What Happens in Italy Stays in Italy

A Mid-Life Road Trip Everyone Wants to Take

Looking for escape on a chilly mid-winter day, one might reach for a copy of The Trip to Italy (2014), starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves on a high-end road trip where their assignment is to write about food, or friendship, or friendship through food and wine. It’s an adventure any viewer would want to accompany them on as they riff about film, catch up on their lives, and listen to Alanis Morissette CDs.

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These two road trip the way I like to, stopping at grave yards, reaching literary destinations, not traveling so hard that there’s no time for lunch. There’s time for lunch, maybe a nap. Their rooms have a view. This is not a let’s-stay-in-places-with-shared-bathrooms sort of road trip. This is not a let’s-just eat-once-a-day-to-spare-the-budget sort of road trip. This is a let’s-rent-a-boat-and-a-crew sort of adventure, the kind some of us fantasize about but haven’t entirely taken—especially not for work. This is a road trip every one of us wants to be on.

For the viewer, watching this movie is like going on a road trip with good friends in the film industry, or, more plausibly, with good friends who watch way too many DVDs—in short, good friends who can keep a conversation going, can keep one another amused when they’re not appreciating the Italian scenery, the sort of good friends who won’t rat each other out to their significant others about random sexual encounters that just might present themselves.

Yes, they sometimes get on each other’s nerves. Yes, like true career folk, they can’t divorce themselves from their electronics. Yes, their women, their kids, their career trajectories are sources of worry. They’re like the rest of us. They’re like the rest of us on a really good working vacation.

Just the way the pasta is presented makes me want to go.

—Lori Tripoli

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Contemplating a trip to Italy? Consider these posts:

• Italy on a Budget: Rome Can Be Reasonable
• On My Knees at the Scala Santa
• Katharine Hepburn’s Summertime Romance