Tablecloth subscriptions

Tuesday was another beautiful day.  I spent most of the day in the city, visiting and re-visiting various sites and museums.  Since I was in town, I stopped and had pizza for lunch.  I ordered the classic Roman pizza capricciosa, a thin crusted, wood fired pizza with mushrooms, artichoke hearts, buffalo-milk mozzarella, olives, prosciutto, and fried egg.  I love it when they serve this pizza with the egg still runny so you can smear warm liquid yolk all over the other toppings.  I also had antipasti of mixed cured salami, cheeses, and pickled vegetables. Very tasty!

As I was walking through the city after lunch I came across a white panel truck, which stopped at nearly every restaurant and bar.  At each stop, folks would load huge sacks of some kind into the truck in exchange for stacks of something wrapped in paper.  After I had seen this transaction at several establishments, I became sort of curious to see what was going on.  Closer investigate revealed that this truck was delivering subscriptions of tablecloths and napkins.  The sacks being loaded onto the truck were stuffed full of soiled linen, and the wrapped packages were stacks of freshly laundered tablecloths.  The vast majority seemed to be the traditional red and white checked cloth.  Now I know when so many restaurants in Italy have the same tablecloths: they subscribe to them!  Sort of like diaper service, but hopefully less messy to launder.

I returned home in the late afternoon, skyped Gary, and caught up on email and reference questions.   My friend Margaret sent a great YouTube link.  This video features tigers, panthers and other big cats in an animal sanctuary, playing with Halloween pumpkins.  Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcT4paZfflg&feature=fvwk. 

Since I had eaten lunch out, I ate dinner at home.  On my way back to my apartment I had stopped at a local bar to buy a spit-roasted chicken (yes, in Italy you can buy these in many bars).  I had good rolls from the local baker and some slices of smoked mozzarella, so I made sandwiches for dinner.  I went out to the piazza for a little while and listened to the jazz ensemble playing next to the fountain, then went back home, talked to Gary for a minute, and went to bed.