BY LARRY CARROLL |I havent seen very much of the world. I suppose thats because I grew up with a couple of absurdly hodophobic parents, who would take myself and my siblings on one hour driving "vacations" from our Boston-based home to Nashua every few months to visit the grandparents. Once every couple years, we'd drive all of two hours to the White Mountains, a voyage that my mother would plan as if the family surname were Shackleton. By the time I hit college at age nineteen, I had set foot in a whopping total of three of our united states (I went to Maine once!), and was boiling with a desire to someday see all those places that people kept telling me I had to lay my eyes on. Or, at the very least, I wanted to get down to Rhode Island.

All that travel suppression should explain why, right after graduating and scraping together a few bucks, I pulled a Kerouac and aimlessly roamed around the country three times until my decade old Ford Escort whimpered and collapsed in an exhausted heap not unlike the Blues Brothers car. Now, several years later, I can happily claim to have seen so much of the continental states and that I successfully transformed myself from an egocentric New Englander into an egocentric American.

Most people would be offended to have the term "Ugly American" slung in their direction, but I wear it as a badge of pride. I don't want to get all Alan Jackson or anything, but I consider myself extremely lucky to have been born in the best country in the world. As such, I love Americana - from the aural indulgence of regional accents to the blissful tackiness of roadside tourist traps to a Waffle House meal with more grease than Fonzie's comb  I love all of it. The Eiffel Tower? Screw that, I figured  I want to see The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota. The canals of Venice? Id rather just get a room at the Venetian Hotel. Whenever I have think about going abroad, it was with a bit of apprehension because I knew it would be hard for me to get excited about being somewhere other than my home. I was curious to travel, but mostly just so I could see how other countries interpreted U.S. culture. It's kinda like Clarence Worley said in True Romance: "I've always wanted to see what TV in other countries looks like."

The timing was, quite simply, perfect when I was offered an opportunity to travel to Rome for a visit to the set of the upcoming film Exorcist: The Beginning. I had been getting itchy to stick my toe outside the American boundaries but, as a recent excursion to Tijuana reminded me, the rest of the world can be a pretty hellacious place. Here was an opportunity to go somewhere I would never normally end up, give it a taste test, and never be more than three days away from my own bed should I end up hating the place.

But I recently did travel abroad for the first time, and I had a great time. Dont get me wrong, Im glad to be back in the states, but being in Rome was definitely something Ill never forget. And even though I was only there for five days, I learned quite a bit. So, on behalf of naive world travelers everywhere, I hereby offer up my Ten Things Every Ugly American Should Know About Rome:

10. A great amount of fun can be had watching American movie stars degrade themselves for a payday: Pierce Brosnan pitches yogurt in a TV ad that has him on screen for (I'm being generous here) three seconds; Sean Connery gets his butt kicked in a commercial that I cant say with any certainty what it was trying to sell; A shockingly wrinkled Kevin Costner smiles from a billboard, claiming that he, "Loves walking in his Valleverde shoes". As I sat in my hotel room and flipped through the channels, I half-expected to find Al Pacino selling Pop Tarts.

9. Pizza in Rome isn't better or worse than our pizza - it's a completely different entity. They serve it crispy on a very thinned-out dough. There's usually no cheese involved in the equation. If you order toppings on the pizza, they are segregated in a way that would make Trent Lott dance with joy. And to make matters even more bizarre, they don't slice the thing up for you - they just hand you a whole pizza and a sharp knife. Trying to compare this stuff to Pizzeria Uno would be like comparing apples to orange Fruit Roll-Ups.

8. You will never, in all your life, wait in a longer line than the one to see the Sistine Chapel. And after looking at it, neck muscles you never realized you had will scream in agony for days. But it's worth it.

7. You could stack twelve Home Depots side-by-side, rip out the walls between them, and the building still wouldn't be as enormous as St. Peter's Basilica. If there's one reason to go to Rome, it is to see this building that, after you spend two hours looking around it, you'll swear you must have been dreaming. The place is truly a miracle of architecture.

6. Don't buy into all these travel books that make Rome sound like the mugging capital of the world. Everywhere you look, you can see lost tourists consulting their maps. The locals are all patient and friendly and willing to point you in the right direction. Nobody on a motorcycle tried to drive by and grab my shopping bag. And, at no point did I see these mythical children who travel in packs and supposedly close in on tourists, rifling through their pockets. Which is good, because my New Year's resolution for 2003 was to stop punching nine-year old boys. So far, so good!

5. Cats have taken over this city. They're everywhere. Apparently there's a great deal of controversy over this, as I stumbled upon a parade of thousands of people chanting "liberty for cats!" Some legislators in Rome want to pull a Bob Barker and help control the pet population, but the natives don't seem too happy about this idea. In America, the only time we see so many people unified with outrage is when the Sci-Fi Channel cancels a show.

4. Don't overload yourself with things to see. Everything here is two thousand years old, has more artistic merit than anything you've probably seen before, and deserves the appropriate time for admiration and reflection. Unfortunately, even the world's most glorious art can get old after awhile, and if you aren't looking at it with fresh eyes you'll find yourself darting through entire rooms, whose any one item would get its own building back in the States.

