From Rome With Love

It's strange that late in his illustrious career, Woody Allen has become a hack for sale. After decades spent artfully extolling New York's singular charms in classic films, he now pimps his talents out to the tourist board of whichever European city is willing to fund his increasingly nonsensical output, resulting in recent abominations like Vicky Christina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris. His upcoming From Rome with Love promises to offer equally shallow insights into pasta and love as he has into tapas and love, or baguettes and love. It opens in a couple of weeks, and despite my contempt for his latter-day oeuvre, I am curious to see it, having just spent the weekend in Rome.
Well played,  Konigsberg! 
A year ago, brother Eli left Barcelona with his Italian wife and their baby daughter for Florence. They now live in Rome so I took advantage of the holiday weekend to visit them.
Now, Barcelona is a city overrun by tourists. The low season stretches from the second week of January to the third week of January. At all other times, in certain areas and streets you are far more likely to hear German, English, French or Italian than Catalan or Spanish. Few places I've been compare for the sheer masses of visitors that overwhelm the city center. Rome at Easter is one of those places. It makes sense that the Jesus epicenter would be packed during Jesus week, but holy sea! Tons of nuns, priests and Americans flooded in while the locals, I presume, fled.
I had been before, so I spent most of the weekend in parks playing with my niece, which is frankly one of the best ways ever to spend a weekend.
My travelog is neither extensive or enlightening, but let me offer a couple of tips you won't find in your Lonely Planet guide. 
You can pick your poison to go with your politics, as one store offers bottles of booze emblazoned with your favorite historical figure, be it Che, Mussolini or Hitler.

The food was, of course, fantastic. We tried many different places at random, and they were all delicious. Here are some places we didn't try.

And here is the artwork that adorned the walls of one place we did.

Also ruins, churches, artwork ancient and modern, but for that, you'll have to go see the Woody Allen movie.