Arrivederci, Roma

Arrivederci, Roma, Goodbye, au revoir

It is now nearly fifty years since I first set foot in Rome, and then it was only thirty years since the end of the Second World War.  How times change?  But then it is over two thousand years since the death of Julius Caesar.....  But who's counting?  Tomorrow may never come, so carpe diem, as someone once said.....

I get drunk drinking my tears.....

It's great to be back in the city.  I meet friends and visit old haunts. Some things haven't changed:

The Basilica of Saint Praxedes, or Santa Prassede

The Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere

There is a sunny positivity about the city.  I cannot help but smile:

All will be well

Even though some folk may have seen better days:

I walk past places that hold fond memories, like this restaurant on Via Panisperna, where the waiter and the chef played opera music on their radio while we ate and on one memorable night we pushed the chairs and tables back after dinner and danced to a harmonica for someone's birthday.....

And past Trajan's Forum, where in the early hours of a moonlit night, Antonio and I played hoopla with bicycle tyres over the broken columns:

By the Teatro di Marcello, which includes the Palazzo Savelli Orsini, I pay my respects to Iris Origo, author of War in the Val d'Orcia, who acquired this piece of history in the 1950s:

In Trastevere, close by where I used to live, I seek out the quietude of the forecourt of the Church of Santa Cecilia, who was martyred on this site:

Then, wandering past No 169 Via di San Francesco a Ripa, where I lived for seven years, I take a drink in the Caffè di Marzio, where my flatmate Malcolm Farr, Editor of the International Daily News at the time, was stabbed in the stomach one night.....

I wander down the Via della Lungara and detour into the Orto Botanico di Roma, ring necked parakeets (there weren't any of them in the 1970s) squawking in the palm trees, a puff of smoke drifting up over the Gianicolo from the 12 o'clock gun:

The bougainvillea gorgeously in flower and the acanthus modelling for Corinthian columns:

Near here Raphael wooed his baker's daughter while decorating the Villa Farnesina; then a few paces further along someone exploded a car bomb outside the Regina Coeli prison one night, coincidentally blowing me out of my bed - though it is quiet now as a breeze flutters the flags of Italy and the European Union......

Maderno's Fountain cools the Piazza in front of St Peter's, 

While tourists flock up and down the Via della Conciliazione (will the UK ever be reconciled?)

And gaze at the city from the heights of Castel Sant'Angelo (Hadrian's mausoleum) from where Benvenuto Cellini made a dramatic escape in 1537, with knotted linen and a leg-breaking jump to round it off.

Time for a little lunch......

Though not at Pierluigi's, which was founded in Piazza de’ Ricci as a small osteria by Umberto Pierluigi in 1938.  I had many wonderful fish lunches (the risotto all crema di scampi is still beautiful) here in the 70s and early 80s, but then Roberto Lisi took over and eventually transformed the small family-run trattoria into an expensive and refined restaurant, now managed with his son, Lorenzo.

No, long lunches in the heat of the day are part of my past, and a glass of fresh white wine and some light snacks are more my idea of heaven, as here at the Antica Enoteca, Via della Croce.  This too used to be a simple place where you could buy loose wine cooled in a marbled refrigerator - now it, like so many places, has gone up-market, but it is still a pleasant place for refreshment:

There is so much to see in Rome - a lifetime is not enough.  The Spanish Steps, next to the room where Keats died (and near the hotel where Tony Soprano met his caviar-infused fate) lead up from the Fontana della Barcaccia towards the Pincio and the gardens of the Villa Borghese:

Across town I bypass the crowds around the Colosseum:

And instead head for the relative peace (hardly a tourist to be seen) of the monumental ruins of the Terme di Caracalla, which is hosting a photographic exhibition (as well as preparing for the opera season - my dad saw Aida here in 1944, and I also saw her here in 1978, remarkable for her age.....)

This bath complex, covering 25 hectares (62 acres) was the second largest in Rome.  It was opened in the year 216 and remained operational until the mid sixth century.  The complex included two libraries (remember them?) and was built over some recently discovered Roman houses whose paintings were exquisite:

As it is some of the mosaic floors are immaculate, using tiny pieces of red and green porphyry, basalt and white and numidicum marbles:

But it is the enormous space that is breath-taking:

Dwarfing the likes of Mat Collishaw, Carlos Labrador, Cecil Beaton, Ilse Bing, Fosco Maraini,  and many more in the photo show:

Outside the sun rains down through the umbrella pines:

And I wander back to my hotel, past the Irish College, stopping briefly (the lovely cloister was closed) at the Basilica e Monastero Agostiniano Santi Quattro Coronati, the only fortified Abbey in Rome:

It is late afternoon, and still very warm, but beneath my room a never-ending procession is passing by, with much music and good cheer.  It is Rome Gay Pride 2024, and it dances its way past for almost two hours, happy in harmony and sunshine:

I am not sure what Mark Anthony would have made of it - perhaps he might have joined in?  Ovid would certainly have taken part....  But, hey!  times change.....

And the sun dims as the corteo disappears past Santa Maria Maggiore:

And night falls.  I will leave Rome again in the morning.  

So, Arrivederci Roma - Until we meet again......

