Amore: An American Father's Roman Holiday

Friedland, a professor of cultural sociology and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, covers a lot of ground, literally and figuratively, in this memoir about raising twin daughters in Rome, the city founded by the mythical twin boys Romulus and Remus. Rather than allow his middle-school aged girls (born in California in 1992 after nine years of infertility) to grow up in a "Westcoast world of blowjobs and Botox," he accepts a two-year assignment at the University of Rome. In this introspective travelogue on the vagaries of love Italian style, Friedland weaves statistics about Italian sexual activity compared to American, with personal observations to create a sort of guide for modern parents. Sorted into five sections that capture Rome in different moods, Friedland opens with an homage to the 1953 William Wyler classic Roman Holiday, the film starring Audrey Hepburn, in which the actress names Rome as her favorite European city. Infidelity and the legacy of Casanova, co-exists with the Holy See in a magical part of the world where Michelangelo "sculpted and painted nudes in great profusion." The central difference between Romans and Californians appears to lie in their attitudes to love and adultery. Perhaps predictably, one daughter has happy memories of the Roman sojourn, while the other experienced a traumatic incident that tainted her experience of Rome. While all this information is thought-provoking, what stands out is the attraction of living in a glamorous city where it's possible to share dinner with director Lina Wertmuller. (Nov.)