There was a carnival atmosphere downtown, with thousands turning out to see me off, for game 7 of the World Series, or both. The flight was full, mostly of sick babies, except for two empty seats beside me in the exit row. Other passengers eyed these seats covetously, asked attendants about them, and trembled their hands at their seatbelt buckles like gunfighters, and then we took off and a woman just ambled up and dropped into one of them without asking the crew or completing any of the application forms I'd prepared.
I don't know why so many sick babies were going to Rome. It's probably our fault for following sick baby influencers, though I'm the first to admit that some of their content is pretty great. Sick baby at the Spanish steps, sick baby crawling the Via Appia, sick baby under the dome of St. Peter's -- those acoustics!
I took the train straight on to Bari, with the idea that napping on a train would be better than hanging around Rome until check-in time. That worked well, though I accidentally booked a seat in a facing pair across from a man with a soul patch who constantly ate clementines. This isn't really something to worry about. Soul patch clementine guy is quiet, stays on his side, and has a personal style that demands respect. Unrelatedly, I think I might grow sideburns and start eating a lot of pears.
The drawback is that you get to Bari tired and stumble through strange, dark streets like a gutshot character in a film noir. In the square outside my large, purple apartment, local kids were riding push scooters tricked out with LEDs and throwing "snaps", which make a tiny explosion and a sound like a gunshot and are traditionally used to celebrate city festivals and random Sunday evenings in November. The snap-throwing felt like it might happen daily, but the next night there was instead a group of men smoking and yelling outside a store. There might be a rota. I don't know what the kids do on Mondays, probably start fires.
The key landmark was an inactive Ferris wheel on the promenade by the sea. If you turn right from here, you strike an eerily lifeless row of public buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, while to the left lies the old harbour and the old city. Tiny fishing boats are tied up in rows and there's a wooden shade structure, marked on maps as a fishermen's market, where three or four men stand proudly over tiny plastic tubs in a "behold the bounty of the sea" sort of way.
The old city is a twisty town of alleys where compass needles spin randomly, homes stand open behind doorway curtains, laundry dries on balconies, voices float up from restaurants in bare cellars, and hands holding cigarettes poke from dark rooms through iron gratings into the street. A cruise ship docks and disgorges tour groups that straggle after the raised umbrellas of guides like soldiers after their banners, seeking loot in the form of fridge magnets and bags of orecchiete.
The church and the basilica are both 12th century or so, whiter and more austere than the cathedrals of northern Europe. Under the cathedral is a crypt with a glass-fronted casket piled high with gruesome relics from a variety of saints. Under the crypt lie the remains of an earlier church, some mosaics, and a bit of a Roman road, and that's as deep as they've cared to dig so far. You can't sink a fencepost here without striking a lot of fascinating history and having to install a bunch of glass floors and metal staircases.
In the early morning there's booming and hammering, as though preparing Bari for another day means firing up some infernal machine from the age of steam. You could draw the curtains and spend a day just listening to the sounds, then be surprised to find no revolutionary barricades or exploded boilers. But the liveliness of this piazza gives the wrong impression; Bari is peaceful, except for the traffic, and the people relaxed and friendly, when not driving.
The third night decided which of the previous two was the anomaly. It was the quieter one. The kids don't just stand in circles and throw snaps, they also have either a band or a very loud stereo and then someone sets off fireworks that seem to explode just outside the window. Not haphazardly, it's a beautiful show (was it a city event?). You can't even stay annoyed, because a mist of nostalgia descends and you remember what it was to be young and Italian and in love with fire.
