Column: Bottle Services. Written by No items found. Your nightlife options just went rogue. The world is currently obsessed with Secret Bars. The following four bars on the other hand, are properly secretive. First you need the password. Then, take the highway south towards Damour Beach. A little ways past the airport look for an abandoned double-decker bus; if there are three flares burning, the club is open.
Pull up besides the bus and get ready. Give them the password. They will judge your appropriateness, sometimes taking your picture and texting it ahead for approval. If you pass, you will be blindfolded and driven to the venue. There are armed military types patrolling the fence— purely for show, probably—they open the barricade and wave you in to The Green Line. At last call, everybody raises their weapons and opens fire—all blanks, apparently.
You can also rent a go-kart and enter into hair-straightening races around the metal-framed balcony—nothing says a night on the town like being run off the road by three bikini-clad girls toting Kalashnikovs.
Finally, at the Tenth Court and its Pavilion of Forgetfulness, look for a large man in a fez carrying a pygmy marmoset. This ecclesiastical-themed bar has been wowing the cognoscenti for over years. Although the church itself was built sometime before , it apparently did not have its own bar until about Poussin reportedly drank himself to death there in , and since then the place was unofficially renamed as a tribute to his talent, and his prodigious capacity for spirits.
When his sarcophagus was erected in the sacristy, it was renovated as the secret door to the bar. After unloading your sins, you will be given an ancient Etruscan coin. If you try to leave the church with the coin, you will be found, believe me. Descend into the dark and prepare to be amazed. For centuries, while war and famine raged above, the catacombs of San Lorenzo have been a refuge for the spirit, and a hiding place for the riches of Rome—picture the Medicis throwing a yard sale.
