(Read part one here) The day I arrived in Rome in May
of 2015, the weather was warm, but, of course, the Roman taxi driver wasn’t
using the air conditioning. He offered to turn it on when I climbed aboard, but
I said no. I wanted Rome to be Rome. Driving along the highway, I spotted those
tall evergreens I only ever see in Rome. Once we’d cleared the city’s
periphery, we began conducting an impromptu tour of the sights. Soon, I was
staring at the back of Piazza Venezia, where there are steps up to the
Campidoglio, and visually bookmarking shops I wanted to visit later.
As I gazed
out at the city from the back of the taxi, I had that feeling again. I get it
every time I see Rome. I don’t know how to express it properly. It’s manifested
in me as a slight nod, and a phrase I half-mumble to myself, like, “Oh right.”
It’s almost as though the human brain, my human brain, simply cannot spend all
of its time computing how fantastic Rome is. Each time I visit, I remember why
it’s the Eternal City. Eternally enchanting. Eternally beguiling. Eternally
mine – if only I can find the time to catch a plane and get here. Because when
I do, I realize that I’ve been living in a bubble. Only in Italy am I truly
alive.
I’d booked a room in a tiny hotel
nestled in a tangle of cobblestoned streets not far from the Campidoglio.
I settled into the room quickly – it was miniscule but who cared? I began digesting
what I was seeing and feeling – a mental version of pinch-me. I was
really and truly in Italy, I thought, as I sat in the window sill of my room in
Rome, looking out over the street below through the spaces of the ‘H’ and the
‘O’ in the vertical hotel sign on the side of the building. Below a shopkeeper watched
as her toddler navigated the narrow street on a tiny tricycle. When the boy had
traveled a little ways down the street, he called out to her, “Mamma, vieni
qui!”
A short while later, I descended to the streets. Wandering into that minor piazza with the father kicking a
soccer ball around with his son and the used bookseller, I actually thought,
“It’s enough already. I’m satiated. I’m overwhelmed. Italy, you win.” I’d been
on the ground about two hours.
As I walked around Rome, I took photos, recorded snippets of
conversation on my phone, and breathed in my beloved tiny, white, gelsomina flowers,
which spilled over walls, and climbed up the sides of buildings, unleashing a
powerful memory agent for me. It was the scent of my first trip to Italy, the study
abroad experience in Siena that launched my so-called Italian life. I’m not
even entirely sure where it was that I first detected the sweet, potent aura of
the gelsomina – from the tenacity of its scent and the journey
it sends me on, I’m compelled to think it must have grown in wild bunches on
the backyard fence of my closest friends’ ground-floor flat, where I had my
share of boozy lunches. Ticking off an item on my personal itinerary, I
lingered over the well-tended floral displays adorning terraces, window sills
and the outdoor seating areas of trattorias tucked into vicoli.
I was taking the temperature of the
city, eavesdropping on conversations, watching the interactions between the
barista and the regulars at the coffee bar. At one point as I stood on the
street, gaping up at the Campidoglio, I jotted down in my notebook: I’m
in super computer mode. It may sound like a mad dash of a decidedly modern
manner; multi-tasking and documenting, without really soaking anything in. Not
so. Instead, every corner, every image, every word I saw assumed triple its
value. After eight long years, I knew the value of everything that I was
seeing. I suppose it helped that I’d become a mom during my exile from Italy.
Responding to the seemingly constant needs of a baby, I’d learned the value of
five minutes. In fact, my 24 hours in Rome were really two dozen different
iterations of 60 minutes.
And besides I had the luxury, in most cases, of having
visited whatever incredible monument I was passing (multiple times, in some
cases). I was able to indulge in what’s perhaps the most luxurious tourism of
all: cultural immersion (or re-immersion in my case). Forget queueing up for an
audience with the Pope or fretting about the weather. What matters more on a
trip like this is the confluence of images, scents, tastes and conversations
conducted or overheard.
I had about an hour before I needed
to pack up my hotel room and make my way to the train station for Florence. I
spent the time strolling from monument to monument, on the lookout
for signs of life, symbols of the Roman personality. My objective was to
breathe in the Eternal City so that when I returned to America, a part of it
would linger on long after I walked away from the banks of the Tiber.
Let’s say mission accomplished. Nuns and priests, who hailed
from all over the world, were cupping
cellphones to their ears and laughing. I peered in shop windows (the only way I
like to shop unless the item is books), including even those of the pharmacies,
hoping to see the house shoes I used to wear when I lived in Italy. I flocked
once again to floral
displays on balconies. Indeed, the flowers I saw on tiny balconies entranced
me. I took photo after photo in an effort to spirit away some of the beauty I
spied on those decks. Then I watched as a man disappeared into a majestic arch
that led to a sunny courtyard. The two photos I snapped of him create a
mystery. Who was he and where was he going? What do they do inside of that
partially-revealed courtyard, one of many around Rome? (Also: how can this
stately lemon yellow palazzo be just one of hundreds if not thousands of
similarly gorgeous buildings in this city?) I even took pictures of Italian
words, often something as banal as the sign for Bar del Fico (Fig Coffee Bar)
chiseled into the wall across from my hotel; nothing can diminish
how lovely they appear to my eyes.
Nostalgia comes so naturally to me that while wandering
around Rome on that first morning back in Italy, I stumbled into a tiny piazza
and stumbled back nearly 20 years to a weekend getaway to the Eternal
City. It was my first trip with my partner, Mike. I looked up at the street
sign – Piazza San Pantaleo – and my mind, photographic for things like street
names and addresses and dates – recalled instantly that we had stayed two
nights at a small pensione on the piazza. (Pensione Primavera.
It’s still there. I checked).
As my 24 hours slowly elapsed, I had a feeling of déjà vu, as clichéd as that might
sound. This is normal, I thought. I’m traveling by foot, I’m stopping to look
at the books at a bancarella. A
father is kicking around a soccer ball. A nun sails by on a bike. The barman is
kvetching with a regular about soccer. For a moment, I was nonplussed, almost
bored.
And then I realized it will never be anything short of
amazing for me that I know Italian, that I can blend into Italy, can even take
it for granted. I was privy in those short 24 hours to everyday life in Italy
and I was seamlessly fitting back in, even though I was alone. I’d left my
partner and my son back in the States, and I only know one person on Rome. But
I wasn’t lonely. I won’t ever be lonely in Italy.
I suddenly thought of all the arguments over the years with
my father where he’d fished out his favorite saying, “You can’t go home again.”
He was particularly adamant whenever I planned to return to Italy. I suppose he
wanted to save me from disappointment. Once you move on, things can never be
the same. I wonder now, Did someone say that to him as a child? Did someone
haunt him with those words? For a long time, I believed him.
But something clicked while I was in Rome, and I concluded
that knowing a foreign language confers a special kind of passport. I can’t go
home again? Sure I can. I’m ‘home’ whenever I speak Italian. Whenever I hear it
or read it. Whenever a man in a fishing vest walks into a bar, juts out his
chin and shouts “O!” Wherever the radio announcer shouts “gol” and a taxi
driver wordlessly exhorts me to pump my fist in solidarity. I’m home then.
Twenty-four hours in the Eternal City? It felt like a
lifetime to me.
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