Billie in Bologna & Ed in Rome

I'll never forget the Billie Eilish concert in Bologna last Sunday -- for all the wrong reasons. Fortunately, Ed Sheeran made up for it in Rome.

Ed and Me.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to attend more live music concerts with friends. So far, I’ve been to two this year within a week of each other in Italy: Billie Eilish in Bologna and Ed Sheeran in Rome. Both made my head spin — for entirely different reasons.

In an age where we constantly watch reels, streaming-series and pre-recorded videos on media platforms, I crave live performances more than ever. I’m tired of watching shows which have been staged, perfected and altered with retakes, artificial intelligence or filters. It’s hard to wonder what’s real anymore. The magic that live art creates is rapidly disappearing.

Just about every day, I read depressing news about funding cuts to the arts in America. As far as I can tell, live concerts can go on as long as the public is willing to pay for them. My pilgrimages to concerts are also my way of protesting the slashing of the arts and keeping one of my favorite forms of creative expression alive.

A live performance reminds me that musicians are human. Although musicians may seem to possess superstar powers on stage, I love thinking that they also meddle with the mundane, and, in quiet moments, tie their shoelaces, brush their teeth, and pop a piece of bread in the toaster. Even if they might have someone doing all that for them, I imagine they still dream of those occasional beautiful moments in life which happen by mistake, spontaneously, or off-script. I go to a concert with expectations to witness something I can’t see on YouTube or listen to on Spotify. I go to feel energized by the art that we as humans are capable of creating from within.

I have a theory about our busy lives these days: if you put something on the calendar in the future, it will happen. Pull out your calendar, choose an event, call a friend, and book the date. It’ll creep up on you, and, once you live the moment together, you realize that life is short and fast, and there’s no time to waste. Going to a concert with friends creates new memories as we grow older, and often resurrects wonderful memories of our youth. Sing a squarciagola until your voice is hoarse. You’ll feel like a kid again, and you’ll show your kid that you’re still young at heart.

This year, my daughter Sofia turned 16. An aspiring singer, she spends a fair amount of time strumming her guitar and learning Billie Eilish songs. A year ago, when I gathered Billie would be on a European tour, and playing for one night in Italy, I booked tickets immediately. It would be my daughter’s special birthday present as a destination trip right after she finished her 10th grade exams.

Over this past year, I discovered that a friend and classmate of Sofia was also planning on going to the Billie concert in Bologna with her two younger brothers and her parents. As the time approached, her friend’s mom and I orchestrated the logistics together so that we all ended up riding on the same train from Rome to Bologna, staying at the same hotel, and skipping the same day of school the next day. The energy was high among both our families, and we were excited to share this unique experience together.

Coincidentally, we had all purchased our tickets from the two companies located in the UK that recently merged into one. I bought my two tickets from Viagogo and my friends had used Stubhub. Email confirmations of our purchased tickets stated that we would receive them via email two hours before the concert.

All seven of us piled into two taxis from our hotel (after a two hour train ride from Rome) and showed up at the Arena in Bologna at 6pm last Sunday night. With the concert beginning at 8pm, we waited impatiently for our tickets to be downloaded from a promised cloud. After calling the customer service of each respective companies, we were reassured by humans with whom we spoke that the tickets would reach us shortly. At 7:15pm, our friends suddenly received their tickets via email. We all cheered, and the five of them headed into the Arena as we could already hear Tom Odell opening up onstage for Billie.

Sofia and I started walking towards the ticket office outside of the arena to see if we could gather more information. There, to our horror, we found approximately 500 stragglers like us. They looked the way we felt: hot, disgruntled, angry, and frustrated, waving computer print-outs of confirmation emails, losing battery power on their phone as quickly as they were losing faith in the entire system.

The more I listened to everyone else’s stories, the more I realized the terrible truth: we had been scammed.

I called back Viagogo, and immediately got someone on the line. I explained the situation and, only at that point, fifteen minutes away from the start of the concert, the representative confessed that, actually, Viagogo and Stubhub weren’t officially elegible to provide tickets to the Billie Eilish concert. But, if we wanted, we could purchase other tickets then that were available, starting at the price of 2,000 euros per tickets (approximately 5x the price of one of the tickets I had originally paid for). Or, I could click on a link and receive a full refund in the form of a voucher to my original purchase. The last thing I wanted to do was to use the voucher towards any sort of service that Viagogo might offer in the future — but I’d take what I could get. It still made no sense whatsoever because Stubhub, which was purchased by Viagogo, had pulled through in providing the tickets downloaded to my friends, albeit illegally.

