After reading of Julie Campbell's death, my first thought — and one I hoped wasn’t true — was that she was killed by a local.

This was the hippest, the coolest, the most stylish place I had been to yet.

I lived in San Giovanni di Laterano, so I had a jumble of bus numbers: 85, 87, 571, 117, 860. I never played favorites.

Home is where I've had a mailing address. A bungalow in Karachi, a flat in Dubai, a West Village walk-up.

"I need 10 stamps," I say. "You can have two," she says. "But I need 10. Why can't I buy 10?"

BOOM! No, there was no bomb. But I was furious. Had there been one, it would have been dead cop, dead me.

I put out milk and cookies for the pope, he was a little insistent...

When you lose it — literally — you're at the mercy of a few good souls.

It wasn’t long before people wandered off into the woods seeking alternative paths to the bus stop.

With your Rome roommate, there's clean and then there's Leopardi clean.

"You have a complex fistula. We have to operate. You will be able to live a normal life." Time to call the parents.