Relais Orso
Not cheap-cheap, but nothing kind of is in Rome. A really lovely hotel off a side street that’s barely a block to the Piazza Navona. Quiet and picturesque, walkable to all the sights, and only mid on the touristy scale.
YellowSquare Rome
The kind of hostel you’d imagine in a teen backpacking movie: a comically small elevator that chitters up through the middle of a stairwell (it’s often faster to walk), unremarkable apartments-turned-rooms, and a cafe/bar across the street that serves free spaghetti dinners to guests, meaning every twentysomething packed inside YellowSquare packs inside (and outside) the bar each night at 7 pm. Remarkably charming in a 9-star-on-HostelWorld kind of way.
The Only Place - Best Coast
California girlrock got me through four years of Brooklyn winters. It’s something about the charm bracelet jangling, the sha-la-la harmonies. There’s an entire buffet of “this town sucks” testosteroning from the same period. Best Coast is refreshing in how sincere they are about really, genuinely, shamelessly loving the endless summer of California.
Isabella Rossellini in Death Becomes Her
Me, shouting: This! Always This!!! There is nothing sexier without being harlequin, nothing more precisely worn, nothing closer to the disaster of a wardrobe malfunction which makes it All! The! Better!!
