then jumping up on their feet two seconds later to lead another attack on the goal.
Lazio lost, though.
Needing to be cheered up after the game, Luca Spaghetti asked his friends, "Should we
go out?"
I assumed this meant, "Should we go out to a bar?" That's what sports fans in America
would do if their team had just lost. They'd go to a bar and get good and drunk. And not
just Americans would do this--so would the English, the Australians, the Germans . . .
everyone, right? But Luca and his friends didn't go out to a bar to cheer themselves up.
They went to a bakery. A small, innocuous bakery hidden in a basement in a nondescript
district in Rome. The place was crowded that Sunday night. But it always is crowded
after the games. The Lazio fans always stop here on their way home from the stadium to
stand in the street for hours, leaning up against their motorcycles, talking about the game,
looking macho as anything, and eating cream puffs.
I love Italy.
24242424
I am learning about twenty new Italian words a day. I'm always studying, flipping
through my index cards while I walk around the city, dodging local pedestrians. Wheream I getting the brain space to store these words? I'm hoping that maybe my mind has
decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with
these shiny new words.
I work hard at Italian, but I keep hoping it will one day just be revealed to me, whole,
perfect. One day I will open my mouth and be magically fluent. Then I will be a real
Italian girl, instead of a total American who still can't hear someone call across the street
to his friend Marco without wanting instinctively to yell back "Polo!" I wish that Italian
would simply take up residence within me, but there are so many glitches in this language.
Like, why are the Italian words for "tree" and "hotel" ( albero vs. albergo) so very similar?
This causes me to keep accidentally telling people that I grew up on "a Christmas hotel
farm" instead of the more accurate and slightly less surreal description: "Christmas tree
farm." And then there are words with double or even triple meanings. For instance: tasso.
Which can mean either interest rate, badger, or yew tree. Depending on the context, I
suppose. Most upsetting to me is when I stumble on Italian words that are actually--I hate
to say it--ugly. I take this as almost a personal affront. I'm sorry, but I didn't come all the
way to Italy to learn how to say a word like schermo (screen).
Still, overall it's so worthwhile. It's mostly a pure pleasure. Giovanni and I have such a
good time teaching each other idioms in English and Italian. We were talking the other
evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I
told him that in English we sometimes say, "I've been there." This was unclear to him at
first-- I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific
location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow,
you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone
can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved
on, sometimes this will bring hope.
"So sadness is a place?" Giovanni asked.
"Sometimes people live there for years," I said.
In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle,
which means "I have experienced that on my own skin." Meaning, I have also been
burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through.
So far, though, my favorite thing to say in all of Italian is a simple, common word:
Attraversiamo.
It means, "Let's cross over." Friends say it to each other constantly when they're walking
down the sidewalk and have decided it's time to switch to the other side of the street.
Which is to say, this is literally a pedestrian word. Nothing special about it. Still, for
some reason, it goes right through me. The first time Giovanni said it to me, we were
walking near the Colosseum. I suddenly heard him speak that beautiful word, and I
stopped dead, demanding, "What does that mean? What did you just say?"
"Attraversiamo."
He couldn't understand why I liked it so much. Let's cross the street? But to my ear, it's
the perfect combination of Italian sounds. The wistful ah of introduction, the rolling trill,
the soothing s, that lingering "ee-ah-moh" combo at the end. I love this word. I say it all
the time now. I invent any excuse to say it. It's making Sofie nuts. Let's cross over! Let's
cross over! I'm constantly dragging her back and forth across the crazy traffic of Rome.
I'm going to get us both killed with this word.
Giovanni's favorite word in English is half-assed.Luca Spaghetti's is surrender.
25252525
There's a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing
against each other to see who shall emerge as the great twenty-first-century European
metropolis. Will it be London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the
young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically,
fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome
doesn't compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed,
exuding an air like: Hey--do whatever you want, but I'm still Rome. I am inspired by the
regal self-assurance of this town, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental,
knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome
when I am an old lady.
I take myself on a six-hour walk through town today. This is easy to do, especially if you
stop frequently to fuel up on espresso and pastries. I start at my apartment door, then
wander through the cosmopolitan shopping center that is my neighborhood. (Though I
wouldn't exactly call this a neighborhood, not in the traditional sense. I mean, if it is a
neighborhood, then my neighbors are those just-plain-regular-folk with names like the
Valentinos, the Guccis and the Armanis.) This has always been an upscale district.
Rubens, Tennyson, Stendhal, Balzac, Liszt, Wagner, Thackeray, Byron, Keats--they all
stayed here. I live in what they used to call "The English Ghetto," where all the posh
aristocrats rested on their European grand tours. One London touring club was actually
called "The Society of Dilettanti"--imagine advertising that you're a dilettante! Oh, the
glorious shamelessness of it . . .
