Before embarking on my semester abroad in Rome, all I heard from family and friends was, “You are going to eat a ton of pizza!” They said, “Roman pizza is so delicious. You will never want to have the junk we call ‘pizza’ in the States ever again.” Having been to Rome once before, I did not recall what the pizza was like, and I just assumed they were wrong. I love pizza. How could I ever turn my back on my favorite Friday night food done U.S. style? Naturally, as soon as I got to my apartment in Trastevere, I immediately went to the local pizza shop and got my first slice. I was blown away. Not only was the pizza in rectangular slabs, but there were so many different varieties. Some pizza had fish while others were coated in mushrooms and oil. The choices were endless, and each pizza looked better than the next. I stood at the counter frozen with indecision. A Pizza Boom employee asked me, in Italian, what I wanted. That made me even more uncomfortable. Finally, mustering up the minimal Italian I knew, I shyly asked for the margarita pizza. The employee took her scissor-like tool, cut me a rectangle of pizza and weighed it. (That same weighing method would come back to haunt me later when I would get slices loaded with heavy goodies.) Then the woman asked me, “Caldo?” I had no idea why she was asking me if I wanted cold pizza, so I just said, “Si,” and hoped for the best. Fortunately, she was just asking me if I wanted it to be warmed up. After getting the pizza from the oven, she wrapped it up in wax paper and handed it to me. Needless to say, this pizza was great! The flavor was bursting and every ingredient tasted like it was harvested earlier that day. From that moment on, I knew I was a Pizza Boom-er for life. It helped that the shop was directly next to my apartment. Traveling around Italy, I had to try the pizza everywhere I went. Every region had its own take. While the pizza in Rome was delicious, it was the pizza in southern Italy, pizza nepoletana, that stole my heart. Sitting at a restaurant in Catania, Sicily, my roommates and I were introduced to a pizza very similar to the personal pan pizzas we knew from back home. Slightly bigger with a nice thin crust, my favorite was the capricciosa. Although it was slightly different each time I had it, it always had hard-boiled eggs, mozzarella, tomato, mushrooms, artichokes, cooked ham, olives and oil. It was amazing; my mouth still waters just thinking about it. I had pizza all over Italy, and I fell deeper and deeper in love with it each time. Coming back to the United States, the first thing I wanted to have, after a huge bowl of my mom’s spaghetti, of course, was pizza. To be quite honest, despite the deliciousness of every slice I had in Italy, I was thrilled to be back to the pizza of my childhood. Now that time has passed and I have been home for almost three months, I have started to miss the pizza. Every Friday, as I contently eat my American pizza, I think about the pizza of Italy and anxiously await the next time I will be in a pizza shop being served a rectangular slice. — Mary Carpenter, intern