In two weeks here, I’ve found that Rome makes “easy” traveling difficult. It is easy to draw obvious conclusions as an American in Rome — simplifying my experiences into vast generalizations — “Rome is like this, the States are like this” (or comparatively, “This is how surprisingly similar it is!”) It usually takes me a conscious effort to move past this black-and-white understanding. For example, in a store, you can easily say something like, “In Italy, salespeople are really annoying and persistent while the waiters are stand-offish; comparatively in the U.S., salespeople are hard to locate and the waiters ask you too often, ‘Is everything OK?’” The accuracy of this statement aside, this sort of generalizing leads me to a superficial understanding of a place on par with my bad habit of stepping behind a camera instead of speaking to people.
Rome, however, makes this sort of generalizing difficult because it is constantly and consistently secretive — never showing all its sides at once, hiding away experiences and sights only to reveal them to you at a later date. From the brief time I’ve been here, I find that Rome is a city that defies flash judgments. You meet Rome at a discoteca, and within five minutes you’ve realized you’ve judged her totally incorrectly and despite the fact that’s she’s breathtakingly gorgeous, your expectations that she’d be an easy-know were totally misguided. You even got her name wrong.
Roma reminds me to fully absorb a place rather than making one didactic statement and walking away, cornetto in hand. (Cornetti, on their own, deserve a full blog post that compares them to their buttery French cousins, croissants, and their mini-Argentine offspring, medialunas. More informed cornetto/i connoisseurs also tell me that knowing which bars (in America: “cafes”) make their own cornetti rather than importing them from the Italian-version of Hostess is precious information.)
In Roma, there are some places that, if you’re unfamiliar with the twisty, non-grid streets, you have to approach with a coded sequence to re-locate. You’ll re-trace your steps multiple times and find that the same buildings look subtly different each time. It’s just as likely that they’re different buildings. Like a chapter from a Harry Potter book (yes, it is indulgent to use American pop culture to explain Italian experiences, but hey, this place is literally magic), my friend and I wandered back streets near the Pantheon trying to locate a pub (known in America as a “bar”). Armed with a map and shameless willingness to ask for directions, we walked by the same street many times on multiple days before being able to find the right way.
It’s not a coincidence that the English word “segue,” which for most of my life I believed was spelled “segue way,” comes from the Italian segue meaning, “follows.” While the locals were able to say, “It’s right THERE,” getting to this pub (“bar”) involved performing a ritual dance to coax Rome into opening up the right cobblestone path. Of course, once we had looped the location a couple times, the correct street opened up and we moved from the flickering darkness into dusky light around the corner (which, let me tell you, was definitely not there all along.)
The Tevere (known in America as the Tiber, from where the Protestant/Anglican phrase “Swimming the Tiber” apparently comes) will also show you different faces on a week-to-week basis. When we arrived, the cloudy waters were so high that they nearly overcame the side parapets, roiling between the concrete bridges.
(This year, the Tevere reached some of the highest levels since World War Two. One hundred dogs were killed in a kennel that flooded on the banks of the river. In Ponte Fabricio there is what looks like a structural hole in the middle, maybe a meter below the pedestrian level, which is used to gauge the closeness of the Tevere to flooding.)
Two weeks later, the Tevere was several stories lower, revealing terraced steps and a long walkway at the foot of the Isola Tiberina for Roman couples and early joggers. I spent the weekend reading where one week earlier I would have been four stories underwater. (Random note: the first floor here is the first floor above ground level. In elevators the ground level is sometimes labeled 0, sometimes PT “piano terra,” and in my apartment, just “T.”) Nonetheless, I feel that if we spend enough time here, the water will drop another couple stories to reveal an entirely new-and-never-before-seen city underneath the currents, a kind of underwater, Vernian Roma.
In two weeks, melodramatic as it sounds, I feel like I’ve been here always. While Roma makes it difficult to make flash judgments, it makes it really easy to live well. You can learn in two weeks that it’s more than socially acceptable to eat gelato at night in the winter. That the size of the gelato you order doesn’t correspond to the amount of ice cream you get, but rather the amount of flavors you ask for. That you really can live without brewed coffee and to-go cups, and switch full-heartedly to drinking caffes in the bar standing up. (That in fact, a caffe is an espresso, and a bar is a café.) That while Argentine Spanish does sound incredibly close to Italian, the past tense is paralyzing different (as is the cussing). That you can take the tram illegally most of the time but if they catch you, you won’t be able to feed yourself for a month. (This has not happened to me.) That you really shouldn’t let the bartender buy you drinks because your Italian is not, after all, molto buono. (I won’t comment on whether this has happened to me or not.)
And finally, you learn that the reason that the waiters are less easy to locate is because Italy has taught you how to enjoy a meal, to go piano, piano, and linger over many courses and good wine. Who misses someone asking you “How is everything?” every five minutes anyway?
