The Magic Ingredient is Pope

Of all moving around I've done in the past year, the one thing I've been really lucky with is roommates. Through the good graces of Craigslist I've managed to track down people in Rome and NYC that make life not only bearable, but absolutely wonderful. People that like to go to bars at 3am, people that like to watch Mad Men on the weekends, people that like to get coffee in the morning-- people that offer to split the last noce cornetto with you because they KNOW the rest of the pastries at the cafe are horrible and they wouldn't want you to suffer. Good people.

The Rome apartment is home to many professions-- do you know how awesome it is to live with PhD students who are also tour guides? They know EVERYTHING. Only drawback is when you're trying to meet them for drinks and they say "Where are you?" and you say "By that obelisk near the house" and after ten minutes of protesting that there are no obelisks near the house they go "Oh that's not an obelisk that's a COLUMN. Be right there". Sorry, my mistake. Can I have my cell phone minutes back?

So I live with smart, talented people who study and tour AND-- the one profession I love the most (for purely selfish reasons)-- work for the Vatican newspaper. Roommate M works at the Vatican and has access to the Vatican supermarket which I imagine to be very large and bright and full of strange and lovely products and probably a lot of angels and hymns playing over a loudspeaker... And for this reason our fridge is often stocked with things like "Milk from the Pontifical Farms".
Another roommate kindly informed me it was radioactive, but this could have been to keep me from using it in my tea. Either way, I will avoid it. For the most part I was regarding the Vatican products as a cool part of living in Rome... but then M decided to introduce me to ciambelle di vino rosso-- a slightly sweet cookie that is knock-your-socks-off tasty. And the best ones come from the Vatican commissary. And every other place in Italy makes inferior cookies. And M had a month off from the newspaper. And you can only access the supermarket with a special blue Vatican card. And the cookies, we ate them all. It has been a cookie drought in Via Clementina UNTIL TODAY when I received this email:

Annnnd I think we're done with work for the night. Vatican Cookies here I come!