Rome - IV

We had originally selected dinner from a guidebook written by Rick
Steves, our general time, money, and life saver (seriously, the guy
writes a good guidebook, and I'm typically not a fan of them). But
ended up walking a little bit past the Pantheon to a place in between
the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps that we had seen the night
before. Named for the tourism I'm sure, "That's Amore" had a good menu
with prices that rivaled some of the other 'cheap eats' in Rick's
book. The quality was easily better than most places along our stay in
Rome.

After dinner we took a slightly modified path through Campo de Fiori
to look for a watch dealer. Unfortunately all we found were executive
pens and some sort of cashmere scarfs (shawls maybe?). When one of the
"pushers" delivered his "I give you very good price my friend" line, I
jokingly replied to him "that's ok, I'm looking for watches". He
whipped out a cell phone and in broken Italian asked someone on the
other line essentially "yo, where you at?" Before we could get five
feet away, he hung up and said "five minutes, he(they?) be here". Holy
hell, I just inadvertently summoned more of these people through what
appeared to be a full on networked operation. I guess it makes sense
though, as they always seem to have whatever item fits the time of day
or weather condition. Getting back to our story, I told the guy thanks
buy no thanks and we made our way back to the hotel. I have a feeling
more of an effort would have been made to get some money out of me,
but there was a police car making its way down the street and everyone
quickly closed up shop.

Interesting..