A neat secret of the College of Design Rome Program is that, in addition to offering extraordinary and unparalleled learning experiences for Iowa State students, it provides a wonderful excuse for parents, families and friends of those students to visit Italy. If you’ve ever had any desire to go to Europe, there’s no better time for a visit than when your friend, brother or daughter is there already studying. Heck, maybe your pal will even let you stay in his or her apartment for free!

With 35 Iowa Staters here, there has been a consistent trickle of moms, aunts, brothers, grandmas, roommates and significant others. I was pretty excited to get in the act myself when two friends arrived to spend their ISU Thanksgiving breaks here.

I’ve been looking forward to this visit because I knew it would rejuvenate my enthusiasm for Rome. I’ve walked by the Colosseum twice a day for how many straight weeks? Recently, I haven’t been appreciating the magnificence of Rome as much as I did when I first arrived. I knew that being with people who were seeing it for the first time would open my eyes again.

I’ve also been looking forward to hearing some first-hand tales of life in Ames. E-mail is a great source of news, but nothing compares to hearing live stories. My friends are engineers, so the campus event I ended up hearing the most about was the Millennium Ball. Is anybody else scared by the fact that when you ask engineering majors about the Millennium Ball, they get crazed, slightly psychotic looks in their eyes and start babbling about how it was the greatest event under the sun and completely changed their lives? It makes me wonder what the E-Council president slipped in the punch that night.

When I arrived home from the studio at 1:30 a.m. Thursday, Brian and Olaf were at my apartment waiting. I knew it was going to be one crazy week as soon as they launched into their story about the owner of the Irish pub around the corner, Carlos, with whom they had a conversation in Spanish, and who was going to give us a ride to some club in another part of the city before the night was over. I also knew then that before the week was over, I no doubt would have at least one really good story to share with my faithful readers in the Daily.

Do you remember me mentioning motorini before? “Motorino” is a term for a two-wheeled motor vehicle, which could be anything from a bicycle with a 25cc motor slapped on to a classic scooter or moped to a full-size hog.

The streets here are clogged with motorini, and most piazzas are giant motorini parking lots, with row after row of them. Think of how many bicyclists there are on the ISU campus in warm weather. Now, imagine 10 times as many cyclists and cycles, and they all make a little put-put noise, and you have a good idea of the Roman motorini situation.

Motorini are great for Rome because they are so versatile. You can ride them anywhere: through piazzas, on highways, the wrong way on one-way streets, up and down stairs, over curbs, between walls, through packed lanes of traffic.

You can also park them anywhere, and they don’t use much fuel — which is good since gas prices in the central city are slightly over $4 a gallon right now.

On Friday, Olaf and Brian rented two 50cc motorini for the day. One ride on one of those babies quickly changed my entire perspective of the city!

No more fighting through crowds of tourists, staring down beggars and dodging piles of you-don’t-want-to-know-what. A motorino is true freedom!

You can zip from the Colosseum to Piazza del Popolo in five minutes.

And it’s not only true freedom, but one wild, crazy ride.

The wind is blowing in your hair, foolish pedestrians are yelling as you narrowly miss them, and cars are honking as you weave through traffic. There are no real “lanes” of traffic on streets — you just go wherever you can possibly squeeze through. Every time you come to a red light, all the motorini inch through the rows of cars until they get up to the light.

As soon as the light is green, it’s a starting-line effect. All the riders are flooring their motorini, racing, racing, vroom-vroom as fast as they can over cobblestone streets through 1000-year-old ruins.

Just to make things more interesting, we decided to make a trip to return some down comforters that we had borrowed from an apartment in Trastevere.

Each of the comforters was BIG – for example, bigger in mass than that cute chow that lives on Hyland Avenue. We also decided that the Canadians that lived in this apartment needed to have this giant cardboard cut-out of a naked man that we had picked up on the street the other day, so we brought that along, too.

Here’s the mental picture you need to have: I have this gigantic comforter strapped on my back, and I’m squeezed behind Olaf on a little one-person motorino. In between us is jammed a big poster of some nude guy, sticking out for everybody to see.

We’re racing through the city at full-speed, dodging cars and foot traffic, and I’m trying to shout out directions to Olaf and to Brian on the other motorino. Now that is a Thanksgiving Rome experience to remember!

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Matt Ostanik is a senior in architecture from Washington, Ill.