My Last Day in Rome
Lasciare casa
Today is our last day in Rome. My wife and I have been living here for the last three months for no reason other than we wanted to and we could. Our kids are in college, we’re both unemployed, and it seemed like if we ever going to spend some time living overseas, now would be a good time. If you’re wondering how we can afford to do this, the answer is simple: we can’t. But, as they say in Italy, fuck it.
When we arrived, I was just coming out of a major depressive episode. I have some idea of what brought it on, and some idea of why it ended, but I didn’t know how a new, foreign city would affect me and we were both kind of worried. Maybe we’d end up Googling Italian divorce lawyers. Our worry was, thankfully, misplaced. Rome has been restorative.
It is, I think, the most beautiful city in the world. More beautiful even than Milwaukee. Why a place that is half ruin should be so lovely is hard to explain. Maybe it’s the city’s palette of soft golds and pinks. The Mediterranean skies and clouds, which are the most consistently fluffy I have ever seen. I have no idea how the Italians get their clouds so fluffy, but it’s a wonder. It’s also the happy crowds and the quiet cobblestone streets and the smell of garlic and the fact that by six o’clock in the evening everybody is half-drunk on Aperol Spritz.
It's a city in which not much gets done. Shops are open for a few hours in the morning. Around lunch, they shut down for a while. Maybe they reopen in the afternoon or maybe they don’t. It’s hard to say. The people are welcoming and chatty, even to Americans, which always feels like a miracle, and they don’t make fun of your weird attempts to speak their language even if you mangle every syllable. They are polite and warm, unless you express interest in their dogs. For some reason, Italians don’t want to talk about their dogs. (They would rather just keep dogs out of the conversation altogether.) Restaurant service is terrible. There’s no such thing as a quick lunch, which I guess is why it’s necessary to shut everything down for half the day.
On the subject of the vaunted Italian food, I will say it is not only possible, but probable, to get a bad meal in Rome. There are innumerable osterias and trattorias all over serving a nearly identical menu of primi and secondi. You wouldn’t think a plate of pasta could vary much, but you’d be surprised; it soon becomes easy to tell a good plate of cacio e pepe from a bad one. The pizzas come in three basic varieties: Napolitano, Roman, and pinsa. My favorite is the Napolitano, which has a thick and chewy wood-fired crust. The Roman pizza is flat, almost cracker-like, and the pinsa is somewhere in between, usually oblong, and smaller than the others. Roman pizza, to be honest, kind of sucks. Unless you like your pizza made of matzoh.
The first question people have when I say I’m living here for so long, and the question I had for myself was, “Don’t you get sick of pizza and pasta?”
Yes.
And then, strangely, no.
Within the first month, we were seeking out alternatives to our diet of carbs, carbs, and carbs. We sampled Italian sushi and Italian Mexican. We cooked at home. But, over time, something happens and I found myself craving tonnarelli, gnocchi, bucatini. I mean, I never really liked pasta that much before we arrived, but now that I’m here, I get grumpy if I don’t have it at least a couple times per week. Yesterday, for example, I ate it for both lunch and dinner, which was a first. Maybe I was just feeling sentimental because I knew we were about to leave, I don’t know, but it’s lunchtime as I type this and you know what I could go for? Pasta.
Food here is cheaper than back home. We often load up on groceries for thirty euros. Restaurant prices are reasonable, and we rarely spend more than fifty euros for a full meal, including drinks, tax, and tip (you don’t tip). I would spend more than that at Applebee’s and I hate Applebee’s. We also eat better here than in the States. There’s far less processed food and the nature of the diet means we’re consuming less red meat and saturated fats. Unless you count gelato, which I do not because gelato doesn’t count.
Have I been homesick? Whatever the opposite of homesick is, that’s how I’ve been feeling. Being here, away from the inane culture war bullshit back home, has been great. Yesterday was the big Pride Parade in Rome. No protests. No nonsense. Nobody getting shot. Just people having a good time waving their rainbow flags and celebrating being themselves. Nice to see at the steps of the Vatican.
Speaking of which, one of my favorite memories here will be the time we were strolling back from dinner around ten o’clock at night walking through the Vatican after the tourists had departed and spending half an hour or so just hanging outside of St. Peter’s Basilica, five centuries of history glowing in the warm spring night. Or there was the time we wandered into the Pantheon after a rainstorm. The hole-in-the-wall restaurant we ate at which served the most amazing parmesan ice cream, when I didn’t know such a thing was possible. There were the endless walks around the city, the museums, buying flowers at il campo di fiori from the lady with the two daschunds - the only lady in all of Rome happy to talk about her puppies. Nearly every day has been lazy and fun.
If it sounds like I’m romanticizing Italy, I am. Because I can. Rome certainly has its problems. For one thing, it’s filthy. Italian street sweeping is rudimentary and garbage collection is, generously speaking, inconsistent. The reasons for this have something to do with the Azienda Municipale Ambient, the corporation responsible for keeping the city clean. I don’t understand the politics of the thing. Maybe the problem is the Mafia, or maybe the solution is the Mafia. I don’t know.
Lest you think I’m indulging in the worst Italian stereotypes, every day we walk past a big police building on the Via Giulia labeled “anti-terrorist and anti-Mafia.” The building maintains a huge presence of plainclothes police officers who stand outside in black sneakers chatting, chain-smoking, and eyeing the girls that walk by. At least a couple soldiers with matte black M-16s guard the place, except on the weekends, which everybody - military and Mafia - takes off. After all, one has to be civilized.
Zooming out a little, Italy itself is a mess. Italian politics, the Italian economy, the crumbling Italian population… all of these problems are acute. But one of the nice things about being a foreigner – particularly a foreigner who doesn’t speak the language – is that I don’t have to pay attention to any of that. I’m not staying and their problems are not my own. I just get to wander the quaint streets, buzzed on Aperol with my honey. I get to look out over the Tiber and be full and in love. The problems of the world will wait until tomorrow, or the next day. Or maybe the day after that. Nothing’s going to get solved tonight, so why worry about it? Have another chianti instead and hold your nose as you walk by the garbage. Everything will wait. And that, I think, is the la dolce vita.
Well done Michael.
Sounds like an amazing few months! My wife and I are planning a trip to Sicily next year with a leg in Rome. Do you have one or two “must do’s” for people who might only be there for a couple days?