On your wanderings through the dredges of the World Wide Web, you may have encountered the infamous ‘Spider Man pointing’ meme, a comic drawing depicting three characters identically dressed in Spider Man costumes, pointing at each other in bewilderment.
A saw a kind of live re-enactment of this anecdote in Rome this February.
My family and I had left Naples that day, where we had stayed with a very kind Airbnb host named Paul Luigi.
Arriving in Roma, we walked to a quaint alley just off Campo de’ Fiori, where we had arranged to meet our next Airbnb host, who happened to also be called Luigi. We waited for a few minutes, before being greeted by an enthusiastic guy, who introduced himself as Paul Luigi. We assumed he had just missed out the ‘Paul’ on his profile. This was indeed the street of our next stay so we happily followed him up three flights of narrow stairs, to an apartment which looked nothing like the one we had booked. For a start, judging from the abundance of modern art pieces, a lot more expensive. We weren’t complaining though, and began to settle in, remove our shoes and get comfortable with the idea of unexpected luxury. Until my father received a confused call from yet another Luigi, asking where we were.
The pin dropped and we realised we had followed the wrong Luigi to the wrong address. We excused ourselves and chuckled all the way to the actual apartment we had booked the correct Luigi was waiting. There weren’t quite as many sculptures and million-euro paintings in this Airbnb but it did the job.
I realised that the name Luigi appears to be in Italy what Jean-Pierre is to France, or Patel is to Gujarat. Turns out there are about 833218 Luigi’s in Italy. I don’t think they are all Airbnb hosts though, and thankfully they are not all wearing Spider Man costumes…
Below: a rather unrelated but beautiful display of an Italian market day.
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