Roman Holiday, Part 13: We Walk the Streets

I love cities.

Cities have an energy to them that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. They are concentrations of humanity, full of stories and life. There’s a reason why “city” and “civilization” ultimately come from the same root word, after all. They’re messy, exuberant places, often joyous, sometimes dangerous, always fascinating, and one of my favorite things to do on trips is simply to start walking around one of them and see where I end up. We did a lot of walking around Rome, just kind of seeing where the next street would take us. I enjoy seeing how people live their lives and the spaces in which those lives happen.

This mystifies a lot of people I know, but so it goes. You can keep your rural scenery for yourselves (more for you!). I’ll wander around my cities reveling in the noise, the crowds, the sheer electric jolts of the place, and I’ll say I got the better end of the deal.

The first thing you learn about walking the streets of Rome is that if you want to know where you are you need to look at the corners of the buildings because that’s where the street signs are. They’re big engraved slabs of stone, usually set just out of your normal sightlines unless you know to look up. If you’re looking for metal signs on poles you’re just going to be lost most of the time.

Also, the streets are generally cobblestone of some kind rather than asphalt, at least in the older sections of the city. The thing about that arrangement that isn’t obvious until you’re there is that cobblestones are small, discrete things and every time a tire hits one it makes a separate noise and those noises add up very quickly and you find yourself really grateful for the fact that cars in Rome tend to be very small and light because otherwise the din would be unimaginable.

This is especially true in tunnels.

We didn’t mean to walk through this tunnel. We were trying to get from Trevi Fountain to the pinsa Romana restaurant that had been recommended to us and this looked like a good route because on GoogleMaps it looked like we’d be walking through a park, but it turned out that the park was on top of the tunnel and there really wasn’t any convenient way to get up there from the direction we were coming so there was nothing for it but to head into the tunnel. It was a very long tunnel. About halfway through we gave up on trying to have a conversation and just waited until we got to the other side.

Also, the manhole covers make you feel like you’re back in the empire.

One of the first places we walked around was Trastavere, which is the neighborhood just across the river from Testaccio. There’s a modern side – which we explored a bit more thoroughly than we’d anticipated when we first arrived in Rome, since that’s where the train station was and we needed to get to the apartment – and there’s a historic side, which is full of narrow streets and city life. People live there, which is something you often overlook as a tourist but I find it the most interesting part.

We had to get across the Tiber to do this, of course. The Tiber cuts a winding path through Rome and pretty much anywhere you try to go you’ll run into it. It’s not a glamorous river really, but it has its charms and it’s worth a few moments of stillness to consider it on your journeys.

We decided rather than go the most direct route into Trastavere we’d take a bus down to the Ponte Fabricio, which gets you over to the Isola Tiberina, a small island that sites in the middle of a bend in the Tiber. The Ponte Fabricio is the oldest bridge in Rome still in its original state, according to the source I just looked up. It was built in 62 BCE and it seems to be doing a good job of things still. You go, Ponte Fabricio!

You walk up to the mainland end and snake your way through the little gate that’s mostly there to keep the lawless Italian motorcyclists from taking over and then off you go to the Isola. The green cross is how you know that there is a pharmacy there, which was a bit of information that would eventually come in handy for us though not this particular pharmacy. This one we just sailed right by, taking in the sights of the Isola before heading across the bridge on the other side (the Ponte Cestio which was originally built not long after the Ponte Fabricio but has been rebuilt several times since then, most recently in the 1890s) and into Trastavere.

We were there on a golden afternoon when the sunlight warmed the reds and yellows of the buildings and it was just lovely. The streets in that part of Trastavere are narrow, the buildings are tall, and there are people and cars pretty much everywhere.

It’s a real neighborhood as well. People live there. They hang their laundry out over the streets.

They do renovations. They do a lot of renovations, actually. Pretty much everywhere we went in Rome somebody was fixing something or had scaffolding up to fix something else. I suppose in a city that old there will inevitably be a lot of things to maintain.

You see sights like this all over Rome, and we had a grand time exploring the city that way. I have no idea what the other tourists thought of me – let alone the native Romans – as I merrily photographed what were, after all, just ordinary streets to them. Sometimes you just have to do things for you, I suppose.

I liked the modern streets as well, but maybe that’s just me too.

One of the things I noticed was the prevalence of Pride Flags. You see them all over the city, hanging from various buildings. The Russian invasion of Ukraine had been going on for a month and many of the flags were emblazoned with the word Pace (“Peace”) on them, which just might be what that flag means in Italy but to me it’s a Pride Flag and it made me happy to see them.

