unusual sights
of rome, in pictures

This fella reminds of me that Janet Jackson song - 'Nasty'! In Rome especially in spring, you'll see quite a lot of these guys. Actually, I think they're usually guyesses - Females, and I'll explain why.
To begin with, they're actually not as dangerous as they look. You're unlikely to be stung by one (although Romebuddy accepts absolutely no responsibility or liability if you do suffer harm from one of these things - We're only speakng from our own experience of these creatures - Your experience may be different, so take care!)

I don't know what they're called - I guess we could call it a 'SuperWasp', but, like I say, they're not really hostile like a wasp, it only looks like one.

Anyway, first time I saw one of these dudes, I was sitting butt-naked and defenceless on the commode when it flew in the bathroom window. Talk about feeling vulnerable! And man, this thing is huge, nearly two inches long, and when it flys, it kind of hovers, and lets its very long black legs sort of hang down straight beneath it, and with that nasty-looking tail, and buzzing very loudly, it looks like hell and certain death on wings.
Well, I thought I was a gonner, so I immediately stopped what I was doing (difficult), hitched my pants back up and got the heck out of that bathroom, slamming the door behind me.
Five minutes later I snuck stealthily back in with a can of fly-spray.

The thing was still there. I felt like Ripley in Alien, trying to get to the escape shuttle. I wished I had a flamethrower. But strangely, the insect seemed to completely ignore me. Instead, it appeared to be looking for something, so I let it alone and watched.

Over the next few weeks, there were many more such intruders to my house, yet none of them gave a hoot for my presence. What they do is seek out a sheltered place in your house to lay eggs. Favourite spots are behind bookshelves or crockery on high shelves. Then they build beautiful little tubular nests out of mud. They eat the soil in the garden and then regurgitate it as a kind of brown cement which they blow out of their ass to build the egg tubes. When they're doing this, as you would expect, they make a high-pitched farting noise.

It takes them about four days to build two or three egg tubes. Then they lay an egg in each tube. Now it get's grisly, real Alien stuff, because next, they hunt down other large bugs, usually spiders, drug or kill them somehow (and it takes guts and superior firepower for a fly to kill a spider, right?), fly them to the eggtubes, (carrying them gripped between those horrid long legs), and then stuff each egg tube with about ten of these dead or dying spiders. Then they seal up the tube with more mud and thats it. They leave, never to return.
However, the egg within will eventually hatch and grow into a larva. It will then feed on the dead decomposing spiders that mom left it, and when it's grown big enough, will smash it's way out of the tube as a new adult, and the lifecycle is complete.

So these monstrous looking insects are in fact very dedicated and maternal homebuilders, and from my experience, they are far too busy working hard to build those mud eggtubes to be bothered to sting me. I put up with them for the first couple years I lived here, because I found their work fascinating to watch, but now I have mosquito screens on all my windows in summer so the the big yellow perils won't be raising families in my house no more.

Italian superstition - Both of these 1000 Lire banknotes (only worth about 50 US cents each) came into my hands at different times, and I've kept them, not because I believe in them, but just out of fascination. People write weird stuff on banknotes here.

The one on the left says; "Whosoever finds this money will have four years of good luck. Write these words on another three 1000 Lire notes, or else have four years of bad luck". The other one says; "If you copy these words onto five more 1000 Lire notes, you will be lucky for seventeen years. If you don't, you'll be unlucky for two".

What's really noticeable here is the sting in the tail that each charm carries. In our modern western society, we tend to only like to consider good luck. But the meddlers who write this junk always like to add a curse to the blessing, fully acknowledging 'the dark side' of things, and warning against incurring the devil's wrath, as if he, and not God is the one who needs placating. A very pessimistic view, and it's sad, because this kind of stuff genuinely still scares the rubbish out of a lot of Italians, even today.

Italy has a National Lottery, the playing of which is also steeped in superstitious tradition that goes way back.
From any newstand in Italy, you can buy nasty little Cabalistic almanac-type manuals of codes, charms and spells to help divine the winning lottery numbers. These are much favoured by the older generation of Italians, and the brightly coloured covers of these booklets often stylistically depict an ageing, witch-like widow-woman, hooded, shawled and dressed in black, clutching a handful of high denomination banknotes which she's obviously won in the lottery, while empty-handed, cynical-looking, modern young women look on enviously. The message is clear - 'Do your deal with the devil, and you'll be a winner'...

Well, I didn't bother writing out another five 1000 Lire banknotes, and, too bad, Italy's changed to Euro banknotes now... So I guess that leaves me in the devil's bad books. See you in the Lake of Fire, Redboy! Don't wait up for me, okay? I already did my deal with Jesus actually, and got a much better rate of interest, so you can keep the barbecue to yourself, spikey...

But I suppose the tradition will continue, even written on the new Euro banknotes, (probably even more fitting actually, if you believe all those apocalysts who reckon that the new united Europe is all the antichrist's doing...!) So keep an eye open for such notes, it'll make a wacky souvenir of your time spent in Rome, when you trod the rocky Roman road (that's the Via del Corso!) between heaven and hell and the SuperWasps, and lived to tell the tale.
My, you're gonna have a heck of a holiday in Rome, aren't you just?

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