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In Rome Again.

http://sargeantstudios.net/?p=79 Memory is fickle: inaccessible when we need it, so ready to hand when it is redundant. Here we were, in Rome, and now, for the first time since I was gone, I could remember it all. The espresso bars opening onto the streets, the pairs of professional women making comments as they walked down the streets, the long legs and short shorts of the German tourists, the blue skies, the cool breezes of the morning – it hadn’t changed at all, and it wasn’t new to me – I remembered it all.  Now it seemed strange that I had forgotten. The dusty darkness of Viale Trastevere; the sidewalks of broken asphalt lined with dirty travertine; the broad, trafficked modern streets and the crooked, narrow, medieval ones; the worn, stained, cracked, sun-bleached stucco, ten times repaired and in every sense showing its age; the madonnas looking down on the compiti; the dull, slow thunder of the Trastevere tram, and dull, impassive faces of its morning riders, the universal face of all commuters; the way every Italian man wears long pants no matter how hot it is; the way every woman’s clothing shows her figure; the little lava paving-stones, each and every blessed one of them slightly irregular and I presume chiseled by hand; the way the temperature drops ten degrees when you step over to the shady side of the street; the way the motorino riders weave past narrow gaps in stopped traffic, pointing the wheel now left and now right, their feet scraping the ground; the smell of bread mixed with olive oil in the air; the electric grind of contractors’ saws, the distant clink of silverware, the chainsaw-buzz of motorinos and the cheeping of swifts in the air; it was all as if I had never left it. Even just walking a few blocks down off Viale Trastevere we saw all the crazy brickwork of Rome, the random bits of antiquity that looked like they were eroding out of the walls, the walls built in four different types of brick from four different centuries, the look of deranged decrepitude that tinged all the beauties – something ferocious and human and a bit mad.

interminably So there we were, standing in the Piazza della Piscinula, where there is a church, San Benedetto in Piscinula, whose name makes no sense and no one knows where it comes from or what it means – Saint Benedict in the Little Swimming-Pool – looking for the apartment we had rented. Google maps had pinned it here, but we couldn’t find it. The Airbnb address was number 9, and we were near 200 in this spot. So we asked an Italian woman who happened to be seated in the piazza on a Corinthian capital doing nothing – of course she was – and in true Italian fashion she warmly and pleasantly directed us in precisely the wrong direction. So we walked in that direction and found nothing; then back in the other direction, a long way, before I finally dropped the bags and left Catherine on the steps of Sant’ Agata, now converted into a baptist church, so I could move more quickly, doubting if the information we had been given was correct. I also decided to call the proprietario of the place to see if I had the address right. He didn’t answer, and I was beginning to fear a fraud. But then he called right back, and in fact the Airbnb address – we looked at it again, we had not made a mistake – was entirely wrong. The map, however, had been correct. We doubled back to a place near the woman on the column, where our host Alessandro was waiting for us.

The place was entirely to our liking; perfect in every way, in fact. I suppose it had better be, considering how much we paid for it. A kitchen and a living room open up onto the lovely and lively Via della Lungaretta, the main pedestrian thoroughfare of that part of Rome which Augustus Hare calls “the least altered from mediaeval times, and whose narrow streets are still overlooked by many mediaeval towers, gothic windows, and curious fragments of sculpture.” A perennial passegiatta of people goes by under our two front windows; but at the back of the apartment a bedroom opens onto a private patio, hemmed in by massive brick walls and sealed off from the noise of the street. We are here only for a week, before the rooms booked for us by the Paideia Institute open up; which I am sure will be even nicer. We put our bags down and Catherine nursed the kiddies while I went to get us some food.

