My place in Rome looked to be one of those operations without a street-level lobby, and I was pleased with myself for finding the building, buzzing in, and locating the rooms up on the fourth floor. But a uniformed attendant found me there and escorted me back downstairs and a few doors along to check in at the lobby of the hotel of which these rooms are apparently some weird annex. Then a different attendant led me back into the grubby ground floor of the first building, summoned the tiny stairwell elevator with a flourish, and guided me back to the place I'd already found.
It's a debatably-interesting fact, by the way, that, no matter how grand the exterior, the ground floor of every building in southern Europe looks like a parking garage. There are always soot or dirt stains on the plaster that can't have gotten there through any human agency you can think of, a floor of tiny tiles, and a ramshackle wooden booth with a purpose lost to history. But the room is just off Piazza Repubblica, and if I blew up just one apartment building, I'd have a view of Santa Maria della Vittorio.
Of the two full days I had, I set one aside to walk the Via Appia. Do you want to have the worst possible Via Appia experience? Go to the Porta San Sebastiano and head south. That stretch is busy, has ambiguous sidewalks, and is walled-in, so you can't escape. Cars and the route 118 bus you should have taken rumble continuously by on asphalted cobblestones, their exhaust hangs over the sunken road like a gross atmospheric river, and you have a long time to enjoy all that, because the first interesting sight is a fair ways away. I've walked this route before, many years ago, and had forgotten all that. I forgot, too, about the tour buses at the catacombs, the cyclists, and the classic car rallies. The classic car rally may have just been that one day, I don't know. At any rate, it was all a neat demonstration of the unreliability of memory that scientists are always going on about.
It was a relief to reach the grassy ruins of the complex of Maxentius (a mausoleum, a circus -- towers, the spine of the track, and the discreet doorway for removing wrecks -- and an inaccessible palace), just like something from an 18th century Grand Tour. You want to get an oil painting done, with some sheep added for atmosphere -- maybe stand over the artist and keep barking "more sheep!" -- to hang in your parlour. The baths of Trajan, back in the centre of the city, are the same. Too hopelessly ruined to do much with, they're a litter-strewn hangout for the indigent.
I took a bus back into the city and was happy to see the screwball comedy of tourists trying to use bus tickets playing out just like it used to. The transit system now takes cards directly, but everyone has tickets or passes. The various machines on board let you tap, scan, or insert, and it's not obvious which to try. Some people also have exotic all-in-one tourist passes that can do none of these things, and they can only stand around helplessly. Only later will they appreciate what a quintessentially Roman experience they've had.
That grudging coexistence of the old and new -- ticket machines, in this case -- is part of the city's weird charm. It's a beautiful, frantic, frustrated place where you can't change anything without destroying something priceless. Developers yearn for the happy medieval days when people knocked down anything that was in the way and used the wreckage to build whatever they wanted, locals halted by crowds think wistfully of the Goths, drivers -- actually, no one can get inside the mind of a Roman driver, and it's better not to try. And yet the city is somehow extending a subway line, and, strangely, the ancient centre is teasing new attractions: hoardings near the forum hide new excavations soon to be unveiled.
The plan for the last day of the trip was to just walk around and maybe hang out in the piazzas trying to look like Fellini. Many people don't know Fellini frequently wore hiking pants. It was great. Places I used to freely wander in and out of require tickets and have snaking lines, but I've seen them before, and it's amazing how much of Rome you can see in a few hours if you refuse to stand in lines.
Along the Tiber, I rested and admired a derelict passenger ship with graffiti on its
sides and bed sheets in the windows. It looked like a cruise ship for
anarchist squatters. I hope it is, and wish I were cool enough to sail
on it. The fare would be a bag of flour and an anti-establishment
artwork. The only buildings I went into were churches, a pizza a taglio place, and Tazza d'Oro, a cafe I went to many times on visits long ago and was happy to find totally unchanged. It's still madly busy, the cashier still responds in English no matter how perfectly you think you've ordered, and you still leave your receipt on the counter under a coin, drink your coffee, and are on your way in seconds.
You can no longer drop into the Pantheon on a whim, but Rome is the American Olympic basketball team of ecclesiastical architecture: the second string is still incredibly impressive. There's Sant'Andrea della Valle, an only-slightly-less-rich man's St. Peter's; Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, a stupendous renovation of the baths of Diocletian planned by Michelangelo; San Vitale's, a surviving 4th century basilica, now far below street level, which no one goes to because it doesn't look impressive and you have to go down some stairs. Skipping the baroque masterpieces also opens up real variety; if you want to get weird, Rome's churches can get weird. I didn't go this time, but consider Santo Stefano Rotondo, a round church economically dedicated to two different Stephens that has an interior covered in gruesome frescoes of martyrdoms.
Rome may be frantic, but it's also amazingly casual: people have to live among all this stuff. Some are walking their dogs in the Circus Maximus, and a woman leaning over a railing ashes her cigarette on Caesar's forum. The souvenir scene is another important part of the street life. This year, the shops are being undercut by street tables selling even worse crap for €1 per item -- "if you find cheaper crap anywhere... buy it" -- and eager buyers are rooting around in the bins of identical key chains looking for the perfect one.
On the last night, I woke up sick to my stomach (pizza a taglio? Questionable breakfast buffet items? That grocery store salmon carpaccio I knew was a mistake at the time?) and came close to skipping my flight. Instead, I took more Gravol than I've ever taken before and had a day that was not very much fun.
