What to do With Words Award -- March 1, 2007

Today, I'm kicking off a new feature -- a very irregularly chosen "What to do With Words Award" for the blog world's writing talents.

The first goes to Iain Manley, co-author of Old World Wandering. Iain and his travel partner Claire go about discovering Europe, and somehow they maintain the discipline to sit down fairly regularly and write about it.

I'm glad they do.

I am calling Old World Wandering a literary blog -- and then secondly a travel blog. That's my interpretation because if you can't travel to see, taste, live another culture, the next best is to read someone else's observations.

Below is a small item plucked from Iain's account of a visit to Rome. He's got plenty of observations about the Fountain of Trevi, the Pantheon and other popular sites...but the paragraph below offers a very quirky picture of his hostel.

If this were a clip from a movie, it'd be early 1950s. Black and white, of course. Behind the camera, Fellini would be yelling out directions to Giulietta Masina, Si?

The incessant “bella, bella, bella” of Miss Italy blared through a small, smoky hall in our hostel, Bella Roma. The competition lasted a week, today it was being contested entirely in bathing suits. Parades of lithe flesh were periodically interrupted for a demonstration of each participant’s talent: twirling a single hula-hoop, playing volleyball, badly, with a bemused judge and clumsy security guards, dancing in a lycra skirt, strapped on for modesty. -- Iain Manley