Even sixteen years ago, when I spent a spring in Rome, there were rumblings that a change was coming to the Roman lifestyle. The first supermarket had opened in the Campo Marzo, the central, medieval quarter of Rome, and it was beginning to succeed. It used to be that grocery shopping would take an hour or more: you had to go to the butcher for meat, have some small talk with him (he was not very fast); then a cheese-store for cheese, where you went through the same thing; then a baker for bread, a wine-shop for wine, a grocer for fruit (and he or she would choose for you, mind you – no touching the fruit), and if you wanted sweets or processed foods those were in other stores too. It was complicated and very very fun. But even us tourists who had time on our hands knew how nice it was to just go to the supermarket, where you could get it all in one stop, and get better prices too. By 2007, the last time I was in Rome, the supermarkets had cannibalized most of the small businesses in the older parts of town, and the old bakeries and frutterie were gone, replaced by tourist knick-knack shops or bars or other things. But here at least on the Via Lungaretta the old way was preserved, in part because the shopowners had accommodated to tourism: our place was opposite the “Antica Frutteria,” which survived by selling not only fruit but drinks to the tourist crowd; down the street was an espresso bar, which survived by selling beer and wine in the evening; a tiny grocery; a bookshop, which had added books in English; and a bakery, which also sold cheese and sliced meats. After a short trip down the block I not only had food for us but had introduced us to all the shopowners.

After some breakfast we all took a brief nap, and then I got up to head off to a meeting for work. I had to go to the office, which was up on the Janiculum above Trastevere. It was not far from where Reginald Foster used to teach, so I was going over much familiar ground. It amazed me how little it had changed – the Bangladeshi men were selling clothing in precisely the same spot, perhaps under the same tents, the restaurants were all in the same place, there was still a supermarket down in the basement of a department store – though the names of both had changed, the thing itself had not. Those old plane trees still reminded me of Paris, though the Romans had filled up the sidewalks in various ways – seating for cafes, open-air markets, parking – and the walking was not nearly so pleasant. Going up the hill I could feel my body start to sweat in the Roman heat. It was just as it was in the past – to me a kind of pleasant heat, excessive for sure but nothing my body couldn’t handle. It was appropriate for summer.

Finding the office proved a bit difficult, the way everything is a bit difficult here. I was looking for number 70. The numbers went on one side of the street from 65 to 71, with a building in between, but that building had no entrance or any other information. On the other side the numbers were in the 20s. Of course the place I was looking for was on the other side, several blocks away. 70 was several blocks away from 71. But I found it eventually, did the meeting, and soon was walking back home to my wife and children.

Look what blooms in odd places: a pretty fellow, unknown to me.

Look what blooms in odd places: a pretty fellow, unknown to me.

In Rome you can so easily find yourself in a place you’ve never been before. The city is quite big enough to keep a person going for several lifetimes. When I first came here as an eighteen-year-old I decided I would, in a day, walk the old city walls to get a sense of the place. I failed miserably – did not even walk half of the circuit, in fact. I am told it is only a twelve-mile hike, but of course it’s not all easily followable on foot – the roads don’t necessarily align with the walls – and it’s complicated by all kinds of later additions to the city, such as the Borgo – the area around the Vatican, which is now walled in. Anyway, I found myself walking along the old Trastevere walls, on the outside of them, in a place I had never been. It was amazing, seeing modern life in such an ancient place – a Heating and Cooling Repair shop called “Madonnina” tucked into the old defensive bends in the walls, warehouses, and so forth – and seeing the botany of the place for the first time. The last time I was in Rome, I knew no plants; now I could see things. There were capers (Capparis spinosa) growing on the old walls, with impressive flowers as staminate as a protea and looking like white St.-John’s worts; and what looked like some kind of violet or lobelia; and acanthus all over the weedy shaded slopes. Some had bemoaned the loss of the flora of the Colosseum – the archeologists had the plants ripped out, though they had been celebrated and book even written about them – but the walls of Rome still had a rich flora, if someone would walk them and examine them.

I couldn’t go through the city without some memory intruding – of something done or undone – which filled me with both happiness and a certain melancholy.  The life that I have had in Rome has seemed, for a long time, to be far away. It’s not like life in the Catskills, here; and I like the more natural, more physical, and more genuine me that has developed in the past nine years since I last was in Rome. But I get the sense that now I am capable of revisiting and reincorporating much of what for a long time was merely past. I read a very wise saying not long ago, which went as follows: “You cannot change your future; you can only change your past.” This is brilliantly paradoxical – the literal-minded will simply scoff – but for those who know what it means, it cannot be put any better. Most people are caught by their past, and have no room to transform it, or transform themselves.  This is really what most of us are hoping for in life: a present which somehow allows us to change our past. Because that is the part of us that most needs changing.

I feel I have been given an opportunity here, and I want to try to grab it.

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