Some friends from France are coming to our house this evening and one of them has never been in this eternal city, and so I am going to suggest that we all go over to Largo Argentina where many, many stray cats hang out on the ancient stones of Rome and bask in the sun on pretty days and have a nice place under which to curl up when it rains and very attentive women (because there are women there, no men, as far as I have observed…hmmm) to give them food and snuggle them and make them feel wanted and loved, as I do here in our sunny little Roman place. It’s sort of a cat hospital, except the kitties I’ve seen there look pretty healthy and the straggly ones get well fast.
There used to be lots and lots of kitties in Rome and then someone went around and left poison out everywhere and they died out….so, so sad…and of course there was that other thing—kitty stew, but we won’t go there.
And now when I gaze out of my window in the morning, I have to put up with barks and yap, yap, yaps from all the idiot doggies being walked outside our building and they sniff around each other (in the most unbelievable places—I’m sure you’ve noticed!) (and then they kiss and lick their masters after that…whoa!) (but then, we kitties do that, too; it’s just that we don’t do a lot of kissing and licking) (I take that back—I give mama a bath every evening when I’m curled up in her lap and sometimes it goes all the way to her elbow, but that’s my inner affectionate me coming out and she loves a kitty bath…)
But these yappers are so, so loud that I can hardly think about my prima colazione (that’s breakfast in Italian) and there is this BIG boxer who gets in fights with any doggy he can intimidate and I watch that for awhile and think, ‘boy, am I glad to be a kitty and not have a mug like that!’
Then I wave my paw at the poor little sucker shaking in his tiny Chihuahua boots who was almost a snack for the boxer and the boxer’s owner FINALLY pulls her ward away to get that bully off the streets. As if she didn’t notice he was terrorizing the neighborhood!
And maybe after our guests see the kitties, we’ll hit the Colosseum where I’ve heard some kitties are starting to show up now. Kitties of Rome will rise again!
