BFT23 - Living Briefly in Rome

 

One of the things that is most enjoyable about traveling is getting to know a place, which is something that takes time. That can be interpreted two ways, both of which are essential to the process.

First, there is the basic fact that you have to spend a certain quantity of time somewhere to get to know it. You can’t just parachute in, visit a scenic spot or two, and then hightail it off to somewhere else later that afternoon. You need to be there long enough to get a feel for some of the rhythms of a place – how it gets through a day, what a neighborhood looks and sounds like, and so on, the things you learn just by the sheer fact of existing in a single place for long enough to notice.

And second, you need to have the time to notice. This means unstructured time. If every minute of your trip is accounted for, you’re probably not going to get to know anything other than your itinerary. There should be open spaces in the day for you to wander aimlessly through a place, seeing what is around the next corner or up the block a bit without the feeling that you needed to be somewhere else fifteen minutes ago. This is probably the harder of the two senses of time to achieve, though in some ways it is the more important one. Quantity time is mostly a matter of spending the money and making the plans to be gone that long, but unstructured time – time not spent rushing off to the next big thing – requires a sense that such time is important in itself and not simply wasted. Most Americans have difficulty wrapping their head around that idea even at home.

We did a lot of things on this trip and saw a lot of sights. There was a lot of planning that went into it and we had a grand time doing it all. But we also tried to allow for the unstructured, the open, the exploratory. We tried to get to know Rome and all of the places we visited in some ways, just by letting them wash over us a bit – as much as we could in the time we had.

In Rome some of that was spending time in Testaccio, the neighborhood where we stayed and which Kim and I had gotten to know a bit last year. We actually timed this trip in part to match the availability of the apartment we’d had for our first trip to Rome and it was just as lovely the second time. It had room for the four of us to sleep, plus a good sized bathroom and a kitchen, plus it had air conditioning which made the nights much more comfortable. You entered from a courtyard that was full of greenery, and across the street was a movie theater that was never open but promised us that it was playing Oppenheimer the whole time, plus a playground attached to what was probably a church school that was rarely ever empty. One night there was what sounded like a dance.

I did a bit of exploring on my own one day, just walking around Testaccio while Oliver rested in the apartment and Kim and Lauren explored the Basilica in the Vatican, and it was a great little neighborhood. There were shops all around us – normal things that catered to people living their lives rather than visitors – and all sorts of art (some of which was graffiti and some of which were murals, though the dividing line between those things could get pretty thin at times), and the Tiber ran along one edge of the place. There were parks and newsstands (yes, actual newsstands), and there were always people about. Italians live outside in a way that Americans really don’t anymore, so the sidewalks and benches were never empty. It was hot the whole time we were there so I stayed in the shade as much as I could.

I don’t know who the guy in the big mural was, though if you got closer and looked behind the tree you could see a Roma emblem so he might have been a soccer player of some kind.

We also wandered around the city the group of us, just seeing the sites of urban Rome. It’s a place people live.

And they live there at all hours. Rome is always hopping, as near as I could tell, and there are always people of all ages floating around. This is us waiting for a bus after a typically late dinner, and the place was packed.

Sometimes we did take some time to explore a specific place. There’s a bridge across the Tiber that takes you from Castel Sant’Angelo to the older part of Rome that is just lovely, and we took our time wandering across it. The sculptures on the sides are by Bernini and you have to spend some time admiring them, but there are also all sorts of street vendors trying to sell things, Instagrammers getting their angles just right, pedestrians just trying to get from A to B, views of the neighboring bridges to take in, and assorted other people going about their business. You find yourself slowing down when you cross it.

The graffiti artists on the town side of the bridge were also pretty clever, really.

But if there is any way to get to know a place for real, it is to eat there. And if there is a better way to spend time than sharing a meal with those you love, I haven’t found it. Combine those things and the world becomes a brighter place.

We tended to eat breakfast in the apartment, which meant a few trips to the local groceries. I love local groceries, since you get to find out what sort of things people consider normal. There were three or four little markets in our neighborhood and I hit them all at one point or another, bringing back bread, meats, cheeses, drinks (chinotto!), and assorted snacks.

Though we did stop by Pasticceria Linari for pastries a couple of times, because it was wonderful and that’s all the reason you need.

Lunches and dinners we went out into the city for, and as with the Bistro at the Vatican all of the places we went to were very accommodating of food allergies. We’d made some laminated cards in advance (in Italian, Czech, and German) that basically said “I am allergic to these things – can I eat here?” and every single server, cook, cashier, and manager we handed them to was gracious and thoughtful in figuring out the answer to that question. It was really very comforting that way, and we were deeply grateful to them.

Our first and last meals in Rome were at Testaccio Market, which is a collection of vendors not far from the apartment. We stopped there on the way to the apartment on our first day and found some lunch while Kim collected the keys from Pasticceria Linari where Stefano had left them for us, and we stopped there again on our way out to get the rental car for the next leg of our journey, though few of the vendors were open then.

The only other place we ate at twice was La Botticella a Testaccio, our favorite little restaurant just around the corner from the apartment and a place Kim and I had found on our last trip. The first night we were in Rome Kim, Oliver and I went while Lauren rested at the apartment, and the next night we all went. Like all restaurants in Rome that aren’t tourist-focused, it opens around 7pm for the early-bird diners, with most people arriving between 8 and 9 and staying for a couple of hours. Dinner is a leisurely affair in Italy.

La Botticella is a neighborhood place and there were never any other people there who spoke anything other than Italian, but the people who run it are very friendly and the food is wonderful. They found us a table outside when we really should have made a reservation, they parsed out our attempts at speaking Italian, and they gave us really great meals and wine. You can’t ask for more than that. If we ever do go back to Rome, we’ll go there again.

The other place we went to from our previous visit was Pizzeria Remo in Testaccio, where you can get phenomenal pizzas. This time around we didn’t have to wait for the one English-speaking waiter to come on duty, which was nice – we managed to order more or less in Italian on our own, and there were more people who could speak English this time anyway. Again, marvelous food.

We ate a lot of pizza while were there, and it never got old though it did get hot.

On our last night in Rome we went to La Campana, which is the oldest restaurant in Rome. Founded in 1518 and still in the same location – this was where we were headed as we crossed the bridge from Castel Sant’Angelo – it has both indoor and outdoor seating. It was Lauren’s choice to eat there, and it turned out very well indeed.

We sat in the piazza and ate good food and talked while the sun went down over the Eternal City, and I think I will leave us there, at that slowly darkening table on a warm night in Rome, sharing our time together.