The Rome Travel Blog Introduction: Saturdays In Rome

This Rome travel blog introduction to the Saturdays In Rome blog is the start of our adventure celebrating the sites, food, culture and beauty of Rome, Italy.

Don’t wait for the “right” time and just come here when you are able to. I dreamed about coming here to Italy for many years and once I made my first trip, of course I was kicking myself wondering why I waited so long.

Travel To Italy

We have been traveling to Italy for more than twenty years and each time our love for the country, its food, people, culture and art has grown. We have traveled from as far north as Venice to as far south as Agrigento and we have grown to appreciate the individuality of each place we visit. There are still many places we still plan to visit, for example the Adriatic coast, the east coast of Sicily and the mountains, and moving here has made this much more accessible. Being able to take a long weekend to check out the things to see in Genoa is truly a gift for those who live here or for those who can spend more than a week of vacation time bouncing between small towns.

During almost every trip to Italy we’ve made over the last 20+ years, we made sure to travel through Rome. It was the first city we landed in more than twenty years ago and continues to be our favorite, which is why when the time came to relocate to Italy from the United States it was clear that Rome would be our home. In addition to being a large city, which we love, it has the best of the north and the south, but one question I’ve see asked is if Rome is in northern or southern Italy, and the answer is that it depends who you ask. If you ask someone from Milan, Rome is basically northern Africa and if you ask someone from Sicily, Rome is practically Germany. These cultural perspectives I’ve experienced give a depth to life in Italy that continues to reveal itself everyday.

This Rome travel blog and portfolio of pictures will celebrate food and beverage, culture and beauty of Italy, with an obvious bias towards Rome. Now that we live in the city, I plan to use my past and new experiences to craft a detailed and colorful perspective on the lifestyles and culture of the country that I’ve only begun to try to fully understand and while I probably won’t reach my goal, it will be all about the journey and not the ultimate destination.

Enjoying The Food Of Rome

Growing up in an Italian-American family in the US provided me the opportunity to enjoy Italian food nearly from birth. My ancestors are from Sicily and I think the style of food I enjoyed while growing up was southern Italian but we only knew it as ”Italian” food.

One of the joys of learning about Italy is the clear differences between what were once individual city-states. This is shown in the food, cultural attitudes and the language from all corners of the country. While you can buy cannoli in Rome, why would you? Eat the four classic pastas of Rome and save the cannoli for your next trip to Palermo.

This travel blog will feature recipes of well-known dishes as well as some that fly under the radar for most Americans. I will be sharing the restaurant culture as well as cooking at home and maybe you’ll be inspired to try your hands at what might become one of your new favorites.

If there is something about Italian food that you would like to know more about, please contact us because even if we don’t know the answer, we’ll be excited to learn something new on this journey.

Italian Society and Culture

We have learned a lot about the cultural differences between the US and Italy that we’re excited to share with you, but even after years of travel, entertainment and language learning it is clear that we still have a lot to learn. That’s why moving to Rome was so important for us. You can only learn so much about the culture by watching movies, visiting the city for a week or two and learning in a classroom in the US.

One perspective about moving here which is a bit different from some others was our Italian citizenship. We spent more than two years following the necessary procedures with the Italian Consulate to get Italian citizenship acknowledged through the Italian Citizenship by Descent Program. Completing that and the Italian Citizenship through Marriage program, which took more than seven years, provided us the protection of citizenship that has made and will continue to make the bureaucratic obstacles a little less daunting.

Rome Travel Blog

As mentioned above, we have been fortunate enough to have been able to travel to Italy repeatedly over more than twenty years. We hope that some of the imagery we will be providing will either return you to an experience from your past that will evoke happy memories or push you to buy that plane ticket to Italy and see for yourself if the beauty is even better in person. It is!

Origins Of The Name: Saturdays In Rome

Regarding the name of this Rome travel blog, We were inspired by a documentary called: “A Map For Saturday” by Brook Silva-Braga, the film’s producer. The idea for the name came from his experiences with long-term budget travel and how you can lose track of the days, making every day feel like Saturday. We loved this film because of how it fed into our wanderlust and it seemed applicable to me because one could consider this VERY long-term travel. Changing cultures has provided an opportunity to reevaluate priorities for how we want to live our lives and this was an important factor in our decision to move abroad. Luckily, we have not yet needed to return to typical 9-5 jobs, so for us, everyday feels like Saturday!