“Don’t wear the t-shirt tonight, we don’t want people to see we’re a group” the owner told me, handing over the cheap white shirt emblazoned “I came, I saw, I crawled” as I bought my tickets for that night’s international booze fest.
Organised pub crawls have been illegal in Rome since 2009 after the tragic accidental death of a 20 year old participant. One might suspect that the ban is also partly due to Italians’ distaste at large groups of drunken tourists making noise in their piazzas late at night. Yet the crawls continue under slightly changed names – one company’s website even advises party goers to avoid the use of the words ‘pub crawl’ to steer clear of trouble from the authorities.
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Katie Forster 