I've also become friends with a cool couple named Maria and Giulio, introduced to me by my friend Anne—an American painter who lived in Rome a few years back. Maria is from America, Giulio's from the south of Italy. He's a filmmaker, she works for an international agricultural policy organization. He doesn't speak great English, but she speaks fluent Italian (and also fluent French and Chinese, so that's not intimidating). Giulio wants to learn English, and asked if he could practice conversing with me in another Tandem Exchange. In case you're wondering why he couldn't just study English with his American-born wife, it's because they're married and they fight too much whenever one tries to teach anything to the other one. So Giulio and I now meet for lunch twice a week to practice our Italian and English; a good task for two people who don't have any history of irritating each other.

我也和一对很酷的夫妻成为朋友，他们名叫玛莉亚和朱利欧，由我的朋友安——几年前住在罗马的一位美国画家——所介绍认识。玛莉亚是美国人， 朱利欧是意大利南部人。他拍电影，她为国际农业 政策组织工作。他的英语说得不太好，她则说一口流利的意大利语 （也说流利的法语和中文，因此这并不吓唬人）。朱利欧想学英语，询问我能否跟我练习会话。假如你想知道他干嘛不跟他的美国老婆念 英语，那是因为他们是夫妻，每回其中一人尝试教另一人什么的时候，就吵得如火如荼。朱利欧和我如今每周见两次面吃午饭，练习我们的意大利语和英语；这对于没惹恼过对方的两个人来说是件好事。朱利欧和玛莉亚有间美丽的公寓，其中最给人印象深刻的，在我看来是一面墙壁。玛莉亚（用粗黑奇异笔）在墙上写满对朱利欧的愤怒诅咒，因为他们起争执的时候，他吼得比我大声，因此她想要有插话的机会。

Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in thick black magic marker) because they were having an argument and "he yells louder than me" and she wanted to get a word in edgewise. I think Maria is terrifically sexy, and this burst of passionate graffiti is only further evidence of it. Interestingly, though, Giulio sees the scrawled-upon wall as a sure sign of Maria's repression, because she wrote her curses against him in Italian, and Italian is her second language, a language she has to think about for a moment before she can choose her words. He said if Maria had truly allowed herself to be overcome by anger—which she never does, because she's a good Anglo-Protestant—then she would have written all over that wall in her native English. He says all Americans are like this: repressed. Which makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they do blow up.

我认为玛莉亚性感得不得了，而这瞬间迸发的激烈涂鸦更证明了这点。但有趣的是，朱利欧把这面涂鸦墙壁看作是玛莉亚的压抑迹象，因为她用意大利语写下对他的咒骂，而意大利语是她的第二语言，一种在她选用词汇之前必须思索片刻的语言。 他说玛莉亚假使真的怒不可抑——这从未发生在她身上，因为她是中规中矩的盎格鲁新教徒——那她就会用她的英文母语写那面墙。他说所有的美国人都像这样：受压抑。这让他们在爆发之时更加危险而且有诱发致命的可能性。

"A savage people," he diagnoses.

一群野蛮人。他判断道。

What I love is that we all had this conversation over a nice relaxed dinner, while looking at the wall itself.

我喜欢一面吃轻松的晚餐进行这样的对话，一面观看这面墙。

"More wine, honey?" asked Maria.

甜心，再来杯酒？玛莉亚问道。

But my newest best friend in Italy is, of course, Luca Spaghetti. Even in Italy, by the way, it's considered a very funny thing to have a last name like Spaghetti. I'm grateful for Luca because he has finally allowed me to get even with my friend Brian, who was lucky enough to have grown up next door to a Native American kid named Dennis Ha-Ha, and therefore could always boast that he had the friend with the coolest name. Finally, I can offer competition.

但我在意大利最近期的好友当然是卢卡•斯帕盖蒂。顺便提一句，即使在意大利，斯帕盖蒂这姓也被认为是相当逗趣的事。我很感谢卢卡，因为他终于让我和我的朋友布莱恩打成了平手。布莱恩从小有幸跟一个名叫丹尼斯•哈哈（Dennis Ha-Ha）的美国原住民小孩做邻居，因此老是夸口说他有个名字最酷的朋友。我终于能和他一较高下了。

Luca also speaks perfect English and is a good eater (in Italian, una buona forchetta—a good fork), so he's terrific company for the hungry likes of me. He often calls in the middle of the day to say, "Hey, I'm in your neighborhood—want to meet up for a quick cup of coffee? Or a plate of oxtail?" We spend a lot of time in these dirty little dives in the back streets of Rome. We like the restaurants with the fluorescent lighting and no name listed outside. Plastic redcheckered tablecloths. Homemade limoncello liqueur. Homemade red wine. Pasta served in unbelievable quantities by what Luca calls "little Julius Caesars"—proud, pushy, local guys with hair on the backs of their hands and passionately tended pompadours. I once said to Luca, "It seems to me these guys consider themselves Romans first, Italians second and Europeans third." He corrected me. "No—they are Romans first, Romans second and Romans third. And every one of them is an Emperor."

卢卡的英语说得很好，还是个老饕（依意大利语的说法是una buona forchetta——好叉子），因此对我这种饿狠狠的人来说是绝佳好伴。他经常在中午打电话说嗨，我在附近——想不想见个面，快快喝杯咖啡？或吃盘牛尾？我们在罗马后街那些肮脏小酒吧消磨了许多时间。我们喜欢那种日光灯照明、外头没有店名的餐厅。塑料红格子桌布。私酿的柠檬甜酒。私酿的红酒。而卢卡称之为小凯撒们的侍者，总是端上分量惊人的面条；这些骄傲、有干劲的当地男子，手背有毛，头发照料得俊俏。有回我对卢卡说：依我看，这些家伙认为自己一是罗马人，二是意大利人，三是欧洲人。他更正我：不——他们一是罗马人，二是罗马人，三是罗马人。他们人人都是皇帝。