Sofia and I then thought we’d see if there were any other tickets still available from the on-site, crowded ticket office at the original price that we had purchased. We stood in line with hoards of Billie Eilish doppelgangers dressed in Vans, basketball jerseys, long denim shorts, and hair highlighted green underneath baseball caps worn backwards.

Ten minutes before the concert began, a rumpled and sweaty ticket office manager came out looking as if he had already been beaten up, quieted the furious crowd, and told us there were no more tickets to the show. There was nothing he could do about the fact that we had all been scammed, he said as quickly as possible, and then ran away.

A woman standing in front of us was dressed in a purple hijab with beautiful Ocean Eyes, and said to me, “I can’t bear to walk to the end of this line and tell my daughter what has happened. We’ve been waiting all year for this concert.”

Many girls broke down in tears, and we overheard people telling their tales of how far they had traveled to hear Billie play in the only Italian stop on her European tour. No one would be able to see her on another night in Italy the following day. She’d move on to the UK the day after.

Sofia and I shuffled around the stadium with all the other lost puppies, incredulous and directionless. One adorable local vendor from Bologna took pity on us, and brought us a little boat of French fries while we slumped on a step next to a plug where I charged my phone near an overflowing trash can around which bees buzzed.

“Ketchup or mayo?” he asked us. It was the nicest thing anyone working at the Arena had said to us all afternoon.

Sofia whispered “ketchup” through misty eyes. We devoured each and every one of our consolation prize in silence.

When all else failed at the Bologna Arena, my daughter and I laughed. French fries helped.

Eventually, as we heard the 15,000 fans singing along to Billie’s opening acts, we couldn’t take it anymore, and called a taxi to take us somewhere, anywhere, out of there.

“Dove andiamo?” the taxi driver asked as soon as we fell into his backseat.

“Ad un piatto enorme di tortellini," I answered, demanding he had to find us an open restaurant on a Sunday night that would restore our spirits with Bologna’s trademark speciality. He had a few places in mind, called all of them as we drove back towards the center of Bologna, and found one open. Eventually, we ended up at Ristorante Cesarina, and ate our weight and age in tortellini.

The next day, I discovered two things.

First, I had been entirely refunded by Viagogo because I had originally purchased a guarantee with my tickets (which I thought was to protect me, like trip insurance, not them). It didn’t hurt that I had paid for them with my American Express card. In speaking to a lovely Am-Ex representative, I was told they would have helped me receive a refund even if I hadn’t already.

And, then, I discovered that I’m not alone in what happened, and that there are racketeers out there doing very mean things. The more I shared this story with friends, the more I found people who had experienced similar debacles, and were turned away from Taylor Swift concerts to international sports events. This is not about overbooking — it’s about pure fraud.

PLEASE READ THIS THIS ARTICLE LINKED HERE: the BBC recently investigated The Meanies wreaking havoc over the concert-buying industry. This article came out a couple days after our foul-up. I have learned that you should only buy tickets through a musician’s official website (perhaps many of you are saying, “duh,” but I’m not a regular concert-goer and I’m learning as I go so don’t judge).

In Italy, the reliable platforms are Live Nation, Ticketmaster or Vivaticket. Don’t trust anything else. All I can say is that these crooks who make money from ripping people off must not have kids. Because they have no idea how disappointing such an experience as the one we lived through is for teenagers. I wish I could put these monsters in a sauna with the door shut and play Billie’s “Bad Guy” on repeat as it’s their theme song.

At lunch the day after, we went over all the details with the wonderful family who propped us up and pretended the concert hadn’t been that great after all. Somehow we got talking about school, and homework left to do. The youngest boy of the family said he was excited for the spelling bee coming up that week. I asked him what was the hardest word he had to spell.

He thought about it over a few beats, and then his eyes lit up and it came to him.

“Absurd!” he chimed with a slight lisp.

It was the perfect word for the entire Bologna experience.

A week later, I got my revenge in Rome.

This past January, two close American friends who live in Torino suggested we all go to Ed Sheeran’s Roman concert at the Stadio Olimpico. We marked the calendar and, suddenly, the day arrived before we knew it.

Yesterday, the morning of the concert, my dear Roman friend Angela (no relation to those with whom I attended the concert later that evening) texted to tell me she had just learned that Ed Sheeran would be interviewed by Italian radio journalist Gianluca Gazzoli in a secret spot around noon. It was all very last-minute, and she wondered if Sofia and I wanted to join her to try to meet him after the interview.

