La Dolce Vita

​This is a charming story out of Texas by way of Philadelphia to Rome.
 
During the winter freeze this past February in Texas when the power grid failed, 91-year-old Ezell Holley had to move out of his home temporarily.  His granddaughter Alex, who cohosts the TV show, Good Day Philadelphia, get him an available room (they were hard to come by, as you can imagine) that the family jokingly called the Waldorf Astoria.  She and her grandfather posted a series of sweet video about him taking his stay at the Waldorf all in stride.
 
And the story came to the attention of a real Waldorf Astoria, the Rome Cavalieri.  And they invited him and a guest to be their guest.  Conditions improved enough that few weeks ago, Ezell and his granddaughter finally went – as did the whole family, paying the additional way themselves.  When they arrived, they all got another surprise – the hotel put them up in the penthouse. 
 
Alex Holley documented it all, and this is the story they showed on Good Day Philadelphia.  (My favorite moment may be with the desk clerk when they check out.  I don’t want to say why.)
 
By the way, I'm going to take a bit of a digression here for a moment.  But as I was reading the story, I oddly and surprisingly had an extremely tiny but personal connection with the story, all because of one word.  When I read that the hotel was the Rome Cavalieri, I flashed back to a hotel with a similar name that my family stayed in on my very first trip to Europe when I was a young kid.  It was called the Cavalieri Hilton.  (“Cavalieri” is Italian for…well, cavalier, or knight.)  But then a thought hit me – wait, was this not just a similar name but, in fact, the very same hotel??  Did Hilton buy the Waldorf Astoria properties and then upgrade this to that luxury level??  I dove in and did some searching.  And…and...
 
…and, yes!!  I found one website that refers to the now-Rome Cavalieri Waldorf Astoria as “The former Rome Hilton” and another that says, “Inaugurated in 1963 by Conrad N. Hilton himself, the opening of the Rome Cavalieri coincided with a period of unprecedented economic development and the heyday of the so-called 'Dolce Vita.'”  Our trip was 1966, in its very earliest days, just three years after it opening.  The hotel was very nice, but…NO, not at the Waldorf Astoria level of "very nice" it is now, and most definitely nothing like the utterly spectacular penthouse.
 
Further, I actually still have the stylish ashtray that I, er…took from the room, which I thought (even as a kidling) that it looked very nice.  And not only do I still have it, but still use in on my desk, about 18 inches from me as I type this.  So, it wasn’t merely a souvenir that a little kid took and soon threw away, or something buried in boxes.  It’s done its duty for a very long time. I’ve taken out all the paraphernalia usually sitting in it so that you can see the Conrad Hilton “CH” logo.

​And as a bonus, this is a photo I took of my older brother John.  The hotel (as the news report notes) overlooks the Vatican, which historically has long been protected by the Swiss Guard.  So, John put on a little hat and took one of the long pillows from the sofa and did his bit to join the Swiss Guard and help defend the place from high.

​Anyway, back to Ezell Holley and Family being treated like royalty and having the time of their – and most notably, his – lives.