Italy in the off-season! Not even the shoulder, it's way off! And yet, clear, bright, and full of energy. The perfect escape! Going to write, read, and revise a new play.
I'm at an interesting crossroad in my career having just left my longtime corporate gig. For many years I've talked about "quitting to write and travel," the old cliche. And here it is. Giving myself six months to see how productive I can be. I wrote a play about Ancient Rome last week, had a big reading with the cast, and now I'm in Italy to revise it. A kind of imperial decadence.
The goal is to spend a few days in Puglia, a few in Malta, see some of Sicily, and return home with a tight script and a belly full of table wine. I brought a ridiculous sack of books, the poems of Catullus among them, but on the plane I read a book about a dragon fighting Napoleon instead.
The flight over was fairly simple, though I pushed it a little by lining things up to avoid spending an extra night in London. Cheap to fly there, expensive to stay there. Long layover in the giant shopping mall men call Heathrow.
I got pretty delirious at one point and started reading City of Night. Its loopy Beat sentences fit right in with my weary disorientation. It's like a Tom Waits song in a tight white t-shirt, this book. It's too too marvelous.
Heathrow, and Gatwick before it, had recently been closed on account of a personal drone being flown near a runway. This has apparently been happening a lot. It was something I was ambiently worried about. But, all clear. Just as back home a partial government shutdown had defunded the TSA, so I had expected delays state-side, but... also all clear. Like the Roman skies when I arrived.
It sure looked to me like most of the natives' carry-on luggage was musical instruments.
Got badly burned at a currency-exchange place, like a rookie chump, so punished myself with austerity methods, no coffee or pastry at the Metro station. That will teach me. Said Metro was easy and functional with no real character. It just worked really well.
Got to my room by entering a large wooden door and climbing spirally. My host spoke no English but touched everything she spoke about, so I got it. At one point, she knew a bit would be too complicated, so she typed it into her phone and an electronic voice told me in English that a backup door key was hidden in the bathroom, tucked in with the shampoo packets.
Napped like I was from Naples and woke up in the Roman dark. It's a late-night town, but I stayed in and read City of Night. It was very easy to see how deeply it had influenced many things I loved in college. I was almost angry at the authors I loved who have ripped it off. For not telling me sooner.
Gobbled up about a hundred pages and went right back to sleep. In the morning, I tore open the curtains to see a trio of Vespas speeding past a restaurant called Don Giovanni. Italy!
There was a free breakfast of mortadella, sliced cheese, yogurt, and bran flakes, so I ate them up. The host assumed I would want an Americano, so I took it. I thought was sweet. You are from America, so you must want the drink named after you. We call it this as a kind of gentle disparagement, but you are not aware, so please enjoy. Does it not pair well with the mortadella?
It was ready in "due minuti."
Got bundled up, it's cold here, and got out in it. Plan was to walk from the Colosseum to Vatican City and back. You pass the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain on this route and many famous plazas as well. And the stones! The stones that moved great artists to song and string!!
It was a work day and regular folks were bustling to the office. Briefcases and sunglasses. Scarves and caps. I enjoyed listening to incomprehensible (to me) snatches of conversation.
The language seems designed specifically for extremes in frustration and delight. It purrs along fine in normal conversation but comes to glorious, roaring life in arguments and ecstasies. The vowels are all extended to tremendous effect. There is nothing to compare with an old man crying "ah, olio!" when a fresh bottle is brought to his table. And no sleep to be had when the landlord is having it out with a tenant over "acqua calda!" It's either forks up or knives out.
The apartment is just twenty minutes from the Colosseum, which still impresses. The size of it! The history of it! The familiar shape of it! It's like a cake left out in the rain! I don't think we'll ever have that recipe again. It was moving in the way famous sites are. I think our cells regenerate and replace themselves so rapidly, we get so much new input at all moments, that anything we know feels like a warm bath of permanence.
Old songs, old buildings, old friends, old paintings. Not everything has changed. Not everything has moved away or gotten too fast. Hello, image from a thousand tote bags and B-movies, I have never stopped loving you, and you have never gone away.
Fun, gentle walk with no real plan other than to wander past these famous sites. I had been here thirty years ago, but my memories are dim. It was a school trip during the summer. I was one of the younger students, it being mostly a Senior trip, and all I really recall are teenage boys trying to climb the hotel balcony to reach "our" women, a tour guide who cracked us up with her frantic need to get us to follow her "aerial," some over-the-bra fumbling, and a concierge who bragged to us about having slept with one of the guests.