Oh, I nearly forgot!  Someone scrawled a message on a wall for me!

Live and smile about your troubles - I love you Ric!

******

This post is dedicated to my daughter Sarah and my new son-in-law Marcel

Love to you both

Roma, Roma, Roma

Core de 'sta città

Unico grande amore

De tanta e tanta gente

C'hai fatto innammorà

Antonello Venditti

Roma - Back in the glue pot again!

Towers of Silence.....

I am watching Trust, a sprawling dramatisation of the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III in 1973.  It takes me back, sort of, to Rome in the 70s.  Getty was expelled from St George's English School a little before I taught there, and the whole affair was over a couple of years before I arrived.... but I claim a remote connection, and, in the midst of the herds of tourists on my recent visit, I feel a sense of belonging.... 

{er...To the city, not the tourists, y'unnerstan?} 

This was my street, in Trastevere, where I lived on the second floor of 169 Via di San Francesco a Ripa....

They were exciting times, for many reasons.  Kidnapping was one thing.....  The deaths of three of my transvestite neighbours, found shot and dumped on the periphery of the city after some drug deals went wrong, added to the spice of life.....  In the Caffè di Marzio, in Piazza Santa Maria di Trastevere, a hundred metres from our door, my flatmate was stabbed in the stomach, in exactly the spot from which I took this photograph....

Unsurprisingly, things have transmuted. Trastevere is now trendy, in a Montmartyrdom sort of way, with lots of bright young things and laughter and spritzers and chips....  Despite defacement, the sign on this Caffè hasn't changed....

But its interior and nature has....  You would never have got a beer here in the seventies.  It was coffee or milk, and a digestivo, and that was about it.

But not everything e cambiato.  Santa Cecilia still rests her marble head under the altar in her church....

And round the corner the finest fifteenth century cloister in Rome, if not the world, that of the Pia Società di S. Giovanni dei Genovesi, is still fairly difficult to access....

But despite the trends some of the narrow lanes and alleys in this part of town, where Genoese sailors stopped over while their ships were unloaded on the Ripa Grande, are still quiet and atmospheric....

And some, at least, of the restaurants maintain the post war charm that Fellini and co - and Peck and Hepburn - celebrated.... 

Across the river, in Roma propria, between Largo Argentina and Piazza Paganica, I pause at the doorway of via Sant'Elena, 8, known to have been home to one of the covi (hideouts) of the Brigate Rosse in the '70s,  possibly even the place in which Aldo Moro passed his last hours on the night of May 8th/9th 1978, and where he was shot in the back seat of the red Renault 4, in the garage of what now claims to be a fish shop.

I look up at the shuttered windows, not unlike my own flat across the river, and wonder what secrets they could tell....

And I look round the back, at the dingy, narrow Vicolo dei Falegnami, down which Moro may have been hustled and into the back door of via Sant'Elena, 8,

Before being killed, stuffed into the boot, and driven to be 'discovered' in Via Caetani, right outside one of the stations of the Fiamme Gialle, the Guardia di Finanza, Cossiga's Teste di Cuoio, a branch of Italian Military Police whose role, amongst others, is to be anti-terrorist.  They also have a pleasant beach resort at Fregene, where Aldo Moro is thought to have been held for a while before being brought into the city to be murdered..... from where he got sand in his trouser turn ups.....

Beware of the Griffons, I say!

Yes, Rome is full of secrets.  Mutterings in huddles of bandsmen,  

Quiet phone calls from men in suits,

Whispers in the darkness of churches,

Or painful sighs behind closed blinds in secret service offices,

Rome has always been like this.  In the middle ages, powerful families sealed themselves inside towers like this, La Torre dei Capocci,

Or like this one, the Torre dei Conti, built at the beginning of the thirteenth century by Pope Innocent III, mentioned by Petrarch, and then partially destroyed in the earthquake of 1348....

Then there's the granddaddy of them all, the massive Torre delle Milizie, also from the thirteenth century, but leaning perilously above the ruins of Trajan's Forum, and reputedly the site where Nero fiddled when Rome burned....

Towers of silence.  As Dylan sang, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble, ancient footprints are everywhere....

But light still shines on the tourists in the city, mostly happy and oblivious to the darker side of history.  They take their selfies by the Fontana di Trevi,

Relax awhile in the Piazza di Spagna,  where Little Pauly dances alone in Danny Boyle's Trust.  Climb the steps to the church of Trinità dei Monti (hard by the Hassler Hotel where Tony Soprano ate his last pound of Foie Gras)....

Gape at the columns and the ruins of the Imperial Forum,

And wander aimlessly on the unnaturally white Carrara marble of the Wedding Cake, the Altare della Patria, in saluting distance of Mussolini's office in the Palazzo Venezia....

Me, I'll sip a beer and read my book, 

And peer down at the dark street below, secretly wishing it were yesterday,

Then in the morning,

Is that really the time?

I must pick up my bed,

And walk....

And get back to sniffing at secrets in this dog-forsaken city....

And, trust me, a dog will have its day,

Or maybe it is the wolf, the wolf that suckled Rome and made it what it is....

Free to Roam

(You are, secretly, being watched)

Trust me....