But even the home phone number was the same. One flier listed an e-mail address for some-body named Giovanni the other introduced somebody named Dario. The only difference was the contact information. Right beside his appeal was another flier with the same request, word-for-word identical in every way, right down to the typeface. He (Giovanni, that is-not the merman) had posted a flier on the bulletin board explaining that a native Italian speaker was seeking a native English speaker for conversational language practice.

I discovered Giovanni a few weeks after I arrived in Rome, thanks to that big Internet café at the Piazza Barberini, across the street from that fountain with the sculpture of that sexy merman blowing into his conch shell. We speak first in Italian, and he is patient with me then we speak in English, and I am patient with him.

All it really means is that we meet a few evenings a week here in Rome to practice each other's language. That sounds like an innuendo but un-fortunately is not. To which I can only reply-especially when looking across the table at handsome Giovanni-'Excellent question.' To which the savvy observer might inquire: 'Then why did you come to Italy?' This is why, in fact, I have decided to spend this entire year in celibacy. This is why I have been alone for many months now. Not to mention that I have finally arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over therthe loss of one beautiful brown-eyed young man is indeed to promptly invite another one into her bed. Purely as a matter of principle, I wouldn't inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni. This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven-thousand years old. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and-like most Italian guys in their twenties-he still lives with his mother. Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. Italy or 'Say It Like You Eat It' or 36 Tales About the Pursuit of Pleasure In this excerpt from her book, she discovers the pleasures of Rome the joy of learning 10 Italian idioms a day the amazing eyes of her language buddy, Giovanni and the healing power of pizza. So she took a deep breath, dropped everything, and got out of town. What Elizabeth Gilbert needed was a little distance.

Behind her: a seven-year marriage, a wrenching divorce, a disastrous affair.

Eat pray love by elizabeth gilbert