Playing for Pizza Read Online Free PDF

here?”
    “No, I’ve never seen one.” They were outside now, stopping at Sam’s boxy little Honda.
    “This is it?” Rick asked as he glanced around and noticed all of the other very small cars.
    “Throw those in the backseat,” Sam said. He popped the trunk and manhandled a suitcase into the tight space. There was no room for the other. It went into the rear seat, on top of the clubs. “Good thing I didn’t pack more,” Rick mumbled. They got in. At six feet two, Rick’s knees hit the dashboard. His seat refused to slide back because of the golf clubs.
    “Pretty small cars over here, huh?” he observed.
    “You got it. Gas is a buck twenty a liter.”
    “How much a gallon?”
    “They don’t use gallons. They use liters.” Sam shifted gears, and they moved away from the station.
    “Okay, about how much a gallon?” Rick went on.
    “Well, a liter is roughly a quart.”
    Rick pondered this as he gazed blankly out his window at the buildings along Strada Garibaldi. “Okay. How many quarts in a gallon?”
    “Where’d you go to college?”
    “Where’d you go?”
    “Bucknell.”
    “Never heard of it. They play football?”
    “Sure, small stuff. Nothing like the Big Ten. Four quarts in a gallon, so a gallon here is about five bucks.”
    “These buildings are really old,” Rick said.
    “They don’t call it the old country for nothing. What was your major in college?”
    “Phys ed. Cheerleaders.”
    “Study much history?”
    “Hated history. Why?”
    “Parma goes back two thousand years and has an interesting history.”
    “Parma,” Rick said as he exhaled and managed to slide down an inch or two, as if the very mention of the place meant defeat. He fished through a coat pocket and found his cell phone but didn’t open it. “What the hell am I doing in Parma, Italy?” he asked, though it was more of a statement.
    Sam figured no response was best, so he decided to become a guide. “This is the downtown, the oldest section. First time in Italy?”
    “Yep. What’s that?”
    “It’s called Palazzo della Pilotta, started four hundred years ago, never finished, then bombed to hell and back by the Allies in 1944.”
    “We bombed Parma?”
    “We bombed everything, even Rome, but we laid off the Vatican. The Italians, as you might recall, had a leader named Mussolini, who cut a deal with Hitler. Not a good move, though the Italians never warmed up to the notion of war. They’re much better at food, wine, sports cars, fashion, sex.”
    “Maybe I’ll like this place.”
    “You will. And they love opera. To the right there is the Teatro Regio, the famous opera house. Ever see an opera?”
    “Oh yeah, sure, we were raised on the stuff inIowa. Spent most of my childhood at the opera. Are you kidding? Why would I go to an opera?”
    “There’s the duomo,” Sam said.
    “The what?”
    “Duomo, cathedral. Think of dome, you know, like Superdome, Carrier Dome.”
    Rick did not respond, but instead went silent for a moment as if the memory of domes and stadiums and their related games made him uncomfortable. They were in the center of Parma with pedestrians scurrying about and cars bumper to bumper.
    Sam finally continued: “Most Italian cities are sort of configured around a central square, called a piazza. This is Piazza Garibaldi, lots of shops and cafés and foot traffic. The Italians spend a lot of time sitting at the outdoor cafés sipping espresso and reading. Not a bad habit.”
    “I don’t do coffee.”
    “It’s time to start.”
    “What do these Italians think of Americans?”
    “They like us, I guess, not that they dwell on the subject. If they stop and think about it, they probably dislike our government, but generally they couldn’t care less. They are crazy about our culture.”
    “Even football?”
    “To some degree. There’s a great little bar over there. You want something to drink?”
    “No, it’s too early.”
    “Not alcohol. A bar here is like a small pub or