Italy Impressions 1: Time Travel in the Eternal City
Day 1. "In Rome, stepping outside in the heat was like being abducted, wrapped in a carpet and stuffed in a trunk."
Ciao from Paris!
Italy is still on my brain, so on Thursdays I’ll be sending you impressions until I run out of steam or ideas. Or time.
Enjoy!
Rome was a blur already by the third day. Heat again over 103, the expanse of the city with its monuments, cathedrals and museums shrunk to the thin dark strip of shade next to the apartment building across. Even the cats squeezed themselves into it, nodding politely as they passed.
Beyond it, the bright dry air reduced humans to husks, erased our memories like electroshocks, warped time and space. I could no longer remember grey, drizzly Paris where we’d shivered on the street before dawn waiting for our Uber to Charles de Gaulle airport. In Rome, stepping outside in the heat was like being abducted, wrapped in a carpet and stuffed in a trunk.
Walking seventeen minutes from the Trastevere train station to the hotel in the sun and heat was an hour, a week. Our fingers swelled like sausages. Our sleepless, anxious faces got blotchy and red. Our strides were shorter and slower until we paused at a grocery store, ventured inside to buy water, wondered if the three more minutes Google maps said we had left to walk were really thirty.
Check-in wasn’t until three, but we’d arranged to drop our bags so we could rush back out into the city, profit, as the French say, from our time there. Instead, we staggered back into the wooly, muffling heat to the main drag where we planted ourselves at a restaurant because it had a terrace with a kind of awning over it shading us from the sun.
The place itself was slightly air-conditioned, despite the pizza oven, but we were still more afraid of Covid than of sunstroke, and remained outside, alone, in the increasing heat. We ordered a beer to share and a pizza each, stared dumbly at the tram tracks which wound their way down the center of the sycamore-lined avenue. Every now and then one passed, followed by a cloud of dust.
We told ourselves that the cold beer was delicious. We clicked glasses, celebrated, “Finally! Rome!”
But after a few swigs I felt like puking, the alcohol swishing around in my overheated gut. When the pizzas came we chewed as slowly as possible, sweating through our shorts. I put our guide book on the table. What should we do with the whole day in front of us? What should we gobble up, consume, devour?
Even opening the cover required more energy than I had. I stared at a map on my phone, wishing there was an app for shade, wondering where we could shelter outside for two more hours before we were entitled air conditioning. I filled up my water bottle in the bathroom. We paid and left.
At the corner, men made thin and brown by thirst bent to what looked like a fire hydrant, but had a kind of faucet shooting out a stream of water which they tossed on their heads, used to wash their feet naked and dusty in worn-out flip-flops. After they left, I stuck my own hands in the jet. It was icy cold. I hoped the water flowing into a drain was nurturing the sycamores, or what Europeans call plane trees, arching gothically over the avenue, and casting down their drought-withered leaves.
There should be an entry about them in the guidebooks, are the only things I remember from that first day—their sturdy romanesque trunks, rococo rustlings in the breeze, how they staved off the worst effects of global warming even as they were populated by parrots like catholic school children who emerge at recess to scuffle and scream. Just like in Paris.
We were surprised to hear them, suddenly light-hearted to find neighbors from home, such world class tourists, apparently undaunted by the heat. Ana and I sat on a low brick wall under a different kind of tree and listened to them screech until the eternal swarm of biting flies drove us away.
Ana found a different bench to sit on. I was restless, walked sullenly towards the Tiber which shaped life in the city with its droughts and floods. Nearly alone on the sidewalk, I found myself at the ancient city gate of Porta Portese. The locals weren’t impressed with its age. There was graffiti everywhere. Why not? When even that word graffiti was born here in this city of wolf-raised founders who still bare their teeth and scratch and claw. No, nothing is manicured, and fixed, not yet. The city renews itself like the water which reflected the green of the trees that lined it, but nothing else.
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Until next time.
Ciao,