By Jocelyn McClurg, USA TODAY
NEW YORK � Luca Spaghetti from Rome wants you to know: Yes, he exists. Yes, he is for real. Yes, that's his name.
By Stan Godlewski for USA TODAY
"An extraordinary talent for friendship": That's how Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best seller Eat, Pray, Love, describes her Italian friend Luca Spaghetti (real name), who has written his own memoir, Un Amico Italiano: Eat, Pray, Love, in Rome.
By Stan Godlewski for USA TODAY
"An extraordinary talent for friendship": That's how Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best seller Eat, Pray, Love, describes her Italian friend Luca Spaghetti (real name), who has written his own memoir, Un Amico Italiano: Eat, Pray, Love, in Rome.
And here he is, with his American friend Elizabeth Gilbert, who introduced the Italian tax accountant with the c'mon-really surname to the world in her hit 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.
They are wandering the halls of Eataly, a glistening Italian food emporium in Manhattan, nibbling on chunks of bread, sampling regional olive oils and taking bites of broccoli rabe pizza as Gilbert jokes about the impossibility of remaining on a diet while her fellow food lover is visiting.
And that's before they sit down to lunch, a feast of buffalo mozzarella, wild arugula salad, carpaccio of tenderloin, sinful plates of pasta (no, not spaghetti) and a bottle of Tuscan red.
They have been friends since 2003, when a mutual American pal told Gilbert to contact Spaghetti when she arrived in Rome. There he introduced her to soccer, to his longtime girlfriend, Giuliana (now his wife, who is here with him on this trip), and to all kinds of gustatory experiences. She immortalized him ? and his name ? in her book.
Now he has returned the favor in his own infectious memoir, Un Amico Italiano: Eat, Pray, Love, in Rome (Penguin, $15, paperback original), which features not one but two cover blurbs by Gilbert.
"It's charming," Gilbert says. She describes it as the "delightful" equivalent of having "dinner with him and a couple of bottles of wine."
Indeed, the compliments between these two flow like vino, along with easy teasing.
Spaghetti, 40, concedes he was a little "scared" to first meet Gilbert, fearing she would be an intellectual writer who would want to sip afternoon tea. Instead, he found someone game for screaming soccer matches, terrifying scooter rides through the streets of Rome and eating oxtail with her hands.
"After the first pasta together, I discovered she was an angel," he says.
Gilbert, 41, found that Spaghetti had "an extraordinary talent for friendship."
They became so close that people in Italy asked Spaghetti if there was more to their relationship than met the eye.
"I say she is my different kind of love," he says, recalling that he sometimes cried (and laughed) while writing his book, "because it was very moving to write about my friendship with her."
As they got to know each other better during the months Gilbert was in Italy, she opened up to him about her painful divorce.
"She gave me all of her herself. She was naked in some ways with me," he says.
"That's a metaphor," she clarifies.
They laugh.
Gilbert, of course, famously married the man she fell in love with in Bali in the final section of Eat, Pray, Love. She and her husband just threw a surprise second "honeymoon" bash in New Jersey for Spaghetti and Guiliana when they arrived in America for this visit. (Gilbert missed their December wedding in Italy because of the holiday blizzard in New York.)
Guiliana, 38, speaks warmly of her husband's friend. "They are very similar," she says. "She wants to know everything about Italy. He wants to know everything about America."
Gilbert says she has never met anyone as enthusiastic about America as Spaghetti, who has visited this country about 10 times and who learned English through his love of pop songs. And if a movie is made of his book (as one was made of Eat, Pray, Love, starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert), Spaghetti says an American ? Jim Carrey ? should play him.
He plans to write a second memoir, about the "further misadventures" of life as Luca Spaghetti, which includes non-stop, incredulous questions about his name.
In the meantime, he beams about having Un Amico Italiano published here.
"It is a great joy," he says, "to see my book in American bookstores."
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