It was hot as hell in Rome .. our reprieve lay ahead when we would be sailing the Italian Mediterranean with our dear and long time friends. So we thought: dinner our first evening was with Kimberly, my spirited, adventurous, tour guide niece. Ten years she has now lived in Roma.

"Good Roma cooking, great Roma atmosphere" was my request when she asked where to have dinner. Little did I know as we sat in her fabulous choice of restaurant, that her recommendations for how to spend our holiday in Italy would be sprinkled with treats galore. The culminating experience: our dinner last night at a lovely restaurant, in a cove with singing, dancing Italians who took charge of our experience, bringing wine, wine & more wine; and dish after dish after dish of Seafood Italiana and then a dessert to simply die for. Let me digress: back to the heat of Roma .. and our early reprieve. In Roma you walk .. a lot .. It's hot and it's very humid.. As you go along there are fountains everywhere .. many are amazing works of art, many others look like broken fire hydrants in NYC. But .. they all flow with crystal clear, clean, ice cold water that if you are willing to 'let your hair down', you splash yourself as you go along .. You feel great and you fall in love with Roma. Back to Kimberly .. She loves the island of Ponza. She directed us to the southern side to a cove named Cala Feola. We anchored there, dingy'd to shore where we found Italians. All golden bronze from endless summer days in the sun. The beach was a geological wonder with cliffs carved from a wall of volcanic rock. We loved watching the boys and girls climb the rocks to fearlessly jump & dive into lagoons of sea water melded into grottos our eyes will never ever forget.( we swam in the grottos). Later we had the dinner. There Mandy looked at me ... Smiled and said: "I love Italy" ... Me too.