Felix’s day camp is in Salaria - Trieste, pretty much the other side of Rome from our house. We’ve finally found a reasonable way to get there, since selected trams and trains are air-conditioned. The most direct route is through Rome’s historic center. But direct in this case means unpredictably slow. Our long-way-around skirts the edge of the city, but it takes only an hour each way.

The camp is adequate and friendly, run by a small English school in a side street. Felix went last year, it gave him his first taste of the clash between English and American sensibilities that can lead to such things as violent tea parties and the fact that the most accurate coverage of American politics in the popular press appears in the Economist. For him, it really amounts to the fundamental difference in attitudes about children. As our friend Jesse puts it: “You Americans see children as angels in danger of being corrupted, while we English recognize them as monsters needing to be tamed.”

I’m pretty keen on the slightly fancy neighborhood around the camp. It’s not much to look at -- mostly 19th- and 20th century apartment blocks, with older buildings arrayed along the busy and disturbing via Salaria. But it is leafy and charming, with more florists’ stands and fewer guttered beer bottles than our central and urban Trastevere digs.

I spent some time in a hardware store, trying to figure out screwdriver sizes. Back at our apartment, our little robot kit calls on the box for a screwdriver of size M3. I think this must be a Japanese size, because I had never heard of it, and two of the fellows in the hardware store thought it must mean something about the diameter of a garden hose. I was sure it was something tiny, so I bought a little one. -- after learning that the word for screwdriver is cacciavite, and concomitantly teaching the clerk the almost humorously difficult-to-pronounce screwdriver.

One of the camp days, after dropping Felix off, I spent wandering through a little corner of the vast Villa Ada park. It’s boffo. Some of the paths are ill-kempt, but most of the place is mixed meadows of grass and wild mint, sweet smelling flowers, butterflies, and carrion crows. There were school groups and families, there’s a little lake for no reason except that it’s pretty to have a little lake in that particular spot, and I had a very pleasant morning.

The Villa Ada clearly adjoins a kind of training ground for Rome’s defensive forces. These amount to scattered pairs of men on horseback in a kind of regulation helmet with sashes and archaic weapons.

Many of the streets between Rome’s Trieste and Nomentano neighborhoods are named after African places, mostly in that part of the horn of Africa that so dominated Italian folly a century ago. My favorite is via Tripolitania, but there are also Eritrea and Libia, Mogadiscio and Asmara, Makallè and Tigrè. (There is no k in Italian ordinarily, even though the very earliest Italian inscriptions have k for some sounds. I’ve noticed that a lot of graffiti use k in some contexts, and I’m not sure if it’s a Roman thing, or maybe it’s a bit like the pronunciation z in rap-spelling in English, as in boyz.)

Alaina has been measured in book buying this trip, adding only about two a day for the past week. Most of them are gems, and many of them eminently practical. She spent all of yesterday with two books about Bernini and Boromini architecture, sitting in pews and reading specifically about what surrounded her. More to the point, though, is this a pamphlet, a €5 gem called Roma per il Goloso, which would be best translated in this context as Rome for Gluttons. It includes quick write-ups of most of our favorites in Trastevere, and it soundly lauds the right ones. The pamphlet has also led some discoveries for us: a little shop called Cooperativa Nautia looks like a sort of organic version of most other greengrocers, but it turns out to be the sales outlet for organic producers in a preserve along the Tiber north of Rome. The produce -- much the same right now as any other greengrocers, in its copious bounty of rucola, peaches, and tomatoes -- all looked mighty delicious. The shopkeeper steered us toward the bright green figs. Advice: if your karmic number comes up, consider choosing reincarnation as a fig wasp along the Tiber.

Back in the centro storico, we went to see flood markers, some Bernini sculptures, and better gelato. Alberto Pica’s Granita di caffè with whipped cream is the first frozen treat that has really moved my senses since I lived outside Boston.

Gelato stars so far

Alberto Pica, just off via Arenula in the centro storico. Justly famous.

Fratelli De Angelis, v. di Priscilla 18/20, near piazza Crati in Trieste. Cremolate of extraordinary slurpsomeness.

Note: there is a lot of gelato in Trastevere, and we haven’t found anywhere outstanding yet. Even the cornetteria at the corner of v. S. Francesco a Ripa and via della Cisterna seems like it might have changed hands and declined in quality over the past year.