Two Metro policemen boarded and began shoving their way between the wall-to-wall passengers. The police approached each passenger in turn, and each passenger extracted a ticket for the policemen to see.“Billete,” one said when they reached me. I produced my ticket.The two policemen looked at each other. Motioning between my ticket and my face, they began a heated discussion in Italian. Finally, the dialog ceased, and one of them turned back to me. “Settanta-cinque euro,” he said.“Huh?” I asked and shrugged my shoulders.The policemen turned back to one other, and they began yelling back and forth again, shaking their heads. Finally, one took out a small notepad and wrote on it. “75€” his script read.“Does anyone here speak English?” I asked, straining to turn my head and peer through the crowd. Dozens of pairs of eyes dropped to the floor of the bus. Others continued to stare straight ahead as if I had not spoken at all.


-Excerpt from The Vesuvius Isotope, debut novel by Kristen Elise, Ph.D.

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Author's note: This really did happen to me in Naples. Unlike my protagonist, I refused to pay the fine for not stamping my bus ticket. I really did get arrested. The moral of the story: stamp everything in Naples. Your bus ticket. Your ferry ticket. Everything. Just stamp it.