There are a few other things that you notice when you wander aimlessly through the streets of Rome in addition to just how stunningly unstylish you are as a non-Italian, which eventually you learn to tune out as just the constant background hum of walking around in Italy that it is.

For one thing, there are of course the cars. The cars are everywhere, even in places where you think that they cannot possibly squeeze into but there they are anyway because Italian drivers are not deterred by lesser things such as the laws of physics. Do not under any circumstances attempt to drive in Rome unless you have been trained or born to it, because in addition to the sheer controlled chaos of the whole process there is also the fact that random areas are zoned for only very specific vehicles bearing very specific stickers and the fine for violating that restriction is a hundred euros every time. Even so, the cars everywhere.

Not surprisingly, because you can’t spend every waking moment driving even if it sometimes feels that way for Americans, people have to put those cars somewhere when they’re not using them. Rome is an old and crowded city, and when you combine those two facts what you end up with is the realization that pretty much every piazza is a parking lot.

Italy is the only place I have ever been where people are more random about parking their cars than Philadelphia, which is impressive in its own right and even more so when you factor in the sheer volume of the cars and the narrowness of the streets. Of course the cars would colonize every little widening where they could park. They don’t need much room, after all.

That one is, admittedly, rather small even for a Roman vehicle. The average car in Rome is about the size of a dinner table – you often see them parked perpendicular to the flow of traffic rather than parallel with it simply because they can do that without jutting into the road and causing a hazard. Some, as noted above, are smaller. I saw very few standard American-sized vehicles, and most of them were delivery vans. It’s a small place. You need cars to fit.

Cars also need gas, and the gas stations in Rome just fascinated me. In the US a gas station is a big wide-open flat space roughly the size of an airport terminal, with pumps, parking, and often an entire convenience store attached to it. Here in Wisconsin we have two major gas station chains, one of which is known for its pizza and the other of which is known for its chicken strips and I am not making that up. This sort of thing is not true in Rome, where gas stations are often just little strips by the side of the road. The first one of those I saw was on the way to our apartment the day we arrived and I thought, “That can’t be right,” but then they just kept being like that and eventually the reality of the situation breaks through your denial and you think, “Huh.” Not much more than that, I have to admit, but at least that.

Sometimes if you’re lucky walking around you will come across a busker. This guy was sawing away at any number of classic American pop tunes and he was actually pretty good.

There are also water fountains all over the city. They look like this:

These things are always running – I don’t believe there is any way to turn them off even if you wanted to do so – but Andi the Tour Guide assured us that the water would be running anyway regardless of whether it had been captured by one of these fountains so at least this way it wouldn’t be entirely wasted. There’s a trick to using them, though. You have to put your thumb over the end of the little curved pipe that sticks out, and when you do that the water will shoot out of the hole at the bend in the pipe and you can drink it, or you can step back in a startled sort of way and get everyone in a three-step radius soaking wet. It’s a choice you get to make. You do want to drink it, though. It’s good water.

You also find a lot of graffiti in Rome – this seems to be more common in European cities than in American cities, which have gone to some lengths in recent years to discourage it. I remember being somewhat surprised by how much graffiti I saw in Paris, and Rome was much the same. Some of it is pretty clever.

And some of it is just, well, there.

The final thing I noticed while I was walking around were the trees. It’s a city full of trees, though from what I could tell they fell mainly into two different varieties.

First, there are the sycamore trees.

These things are everywhere. They line the streets and boulevards. They edge the river. They are the standard tree of Rome as far as I could tell, planted by the millions and without which no self-respecting Roman street could expect to be taken seriously, and this is odd because they’re a sloppy tree in many ways. We had one in our front yard when I was growing up and we were forever cleaning up after the constant rain of bark, leaves, gumball-sized seeds, and the occasional limb. My dad waged a low-level war against that tree for years trying to get it to look presentable and not clutter up the property. They’re pretty trees, granted, but not low maintenance which makes them an odd choice to dominate a city.

There are a lot of them in Philadelphia, a city that welcomed vast numbers of Italian immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it occurred to me while we were walking around in Rome that those two facts might not be coincidental. I wonder if the sycamores were brought over to Philadelphia by those immigrants, or maybe it went the other way around as people went back and forth across the Atlantic – many immigrants went back, after all. The only person I know who would have appreciated all the sycamores – who would have found them deeply funny in a way – would have been my dad and he’s not around to tell these stories to anymore. Sometimes that hits you more than other times.

There were also the truffula trees.

That’s not what they’re called, of course. I think the proper name is “umbrella pine,” which is only slightly less ridiculous and given a choice I prefer to call them truffula trees because it amuses me to do so and that has to count for something.