45th-generation roman

Yesterday I took myself on a four-hour whistlestop tour of Rome. Four hours, because four hours was what I had. I decided to go late Saturday night, photocopied the guidebook to read on the train. I reeled around from Termini to Trevi to the Colloseum like a bluebottle afflicted by ADD and stendhalism, all agog. Golden light, golden heat, sweat streaming down from beneath my sunglasses like tears. Dome after sky-aspiring dome appearing and disappearing between the palazzi. And the palms, the hanging vines, those wonderful cloud-shaped pine trees. My guidebook exhorts the modern tourist not to forget the other, older city that lies a few metres beneath your trainer soles. Not difficult advice to follow, considering the lumpy-bumpiness of the streets: you’re clearly walking around on top of a bedspread under which a lazy child has stashed all the contents of his room in a half-arsed attempt at ‘tidying’.

The Trevi fountain was sheer silliness, crowding its tiny piazza like a big spabath on a little balcony, some executive’s minor peccato against good taste. The tourists, each having already thrown the single coin they were willing to donate to the gesture, tossed imaginary coins over their shoulders while their friends’ cameras clicked. But spouting away under that benevolent sun, looming so whitely, making everybody so happy, it made me happy too.

I found the Pantheon by accident while looking for a nearby church with Filippo Lippi frescoes. My carping maiden-aunt-chaperone of a guidebook had assured me that it would be closed, along with the forum and most of central Rome. It also gave all prices in lire. Yeah, I’m cheap. But oh, that dome. So perfect, so austere. Lozenge of yellow sunlight fracturing against the squares within squares. A recorded announcement ripped through the room, distorted by echo. First it called for silence, in English and Italian. I liked that a lot, since it sounded like the voice of Jupiter himself, and felt much more suited to the temple of the planetary gods it used to be than the awkward-feeling church it is now. Round churches: why? Nothing in the catholic mass is adapted to roundness. They just end up crowding all the (rectangular) pews up in one little sector of the circle, with a discomforting sense of empty space behind. The announcement continued at booming, echoey length with a list of all the noises you weren’t allowed to make, so as ‘to preserve the atmosphere of worshipful prayer appropriate to a Christian church’.

And finally piazza Campidoglio, the forum, Palatine hill. Gah. The fantastical deep perspectives, the harmonious jumble of ruins of various vintages, in various states of repair. Too lush for words. I actually caught myself thinking, ‘Wow, aren’t human beings great?’, which is I guess how you know that a city is doing its job, architecture-wise. Arches and basilicas, the house of the vestal virgins. Wild poppies and marguerites softening the wreckage of broken columns and fragments of ornamented capital. Guides informing their limp, limping flocks of all the lurid goings on in ancient times. Contemplating the bronze doors of the Curia, where the Senate used to meet: frog croaks in the archeological dig behind me, girl grunts in frustration as I inadvertently get in her shot. Palatine hill with its fountains and sneaky secret views between the trees. All of it so gorgeous, so gorgeous.

I sat down by the Colloseum, rolled and smoked a cigarette. Watched a sweltering, plastic-breast-plated gladiator scratch at his scalp with a thumbnail, his helmet upturned at his feet for coins. Then back on the slow train with a tinny of Moretti and a magazine. I had to sit backwards, funnily enough, and on the same side of the train, so I saw exactly what I’d seen on the way over but in reverse: the pillowy gold-green loveliness of Lazio, Orvieto on its geometric limestone outcrop, Lake Trasimeno, bloody Terontola: as if the elastic band that had carried me out to Rome, having reached the farthest point of its stretch, was slinging me back in. Home, blog, bed. Not so much as a postcard to show but hell yes, I heart Roma.