He taught us to say, "please accept this flower," in Italian. I have never forgotten it. He told us to move our balls around if we ever felt like "bad luck was near." "When you sense a curse you do this, and it breaks it." He brought out a magazine and showed us a naked woman. "It is her," he said. "She is here and upstairs. Both. She is on the pages and in her bed at the same time, you see? I have had her."
Later, when I told my father about it he said he was sure the concierge was lying. This had never even occurred to me. Though now I am sure my father read it correctly.
I also remember Italy as being the first time I saw an Uzi, the guards at the airport and at the monuments brandished them quite casually. It was very different from the police at home and very much like a cartoon move prop.
The fancy gun tradition has held, though now they have fearsome military rifles, thick barreled and sleek. They countered the effect with jaunty hats, however. Hilarious pom poms hanging down.
They wore berets in the '80s.
I also saw graffiti on that first trip reading "Fuck Reagan!" which blew my young mind. I gasped aloud, couldn't conceive of anyone hating an American president. Why, I thought, aren't we the good guys? I was as naive about that as I was with the concierge.
This time I saw no graffiti at all. Must be the improved rifles.
Made my way down an imperial road lined with various and divers Caesars, green as a copper salad, fingers gesturing meaningfully and biceps rippling manfully. Build this, conquer that. And lets get some more anchovies in the dining hall.
I got a lot of pleasure out of the many piazzas, dotted almost casually with masterpieces. Grotesque fountain-faces and gorgons with places to be, bronze capes flapping frozen behind them. Marble men removing marble shirts. A dude stealing a Pegasus.
Threw a coin in the Trevi. It was smaller than I remembered, kind of like seeing an actor in person and realizing how short he is in real life. It's the Tom Cruise of fountains. This was unlike the Colosseum, which was bigger and cleaner than I expected/recalled.
There was a satisfying ripple as the coin sank to join the others. Fifty euro-cents gone forever. The tourist trade was just coming to life here, and the touts were out in force trying to lure folks into a croissant-shaped trap, trying to seal them into ravioli-shaped booths. Being alone, desperately unshaven, and of indeterminate ethnicity I was let mostly be.
I was tempted by several magnets, but I was still in austerity mode.
The Pantheon revealed itself to me, the charming old thing. Still a stunner, and I loved seeing Agrippa's name all carved in the lintel. 'sup, 'Gripps? One almost expected a Hepburn to come speeding round the corner in a soldier's pom pom'ed cap.
More happy plazas and sing-song alleys. Quiet little bodegas and low-pressure calls to hop on one bus or hop off another. I crossed The Tiber on a non-famous bridge, the domes of the Vatican rising up in the distance. A young man read the newspaper as intently as a student from the 1930s. It was strange and beautiful to see him standing on the bank, paying serious attention to something that wasn't a phone.
As I got closer to St. Peter's Basilica, the marketing got intense. Lots of Pope-branded calendars and rosaries in gumball machines. Catholicism is the most brilliant racket of all time. Beats anything from the Mad Men era. You have to take your hat off to it. Then you can throw up in your hat and toss it in the Tiber.
The crowds were getting thick, though nothing like the high season. A tree with string lights was still up in the main plaza, and I cracked up thinking about neighbors telling the Pope it was probably time to take down his damn Christmas decorations.
Mendicants with some serious physical problems lay on the sidewalks and in the street. One guy has massive boils on his skull, they were almost horns. I thought about the coins I threw in the Trevi. I thought about the money being spent on plastic boxing-nun puppets, on plaster crosses, on magnets shaped like miters. Sorry, sick human being, you should have been a fountain. That's where all the money is.
The clouds were scattered and beautiful, and the stone angels smiled as they flew crosses to wherever they were headed. I crossed the famous bridge on the way back. I was hungry and decided to end my self-imposed punishment for the currency-exchange error.
Got some tortellini at a sidewalk cafe and drank mineral water with a lemon slice in it. The beauty of a lemon slice vs. a lemon wedge cannot be disputed. Sat and read City of Night. The shadows lengthened as fifty pages went by. Compelling stories of repression and hustling, of never quite making it. Sorry youngman, you should have been a fountain.
Diverted myself to the Termini station to buy a ticket for Bari in the morning. Early train to Puglia. I will be heelward-bound! The heel of the boot! The self-service machine was easy to use but yelled "BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS!" in a robotic yawp when I selected "English."
Made my way home, feet sore. I should anoint them with espresso. It flows from the taps here.
Started to catch up on the news and realized how ridiculous that was. What a bad idea. Pulled the blackout curtain closed and slept with my books around me. I've got to finish two by Monday and throw them away or my bag will be overweight and the budget airline to Malta will charge me a fortune.
They've sent three emails about it.
I couldn't read this fast enough! Eccellente!
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