I walk over to the Piazza del Popolo, with its grand arch, carved by Bernini in honor of
the historic visit of Queen Christina of Sweden (who was really one of history's neutron
bombs. Here's how my Swedish friend Sofie describes the great queen: "She could ride,
she could hunt, she was a scholar, she became a Catholic and it was a huge scandal. Some
say she was a man, but at least she was probably a lesbian. She dressed in pants, she went
on archaeological excavations, she collected art and she refused to leave an heir"). Next
to the arch is a church where you can walk in for free and see two paintings by
Caravaggio depicting the martyrdom of Saint Peter and the conversion of Saint Paul (so
overcome by grace that he has fallen to the ground in holy rapture; not even his horse can
believe it). Those Caravaggio paintings always make me feel weepy and overwhelmed,
but I cheer myself up by moving to the other side of the church and enjoying a fresco
which features the happiest, goofiest, giggliest little baby Jesus in all of Rome.
I start walking south again. I pass the Palazzo Borghese, a building that has known manyfamous tenants, including Pauline, Napoleon's scandalous sister, who kept untold
numbers of lovers there. She also liked to use her maids as footstools. (One always hopes
that one has read this sentence wrong in one's Companion Guide to Rome, but, no--it is
accurate. Pauline also liked to be carried to her bath, we are told, by "a giant Negro.")
Then I stroll along the banks of the great, swampy, rural-looking Tiber, all the way down
to the Tiber Island, which is one of my favorite quiet places in Rome. This island has
always been associated with healing. A Temple of Aesculapius was built there after a
plague in 291 BC; in the Middle Ages a hospital was constructed there by a group of
monks called the Fatebene-fratelli (which can groovily be translated as "The Do-Good
Brothers"); and there is a hospital on the island even to this day.
I cross over the river to Trastevere--the neighborhood that claims to be inhabited by the
truest Romans, the workers, the guys who have, over the centuries, built all the
monuments on the other side of the Tiber. I eat my lunch in a quiet trattoria here, and I
linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in Trastevere is ever going
to stop you from lingering over your meal if that's what you would like to do. I order an
assortment of bruschette, some spaghetti cacio e pepe (that simple Roman specialty of
pasta served with cheese and pepper) and then a small roast chicken, which I end up
sharing with the stray dog who has been watching me eat my lunch the way only a stray
dog can.
Then I walk back over the bridge, through the old Jewish ghetto, a sorely tearful place
that survived for centuries until it was emptied by the Nazis. I head back north, past the
Piazza Navona with its mammoth fountain honoring the four great rivers of Planet Earth
(proudly, if not totally accurately, including the sluggish Tiber in that list). Then I go
have a look at the Pantheon. I try to look at the Pantheon every chance I get, since I am
here in Rome after all, and an old proverb says that anyone who goes to Rome without
seeing the Pantheon "goes and comes back an ass."
On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most
strangely affecting--the Augusteum. This big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a
glorious mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of
his family for all of eternity. It must have been impossible for the emperor to have
imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty
Augustus-worshipping empire. How could he possibly have foreseen the collapse of the
realm? Or known that, with all the aqueducts destroyed by barbarians and with the great
roads left in ruin, the city would empty of citizens, and it would take almost twenty
centuries before Rome ever recovered the population she had boasted during her height
of glory?
Augustus's mausoleum fell to ruins and thieves during the Dark Ages. Somebody stole
the emperor's ashes--no telling who. By the twelfth century, though, the monument had
been renovated into a fortress for the powerful Colonna family, to protect them from
assaults by various warring princes. Then the Augusteum was transformed somehow into
a vineyard, then a Renaissance garden, then a bullring (we're in the eighteenth century
now), then a fireworks depository, then a concert hall. In the 1930s, Mussolini seized the
property and restored it down to its classical foundations, so that it could someday be the
final resting place for his remains. (Again, it must have been impossible back then to
imagine that Rome could ever be anything but a Mussolini-worshipping empire.) Of
course, Mussolini's fascist dream did not last, nor did he get the imperial burial he'danticipated.
Today the Augusteum is one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome, buried deep in
the ground. The city has grown up around it over the centuries. (One inch a year is the
general rule of thumb for the accumulation of time's debris.) Traffic above the monument
spins in a hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there--from what I can tell--except to
use the place as a public bathroom. But the building still exists, holding its Roman
ground with dignity, waiting for its next incarnation.
I find the endurance of the Augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an
erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times. To me, the
Augusteum is like a person who's led a totally crazy life--who maybe started out as a
housewife, then unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan-dancing to make money,
ended up somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, and then tried her hand at
national politics--yet who has managed to hold an intact sense of herself throughout
every upheaval.
I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic,
after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody
could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete
ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once
have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody,
true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City,
says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of
transformation.
26262626
I had shipped ahead a box of books to myself, right before I left New York to move to
Italy. The box was guaranteed to arrive at my Roman apartment within four to six days,
but I think the Italian post office must have misread that instruction as "forty-six days,"
for two months have passed now, and I have seen no sign of my box. My Italian friends
tell me to put the box out of my mind completely. They say that the box may arrive or it
may not arrive, but such things are out of our hands.
"Did someone maybe steal it?" I ask Luca Spaghetti. "Did the post office lose it?"
He covers his eyes. "Don't ask these questions," he says. "You'll only make yourself
upset."
The mystery of my missing box prompts a long discussion one night between me, my
