Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Liz says that she needs friends, and she gets busy making them. She meets two American Elizabeths, one a novelist and one a food writer. One Elizabeth writes for Gourmet and takes Liz to the best places to eat in Rome. She has become especially close with Giovanni, her language exchange partner, who urges her to be patient with herself in learning a new language. Giovanni’s twin brother spends most of his time with Sofie, Liz’s best friend from language class. Liz and Sofie sit by the Tiber, eat gelato, and relish the Italian language together. She thinks of Sofie as a sister and is shocked when a cab driver asks if Sofie is her daughter. Liz thinks she must look like a wreck after the divorce.

She meets Giulio, an Italian filmmaker who wants to learn English, and he becomes another language partner. His American wife, Maria, speaks fluent Italian and Chinese and has created a wall covered in black marker scrawls of her angry curses at Giulio. Her newest friend is Luca Spaghetti, a good eater who takes her to little dives on the back streets for homemade red wine and huge portions of pasta. It seems incongruous to her that Luca is a tax accountant, but it seems equally incongruous to him that she wants to leave Italy to go to an ashram. Luca will never leave Rome. He says that he will always stay near his mother and will keep the same girlfriend he has had since he was a teenager. Luca visited America. He said that people work too hard and eat “Amtrak Pizza.”

Liz says that pursuing pleasure in Rome is incongruous with her cultural paradigm. Her mother’s ancestors were Swedish immigrant farmers and her father’s ancestors were English Puritans. Liz and her sister grew up on a small farm with the expectation they would be dependable, responsible, organized, efficient, and hardworking. She never witnessed idleness. Americans never relax, and Luca observes they seem to enjoy it. Luca notes Italians work hard, but for a different ideal: “The beauty of doing nothing” (68).

Liz’s pursuit of pleasure goes against the grain of her Puritan heritage, which asks whether she deserves pleasure. The first few weeks she thinks she should research and write about Italian pleasure and practice the Protestant work ethic based on “should.” Then she discovers she only needs to ask herself, “What would you enjoy doing today, Liz?” (69). She discovers all she wants to do is eat beautiful food and speak beautiful Italian.

One day she visits a vegetable stall, buys a half-bunch of asparagus, and takes it back to her apartment. She arranges it on a plate with two soft-boiled eggs, olives, goat cheese, and two pieces of pink salmon. She eats it while reading her daily newspaper article in Italian. She tops it off with a peach warmed by the Roman sunlight. The experience is so exquisite, she says, “Happiness inhabited my every molecule” (70). Then she hears her ex-husband’s voice in her ear asking if she gave up their marriage for this. She tells him it is not his business anymore and “yes,” she did.

Liz addresses sex and her self-imposed celibacy. She says that she misses kissing, but celibacy is an emergency life-saving policy. Her experience with sex began at age 15, and she has been romantically involved with men continuously for two decades. A friend noted after she became involved with David that she began to look like him. She believes that she needs to break the cycle. Her passions have left her exhausted.

She says that she can still be overcome with lust, especially when she looks at the beautiful Roman men. The men, however, seem to ignore her. When she was 19 in Italy she was constantly harassed by men, but now at 34, they don’t even see her. She asks whether she has changed, or the men have changed. She is told the men have changed, and Italian society has decided that “stalking, pestering behavior toward women is no longer acceptable” (74).

Liz goes to a soccer game with Luca Spaghetti and his friends. The allegiance to a particular team is determined at birth, passed down from generation to generation, and can never be changed. This game introduces Liz to a new Italian vocabulary. She sits in front of a man who pores eloquent curses into her ears. The whole stadium participates in cursing. Lazio, Luca’s team, loses. He asks his friends whether they should go out. Unlike America, England, Australia, or Germany where they would go to a bar and get drunk, they go to a bakery. She says that Lazio fans always stop there after the games, standing in the street looking macho and eating cream puffs.

Liz learns 20 new Italian words a day, hoping the language will take residence inside her. She and Giovanni teach each other idioms, like the English way of saying “I’ve been there” to show you have shared distress or grief but have been able to move on. Italians have a phrase for expressing empathy: “L’ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means “I have experienced that in my own skin” (79). Her favorite word is “Attraversiamo,” which means let’s cross over. She says it over and over. She constantly drags Sofie across the street so that she can say it. Giovanni’s favorite English word is “half-assed,” and Luca Spaghetti’s is “surrender.”

Gilbert says that Rome does not compete in the European struggle to see which city will be the major metropolis. Rome is too grounded and monumental in its history to pay attention. Liz wishes to be like Rome when she is an old lady. Liz takes a six-hour walk through town. Her neighborhood is an upscale district with neighbors like the Valentinos, the Guccis, and the Armanis. Called “The English Ghetto,” aristocrats stayed there on their European grand tours, including famous writers, painters, and composers: Rubens, Tennyson, Stendhal, Balzac, Liszt, Wagner, Thackeray, Byron, and Keats.

She walks over to the Piazza del Popolo with a grand arch carved by Bernini in honor of Queen Christina of Sweden. The arch is next to a church where two Caravaggio paintings are displayed, one depicting the martyrdom of Saint Peter and the other the conversion of Saint Paul. These make her weep, so she goes to the other side of the church to enjoy a fresco “which features the happiest, goofiest, giggliest little baby Jesus in all of Rome.” (81).

She walks south and passes the Palazzo Borghese where Napoleon’s sister, Pauline, kept untold numbers of lovers. Then she strolls along the banks of the Tiber, all the way to Tiber Island. She crosses the river and stops at a quiet trattoria for a lunch of wine, bruschetta, spaghetti, and a small chicken. Then she walks over the bridge on her way to the Pantheon. She says that anyone who leaves Rome without seeing the Pantheon “goes and comes back an ass” (82).

Her favorite spot on the tour is the Augusteum, which began as the mausoleum for Octavian Augustus and his family. It fell to ruins, became a vineyard, then a Renaissance Garden, then a concert hall. Mussolini seized it and restored it as a mausoleum for his remains. His fascist dream failed. Now the city has grown up around the Augusteum. Liz finds it a reassuring lesson in detachment from outcomes.

The box of books she packed in New York was supposed to be delivered to Rome in four to six days. It never arrived. She thinks the post office may have meant 46 days. Her Italian friends tell her to let it go and not ask questions. Italians never plan. Liz attempts to track her box at the post office. She can no longer remember what she packed in it. She thinks it included Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. She doesn’t need it and is probably happier without it.

Liz meets an Australian girl backpacking through Europe on her way to Slovenia. She becomes jealous. It prompts her to invite Sofie to go to Naples for a day to eat pizza. They go. Naples gave the world pizza and ice cream. She discovers that the Neapolitans are the easiest to understand in Italy. They want to be understood. Every public place is active with boys, teenagers, and men playing soccer or poker. Giovanni, from Naples, has given her the name of the best pizzeria. It offers only two varieties: cheese and extra cheese. The streets are lined with Neapolitans trying to get into the place. She and Sofie eat one pie, then order and eat another pie. She says that she has been eating “ghastly amounts of cheese and pasta and bread and wine and chocolate and pizza dough” (89). She is not exercising, not eating enough fiber, and not taking vitamins. Her body loves it.