3. The coffee here is overrated. The good news is that you can get a cappuccino for about a buck. The bad news - they serve it in what we think of as an espresso cup. An espresso, meanwhile, is served in something resembling a thimble. And honestly, none of it was any better than Starbucks.

2. There are 323 steps to get to the top of the Michelangelos dome at St. Peter's Basilica. The view is worth it, but you have never had a workout like this before. My dogs are still barking.

And most importantly...

1. If you are planning a trip to Rome, try your best to have it coincide with a set visit to a cool-looking movie.

Which is exactly what I did. I admit, I packed a whopping bag of skepticism in my suitcase for this trip - after all, Exorcist 2 and 3 could collectively be seen as the blueprint for destroying a film franchise, and the production of this movie didn't get off to the greatest start (original director John Frankenheimer passed away during pre-production, and original star Liam Neeson departed shortly thereafter). But this movie really looks like it could be something special. Whenever any would-be follow up to a classic is being created, you can safely expect the ad campaign to talk out of both sides of its mouth, simultaneously screaming "A reinvention!" and "A return to the roots of the original!", but this new Exorcist looks like it has the potential to actually succeed on both those levels. Keeping in mind that the all-important special effects are yet to be created, then, as well as the fact that I've only seen a small sampling of the film, read on and prepare to get excited.

Exorcist: The Beginning brings us back in time with Father Lankester Merrin (so brilliantly created by Max Von Sydow thirty years ago), to a post World War II-era that has him conducting missionary work in Africa. After suffering a crisis of faith, Fr. Merrin finds himself grappling with the devil, a battle that will restore his belief in the church and train him for the epic battle that he engages in thirty years later.

Paul Schrader, a frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator who wrote the screenplays for such classic films as Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, now directs the film. This I like - while Frankenheimer's best days were clearly behind him, Schrader seems to have made huge strides as a director over the last few years. Affliction and Auto Focus were dark, unorthodox, gripping character portraits that took you into the mind of a director that actually had something to say. Frankenheimer, meanwhile, had been reduced to a hired gun late in life, and spent the last decade of his career cranking out garbage like The Island of Dr. Moreau and Reindeer Games. Schrader is a man who doesn't usually get very much attention or money from Hollywood for his films, and I'm pleased to report that he was darting around the set of this movie with an excited look in his eyes, like a kid with a (rumored $40 million) jumbo toy box.

I also like the fact that Neeson has been replaced with Stellan Skarsgard (Good Will Hunting), a fine actor whose ability to throw around intense, world-weary glances is unequalled. Skarsgard is not only physically appropriate to portray a younger Merrin, but he also doesn't carry the same "star" baggage that Neeson would have had with audiences. Skarsgard is well known throughout the rest of the world, and deservedly so, but has yet to make much of a dent here in America. This movie could change all that.

The Skarsgard-Schrader team definitely instills more confidence in me than Neeson-Frankenheimer, but the promising outlook of the movie doesn't end there. When I visited the set, I saw a 1944 Dutch Village street, the set of the opening of the film. They were shooting a turning point in Father Merrin's life, when he is forced to make a Sophie's Choice-type decision on which of his parishioners will be executed next by a group of Nazis. Merrin sees these troubled times as proof that there is no God, which puts him on the verge of renouncing his faith. Pretty intense stuff. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this one scene beats anything from either of the other two Exorcist sequels in terms of real, emotional heft.

In talking to the people making the film, the one phrase that is constantly repeated is "psychological terror", the theme that they seem to be shooting for. This also is a promising sign - anyone who has analyzed the original Exorcist film will tell you that the spinning head scene might be what everyone remembers, but that wouldn't have meant a thing if director William Friedkin hadn't been so damn good at creating the mood. Friedkin tapped into the subconscious fears of his audience in a way that the directors of the sequels couldn't approach. More dishearteningly, directors John Boorman (2) and William Peter Blatty (3) didnt even attempt to establish a similar psychological creepiness, relying instead on effects-laden money shots. Schrader and his team, however, seem to be on the right track. When I saw them, two days before wrapping an epic shoot that lasted nearly three months and took them all over the world, they still had a remarkable amount of enthusiasm towards the project - a sign that they know they're on to something good.

As we mark the days until the release of the movie, keep coming back to CountingDown for an in-depth look at all the sets I was granted access to, as well as extensive interviews with Schrader, Skarsgard, co-producer Wayne Morris, set designer Stefano Ortolani, and co-stars Clara Bellar (A.I.), Antonie Kamerling (the upcoming Mindhunters), and Ilario Bisi-Pedro (The Dogs of War). I can honestly say that out of all the beautiful things I saw in Rome, I'd have to put Exorcist: The Beginning at the top of my list. Despite all my souvenirs, my luggage coming home was much lighter  I left that whopping bag of skepticism behind.

So go ahead and get excited - the movie looks that good. Mark down the release date of July 18th on your calendar - and prepare to have the bejeesus scared out of you all over again.