Rome I

March 6, 2011

Every single leg of the flight from Asheville was delayed or weirded in some way. The plane that took us from Chicago to Munich had been struck by lightning, and had to be checked out. I slept heroically across the Atlantic, and so have very little jet-lag. I almost never do on this side. Munich might have been Cincinnati for all I saw of it. What struck was that German men are tall and masterful looking, an observation rather disturbing now that I consider it.

Rome

Atlante Garden, Via Crescenzio, just off the Piazza Risorgimento. I’ve been in Rome for 22 hours. The pines are the first thing exotic you notice while being whisked from the airport, the bare tall trunks with viridian bowls set on their heads. They are very beautiful, and strange, like looking at a painting. You think the old painters made them up, but they didn’t. The streets are lined with orange trees, heavy now with oranges. In the courtyards are lemons, also heavy laden. I walked in the evening and into the night, after I was settled in this heavily-curtained, dark green room. I ate at a ristorante near the Piazza di Cavour, ordering in utter ignorance of what I was going to get, which turned out to be pasta with prawns in it, and a fried ball of. . . something. . . with a mixture inside which included peas. All was, nevertheless, excellent. Their house wine was a sparkling red, sweet and bubbly, exactly the sort of thing I could drink forever. Three young men sat down beside me. For a while I despaired of what Italian I had learned, until I realized they were speaking Spanish. They were handsome and each subtly perfumed, a feast for all the senses except–alas–touch. I wandered about until I came to the Tiber and the Castle Saint Angelo. There I burst into tears, for I was standing in Rome, at a FAMOUS PLACE, and everything was lit with the soft gold glow of European streetlights. An old man was playing Bach on a guitar. As a river the Tiber is hardly more impressive than Liffey, much less so than Thames, but so full of history its waters might as well have been running gold. Despite the actual age of everything, Rome does not give the impression of antiquity. All seems alive in the present, vital, and unexpectedly colored in the shades of healthy human bodies–from pale ivory to pinkish to sand to café au lait to sunny golden-brown. The buildings are never African black, but the vendors in the street are, and so the spectrum of flesh tones is complete. This morning a billion people were lined up in the Square waiting to get into St. Peter’s, so I passed that by and got on one of those tour busses where you sit on the roof and listen to history, and Mozart, and, on a day like this, freeze nearly to death. Ho freddo. I’ll need to trace the route on foot to have full benefit, but the tour rang with names one has heard forever– St. John Lateran, Borghese, Circus Maximus. Again, nothing looked “preserved” or sacred, but all part of a living city. It’s hard to dodge the impression that the history of the papacy has been far more political than spiritual. If the popes had not sponsored great art and architecture, they would have been no use at all. I loved the wall that allowed the pope to flee in times of siege from the Vatican palaces to the safety of Castle St. Angelo. The seven hills of Rome are scarcely what we would call hills at all, but I suppose they stood out where everything else was marsh.

Something in my walk must say “American,” for people start speaking to me in English before I open my mouth. Those times when I’ve tried my Italian, they have been kind, repeating what I just said as though making sure they understood, while gently correcting pronunciation and ending. The hotel staff has no English (except for the bartender) so I’ve practiced on them a little. I was chatting with the desk clerk in what approached fluency, and then I had to ask about WiFi, where my Italian promptly collapsed. It is exhausting to be constantly groping for comprehension. I went over Italian idioms and grammar before sleep, trying in those last seconds to figure it out. I bet babies do the same when they’re learning the first time around. The cheerful waiter at the café in the park–which served me a nasty salad, but no matter–corrected a number of idioms for me. People are all the time saying “prego,” which must mean everything from “welcome” to “OK” to “don’t worry about it.”

The best thing I’ve seen yet: small, old-fashioned wind-up toys running by a vendor’s stand near the Castle. The sunlight blazed on them. They seemed so distant, so precious--