By Eliza Pieschel
With its rose-colored buildings lining the streets, its gelato shop on every block, and its famous churches, archaeological sites, and monuments, Rome has a few things to offer a sixteen-year-old American girl.
When I was in Italy with my family for spring break, we had tour guides that taught us all about the places we went, like the Capuchin Crypts, the Colosseum, and the Vatican. (Speaking of which, even the Uber drivers had nuggets of wisdom to share, like the one who told us that in Italy, there’s the Catholic church and right under it, Ferrari.)
While they informed us about the history and background of the places, they also shared things about the culture of Italy.
For one, all three of our tour guides gave us one very specific Italian lesson. They were all very passionate about the way that “thank you” is pronounced in Italian. While it is spelled “Grazie,” they were quite adamant that it is not pronounced gra-zhee.
Apparently many tourists do not pronounce it right. “It is said with three syllables,” one of our tour guides said. “Not two.” They all told us it was pronounced gra-zhee-ay.
Let’s just say, based on their dedication to telling us about the pronunciation, we tried our best to fix the way we said “thank you” for the rest of our trip.
Two of our tour guides were very dedicated to the art of gelato. “The Italians are very dedicated to our food, but I will say some of the gelato is not authentic gelato,” one of them said. Especially in Rome, seeing gelato shops was almost as common as seeing Starbucks or Chick-fil-A’s in Atlanta.
We were instructed several times to search for “authentic gelato” and not “fake” gelato. For the gelato to be authentic, it needs to be homemade. You can often tell whether the gelato is authentic just from a peek in the window.
We were told to look out for shape, color, and price.
Our tour guide told us that fake gelato is practically a scam, because a lot of the time it is overpriced. For example, one way to spot fake gelato is if it’s in a huge mountain inside of the tin. “They are trying to impress you,” our tour guide said, “They whip the gelato a lot to make it so big so they are basically selling you air.”
The next big thing we learned–while at the Colosseum– is that Hollywood has honestly lied to us about ancient Rome. Specifically, both of the Gladiator movies get the history pretty wrong.
“Only 20% of the gladiator fighters actually died,” our tour guide said excitedly. Only? Only 20 percent?
Furthermore, Hollywood often portrays gladiator fighters in movies as untrained slaves or captives being forced to fight highly trained professional fighters. In reality, this didn’t usually happen and it was often that people who had grown up together training to be gladiators would have to fight each other.
Overall, I highly highly recommend getting a tour guide whenever you go somewhere, especially if you want to learn the history behind stuff, or skip lines, or know the right food to eat.
And yes, I had some killer gnocchi in Rome and a ragu pasta in Bologna. I became overwhelmed by all the art in the Vatican and the Uffizi. And sadly, the line for the Duomo in Florence was too long and we didn’t have tickets to skip the line.
We had to say, “No, grazie.”
