or narrative nonfiction these days is to fuel real estate speculation. Think about it. Can we still write in good faith after the Gomorrah and My Brilliant Friend multimedia franchises jump-started Naples’s belated gentrification?

Everything is tourism and everything is real estate.

III. The Borghetto di Merda

There’s a guy in my neighborhood who opens bars and restaurants. The first one was successful and is a sort of touchpoint in the area. The others are not particularly successful. Still, he’s managed to keep them all open through the years. Each of them is different, as if he were trying to corner all the market needs in an area where, with the exception of supermarkets, there are no chain businesses.  

Recently, this local businessman saw the future once again.

I’ll tell it the way I experienced it.

Three of his businesses are located at an intersection that is very busy at night. The long, narrow one-way streets don’t have sidewalks, and so people walk down the middle of them. The scene is lively from 6 p.m. until the early hours of the morning. 

At one specific intersection, a mechanic closed shop ages ago. I can’t even remember when. The place looked shabbier and shabbier as the years went by. It’s the look of the neighborhood, so nobody wondered what would happen to it. A big yard, abandoned, a shadowy ruin amid all that nightlife, near all the bars and clubs.

Then the ruin became a construction site, but still nothing seemed to really happen. 

Then one of the walls came down, but you couldn’t sneak a peek; the view was blocked by tarps and construction material.

It didn’t look like anything in all of Rome. It was a combination of styles. A Pinterest mash-up. The light installations, signs, and windows were all different in style. The name of one of the places was either made up or Swedish. The result was completely abstract, like it was still trapped in the architect’s computer.

One night, very late, I was walking home, and I saw a hole in the tarp hiding the site. I went and looked. The lot had been turned into a courtyard, and at its center, I saw a fountain. It was clearly out of place, made to look like a fountain in a piazzetta of some touristy village in the center of Italy or in the south. Nonspecific, old looking. The kind of fake architecture that you find in the private “plazas” in between skyscrapers in big cities. That you find in malls.

The construction took a long time. We tried gathering information, and somebody even asked someone who knew the local businessman. 

Turns out, the guy had the idea of building a plaza that would cater to the people who stayed in nearby buildings that had been converted into short-time rentals. The buildings were colorful, sort of like upmarket hostels, but made up of small apartments. These tourists, he thought, might have liked to have the following: a bakery with an Italian flavor, a forno; a place to sip wine, that’s an enoteca. Both places would also sell souvenirs: mugs and totes and wine accessories with witty statements about croissants and alcohol. A third place would provide well-crafted objects. You know, plates, ceramics, glasses. Tasteful, simple.

And then one night it was open.

It didn’t look like anything in all of Rome. It was a combination of styles. A Pinterest mash-up. The light installations, signs, and windows were all different in style. The name of one of the places was either made up or Swedish. The result was completely abstract, like it was still trapped in the architect’s computer. The attempt at a borghetto, a small village, half Tuscany, half Puglia maybe, a borghetto with no soul and no genius loci, a shitty place, a borghetto di merda.

It was packed with people from the first night I saw it. It offers two benches and a bunch of tables. The same kind of solace you get from those rest areas in malls.

People are sitting on the private benches the businessman placed in the fake piazzetta, and they are gauging what they’re seeing. This local businessman’s other successful project, the restaurant, which is also a bar, was one of the first places to make the idea of living here palatable to the young people of the creative class. This area was only famous because of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film. Artists came to live here in the nineties; my friends first started to move here in the early 2000s. The restaurant features pictures of the kids who used to hang out with Pasolini. In the pictures, the Pasolini kids are already middle-aged people playing pool in a former incarnation of the place, when it was a neon-lit bar. By then, most of the pool players were being priced out of the neighborhood, invisibly forced to vacate the premises to let in a new generation. 

Businesspeople always have a feel for what people will need — or rather, what they will want — and bend reality to accommodate it.

I still eat at this restaurant occasionally. It’s quintessentially “bobo,” that useful French contraction of bourgeois and bohemian. By now, I’ve known the workers there forever. When it opened, it felt like the one place that made everything else feel readable, decipherable. So you would go there, even if the place was evidently cruel. The people portrayed in the framed pictures the very people who were now being invisibly forced to vacate the premises to let the new, younger people in. The restaurant and bar looked retro. It made us feel that there was a very natural transition from the dignified, poor suburbs to us, admirers of Pasolini’s work and lifestyle. We thought this place wanted us.

Now, with the Pinterest borghetto, the businessman is catering to somebody else’s needs. Let’s try and define who this somebody else is. There are locals looking for more comfortable areas to sit and consume or just be, and Romans from other neighborhoods wanting a more contemporary nightlife experience. Then there’s people who make money from tourists — the people with big money who buy buildings and renovate them to turn them into businesses that cater to the people who populate the short-term rentals.

The businessman who opened the bobo restaurant had created a new reality for a certain set of people. By giving the creative class a restaurant from which they could admire Pasolini’s world, he had, metaphorically, brought cold brew coffee to a place where there was barely money enough for coffee machines. Businesspeople always have a feel for what people will need — or rather, what they will want — and bend reality to accommodate it.

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The American tourist is curious about your gelato and is disappointed you can’t give him cold brew. Businessmen listen and take notes, and the world keeps evolving, by way of invisible real estate transactions, so that every curiosity is satisfied and every new need is met.

The American tourist used to be regarded as the most obnoxious creature in the world. Loud, naïve, ham fisted, needy. The reason I told you about the opening of this borghetto di merda is that it made me realize: Now we are all American tourists. The people who come here want to hang out in a Pinterest fever dream. That tastelessness that was so easy to call American is now everybody’s. It belongs to the class that has the money to build.

Last spring, as I was sipping an iced matcha in New York because some friends’ teenage daughter introduced me to it on a vacation abroad and I now liked it, a British writer told me she didn’t know I was so frivolous. I shrugged, as that drink only reminded me of my friends’ quirky, jovial daughter. Then I saw the memes. Then I heard Japan was running out of tea, thanks to the new popularity of matcha around the world.

Our role, as tourists of existence, is to see an ad, react, send the signal to the businesspeople. A month from now, the coffee shop down the street will have cold brew, and we will make a mental note, nod, and be content.