Fringing On Eternal - Rome

July 15, 2007

I always walk in Rome. It saves the trouble of worrying about transit strikes, crowded buses with no air conditioning and clogged-up roads. It’s the only way that you can be in control of your schedule and your day—especially if you lived on the other side of the Tevere, far removed from the Centro. I lived on the other side of the Tevere, far removed from the Centro.

Monteverde is what I lovingly think of as the Astoria of Rome. While it is only a few miles to the bustle of Campo dei’Fiori or the sun-soaked crowds at the Colosseo, it feels like another world over the Gianicolo Hill. There is a reason why the gritty urban backdrop for post-war neorealist films was so easily found along the via Pamphili or the Piazza di Donna Olimpia. The houses that Mussolini built still stand, apartment complexes that have softened against the lines of lemon trees and palm fronds. Color has begun to make its way in through means apart from graffiti. Young college students, mostly expats, have started to mix in with the residents who have been living there since Ceasar’s heyday.

It can be more daunting than the Vatican, mostly because, unlike the Sistine Chapel or St. Peter’s, there’s no real way in. Old women sneer at you in the alimentari, knowing that you’re the noisy one that kept them up the night before. Teenage boys playing pick-up games of futbol in the street stop to call out phrases that they assume no Americana can translate. Even kids at the area schools, who shouldn’t know any better, can immediately pick you out as foreign and mercilessly make fun of your shoes, your hair, the way you walk when you could take the bus.

I moved out of Rome in the middle of May, and around that time became incredibly lazy. Walks that I considered to be niente would be replaced by stamping my bus ticket in hopes of an empty seat and room for my six-pack bottles of water from the Sma (purchased in the nick of time right before the grocery store shut its gates at 7:50 PM). As the days grow longer, the buses switch on their air-conditioning units again, which makes them a little more full of life. The people are a little less packed and more lively, too. Aired-out. Stoic, wintry silence is replaced by conversation and recognition.

I always walk, but if you want to see Rome at its rush hour, if you want to see the life of the city—the real city, not the city crammed into tourist shops and pay-to-pray basilicas and the Gladiators that mill around the Palatine Hill—it’s on the bus.

“Giorgio! How’s your family?”
“Vittoria, what are you doing all the way out here?”
“I just saw your granddaughter, Signora di Fabia. Che bella!”

It wasn’t stressful, the way I usually perceived the bus to be. Of course, when I usually hop on the bus, there are Finnish student tours sitting on the floors because they don’t want to stand or derelicts shouting about Berlusconi. Or sane people shouting about Berlusconi, for that matter. But that night, it was just a bus full of people going home from their workday. Going home to watch Passa Parola, to sidle up to their significant others, to eat dinner and go to bed with the comfort of the next day being a national holiday.

I wish I’d taken the bus more often when I saw Monteverde pass like this, especially at the non-stressful hour of 8:00 PM. I remembered a passage from Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance in which he wanted to attach a camera to the back of his favorite bus and record it as it made its rounds. I’d love to do it to the 44 bus line in Rome. Watch as it rounds out of Piazza Venezia, past the white marble Vittorino that looks like a giant wedding cake, past the Colosseum and Bocca della Verita on its way across the river. Watch as it passes vespas and the whole of Trastevere and fake Gucci belts and local villas that are now ridiculously luxurious-looking apartments and into the real grit-living area where the Mussolini buildings still stand as monuments to Italy’s more recent pass and sigh a “che peca.”

Getting off the bus, I realize how much I’ve missed being a part of city life since my life became consumed with packing up my apartment. I missed spending nights where daylight stretched into infinity at the San Calisto. I missed being a part of the ebb and flow that the orange ATAC bus was a part of.

Taking the shortcut (which was, in typical Italian fashion, actually two bus stops longer than the long way) through via Ozanam over to via Fabiola was also a great decision that evening. Not only because it saved me from hiking up the endless stories of steps for the front entrance of my building, but because Ozanam has more life than the silent via Paola Falconieri. The lights of alimentari and bars were flickering on in the twilight, and literally everyone in the area was out. I never see people on the streets in Monteverde, but that night they were all making up for it. All out, having cappuccino on the tables outside of one bar, stopping in for last minute fresh vegetables for dinner, giving up on the hot kitchen and going to the local Thai restaurant (whose Pad Thai was suspiciously similar to Barilla pasta noodles).

There was a wonderful cool breeze blowing through the trees and remnants of recent election posters, and for a moment via Ozanam almost felt like my familiar Amsterdam Avenue of New York. Almost. There were families. There were young kids, but not the same soccer-playing, self-proclaimed pick-up artists. There was a sigh of relief and a vinyasa-like intake of breath on one of the first really nice evenings after a prolonged winter. And while the most historic thing I passed that night was a shop owner who often regaled American students with his stories of serving future filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, it was a comfort to go home through all of that.

It was the Rome I envisioned myself living in when I first moved there nine months earlier, and Rome I had yet to experience until that evening.

It’s very rare to see my neighborhood of that city breathe like that, full of life and with a constant pulse. Usually everything that side of town is hot and scalding; closed shutters and empty buses.

Bio:
Growing up an avid reader of outdated guidebooks and listener of Joan Sutherland LPs, Olivia Giovetti has used her love for opera to foster her love of travel. The combination of the two has allowed her to see 99% of Europe and, living off a lavish arts income, heightened her ability to travel on the cheap. Her passport gets more play than Paris Hilton during Fleet Week. A freelance writer, her publishers include New York City Opera, Classic FM, EuroCheapo, and Paper Magazine.