Angela was the very first friend I made in Rome, and she knew how to heal a broken heart after the Billie bust. Unfortunately, Sofia was not in Rome for the weekend. But nothing would stop me from showing up.

An hour later, Angela and I drove together to Rome’s Cinema Barberini, managed by her husband’s family. Together with her two teenage sons, we waited for the rockstar to walk through the side door of the cinema which was closed to the public until 2pm.

(By now, this cineplex is the only place to go to the movies in Rome. Not only do they have multiple salas, films in original version and in Italian, crazy Dolby stereo, a restaurant with a rooftop terrace with everything from an amazing cacio e pepe to a finger-licking-good lobster roll, but they also have delicious popcorn and colorful, comfortable velour seats and couches with cube poufs in the front row to stretch your legs onto!)

Eventually, Ed Sheeran breezed in the cinema donning his trademark shy smile, pink Nikes, dark grey shorts, and a pink Goodhood shirt. He smiled at us as we leaned against the popcorn stand. He was quickly whisked away to a 20-minute interview behind closed doors. Once finished, he reemerged in the lobby, and Angela stopped him to ask if she could take his photo with her boys.

After she clicked her photo, I asked him if she and I could have one with him as well. Ed smiled again, nodded, and stood between the two of us as we grinned like groupies. As I struggled to organize the shot, he took my phone out of my hand and snapped two selfies of the three of us. I knew already my daughter would ask that I preserve my phone case for Ed’s DNA. I told him I’d be at his concert later that evening to which he nodded again shyly, mumbled “cool,” and trotted out the side door to the black van that was headed to the Stadio Olimpico.

Angela, Ed and me: it was absurd!

Later that evening, I met up with my dear friends at the new, delicious pizzeria Avenida Calo’ and then we walked to the concert. We got in without a hitch (official tickets, phew!), and joined the 80,000 fans that had sold out the stadium. Within minutes of getting onstage, Ed announced that everything he performed that evening would be live, which made me again wonder how every performer might not be as honest.

Ed was phenomenal. He sang his heart out, prefacing almost every song with a personal anecdote. There was the story about battling depression after he lost Jamal, his dear friend who passed away in 2022 whom he credits to launching his career. There was the story about winning the case after he was sued for stealing someone else’s song. There was the story of opening up an old phone and finding a past life he didn’t recognize anymore.

He provoked the crowd of Italians by challenging them to sing louder than France, where he sang last week. Immediately, the crowd pumped up the volume.

He shared “Drive,” a song from Brad Pitt’s “F1” film coming out this week, which he hadn’t played for any other audience before.

But he really tore down the house when he called onstage 29-year-old Ultimo (aka Niccolo’ Moriconi and winner of Eurovision 2018). Together they sang Ed’s “Perfect” in Italian while Ultimo played the piano and Ed sat next to him on the piano bench.

It was hotter than Sicily in mid-August but no one budged for Ed’s three hours of performing more than 30 songs. His team whom we chatted with at the Cinema Barberini had said they didn’t know how he would manage onstage with the fireworks that would surround him on the revolving stage that moved like a slow turntable record.

“He’s going to roast like a rotisserie chicken,” one of us crew said while we waited for him to finish up his interview at the Cinema Barberini.

As spectators, we all boiled in the heat of the musical feast. Fireworks blasted through the oculus of the stadium from Ed’s stage surrounded by maxi-screens shaped like guitar picks. No film or video can do justice to what we all felt from the live energy of one simple but fiercely talented redhead.

Listening to his songs, I couldn’t help but think that we also go to concerts to be reminded of love. We go to chant the stanzas that musicians write about love lost, gained, earned, stolen, unrequited. Perhaps it’s because I listened to Ed sing live without my husband but thought about him constantly while he was doing good work in Africa that prevented him from attending the concert. And also because I went to the concert with these two dear friends who met seven years ago after having endured difficult circumstances of life.

Cheers to friendship with Serra and Pietro!

There we were, united again, once in San Francisco and now in Rome, and they have since married and had two beautiful children. Seven years ago, my husband and I stood as their witnesses at their wedding in California. We are proud godparents of one of their beautiful daughters. As I swayed next to them while listening to Ed last night, I sang loudest to his lyrics from “Thinking Out Loud”:

“People fall in love in mysterious ways….and maybe it’s all part of a plan…I’m thinking out loud…maybe we found love right where we are.”

And, on that, I’ll leave you, almost 3,000 words later. With my soul restored by live performances, friendship, lessons learned, and love. Snap!