Rome: DAY 78

SEVENTY-EIGHTH DAY

November 30, 2005

The Tiber runneth over.  It has rained so hard that the Tiber has risen to higher levels than anytime in the last 50 years.  I believe that is apocryphal and that, in fact, it has been higher.  But, this morning I took a walk down to the river and Tiber Island, which like most everything else around here is close to our place.  The river was moving fast and high but there’s still plenty of room to rise; after all I have seen Nathanson Creek in Sonoma come out of its banks.  The rain continues to pelt down and umbrellas stay open.  In the middle of the night the rain was so dramatic that it woke me up.  Even the Romans claim that we have had a lot of rain for this early in the season. 

I have found a coffee bar I like.  Very much a working class place near the apartment and I stop for my morning favorite.  I have discovered Café Corretto .  This little puppy is a single shot of express with a scosh of Grappa.  I like the taste of the combo.  It is by no means a full jigger of grappa, just enough to give you a little morning jolt.  I pick up my Herald Tribune and feel like a real expat.  Now, in our neighborhood that includes the Campo di Fiori, we have a meat guy, a bread guy (several), the supermarket, a general household store, and Kim has even found a dry cleaner.  It sort of reminds me of when we had the apartment in New York and investigated our neighborhood until we knew it like the back of our hand.  New York had the benefit of at least a couple of people who spoke the same language I speak.  No problem, I have become a very good pointer and shaker of my head, yes/no, waving my hands and even saying things like Basta (enough) and Grazie and a muffled Buona Sera in the afternoon or to be cool just Sera.  My entire Italian vocabulary could not be over 100 words, but I am determined to make it work. 

Just a little laugher, our telephone landline went out again today.  I got one of the regulars at the Academy to call in the repair people and they promise to come around sometime tomorrow.  Kimberly and I will probably do shifts waiting for Italian Telecom.  God knows when they would come back if we missed their knock. 

Yesterday Kim bought an Italian cookbook and we continue to eat more at home then outside.  It is a good weight control technique and Kim says she likes doing the cooking.  A friend of ours called to say that indeed she has a built in grill in her Italian kitchen.  We have dedicated ourselves to doing a BBQ on her grill in the near future. In the annex of one of our bread stores there is a very nice deli.  Today the manager started speaking to me in English and showed me all his delicacies including a great big roast pork that he roasts and slices down everyday for sandwiches on their own hard rolls.  What a nice treat to taste that Porco, I think I have found another lunch treat.  I just turned on BBC World and surprise of surprises, rain is forecast for tomorrow. 

Rome: DAY 77 WAH, WAH, WAH

SEVENTY-SEVENTH DAY

WAH, WAH, WAH

November 29, 2005

For sure my Mother would be surprised, I am sitting in the American Academy Library doing research for my proposed project about when paper took over from proto papers in the Western world.  It comes as no surprise to me that others have done the same thing.  Still, I keep thinking that I will discover some nugget that is new before I am through.  So far, the great god of paper history, Dard Hunter, still reigns as the supreme historian of the paper-making genre.  There is still time for discovery. 

In my Roman world I continue to explore the city.  Nancy Di , our new best friend as guide, led a tour yesterday through Campo de Fiori and the Ghetto.  The subject was Beatrice de Cenci who after being raped and sodomized by her father, killed him for which she was sentenced to death.  She died at the hands of the executioner at the age of 18 by beheading across from Castel San Angelo and before thousands of bloodthirsty onlookers.  The time was the late 1500’s and the pope was making an example to the nobles that he would tolerate no more bad behavior on their part.  It was a bloody time in Europe and Rome with cruelty and torture the norm.  We probably are not so far from this today, but it seems more contained.  No political comments are necessary.  Just to put the geography in place, the De Cenci family compound overlooked the Tiber on a mound right near the present day Synagogue and is currently inhabited by the Rhode Island School of Design as their Rome campus and across the square from the great Roman restaurant “Piperno”.  We will go to RISD tonight for a poetry reading by a friend from the Academy.

We are cooking more at home, the produce and meats here are mostly better then what we get in the states.  Sonoma market and the Ferry Building in SF may be exceptions, but people eat well here.  I am slightly jealous when I hear about Turkey’s being roasted outside because nobody here does any grilling except in restaurants.  I would hate to burn down my building with a Weber but am trying to find some sort of small hibachi that I might be able to use on top of our stove that has a fan hood.  With all of my pals thinking that I will gain 50 lbs here I hesitate to talk about food, but the bread is almost formidable in both the variety and flavor categories.  There are dozens of bakeries in the neighborhoods and they all seem crowded.  Food is not cheap and the good Fornos (bakeries) are very pricey.  One of the group with us on the walk yesterday has moved from Rome to the Albanian capital of Tirana, which is in the 6^th world.  They took us to their old bakery in the Campo, Roscioli, where we bought their Locriano, made with dark flour and very tasty.  Our friends bought a huge loaf of the same; it must have been about 20” in diameter and weighed about 10 pounds.  Since they work for the US government, I assume they will out it in the diplomatic pouch.  I also hope they eat fast because with no preservatives, the bread does not last very long. 

My latest whine is about DVD’s.  We discovered our rental place where we were gouged by the shopkeeper and got home only to discover that the American titles we had brought home had been dubbed in Italian and no feature on the disc to make it play in English.  It is just part of the complicated learning curve that continues to plague me.  We will return them today, refund, refund are you kidding, refund?  One can only hope that the dollar continues to rise against the Euro before our funds run out or are taken from our pockets by Roman Houdini’s.  Wha wha  Under normal circumstances Kim would make me take this out, but I will try hard to keep it in, after all, as we all know perfection eludes even the Roman storekeepers. 

Reoccurring themes remain the 49er’s ineptitude, Stanford losing to ND in the last minute, rain in Rome, being bored by BBC World, the greatest classical station we have ever heard, RAI Radio 3; frustration over not being able to get the internet in the apartment, the incredible view of ancient Rome less then 30 feet from our door, having a motorino to get around on, Kim’s indelible good spirits and desire to see it all and of course the good fortune that has allowed us to be here.

Rome: DAY 75 IT’S ALL ABOUT THE GARBAGE

SEVENTY-FIFTH DAY

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE GARBAGE

November 27, 2005

I am seated at my usual spot in our breakfast nook (ha) next to the kitchen so that I can talk to Kim while she is cooking and I am writing.  We just finished our first entertaining in the new place.  We met a nice woman on our walk and talk last week.  She and her husband live 30 yards from us on the main street of the Ghetto.  He is an historian taking a break from writing documentaries and television production to spend a couple of years in Rome.  Their son is a high school freshman at the St Stephens School, the number one private school in Rome.  They have just returned from a week in Amalfi where it was cold and wet, too.  The apartment now looks great thanks to the intervention of Kimberly and IKEA. It also has the benefit of being larger than most apartments in this part of town.  With the heat working and all lights on, we have cocktails in the living room and compare lives.  This guy has no issues in Rome and has suffered none of the hassles that have affected me.  It seems that his wife’s major complaint is that he never leaves the building, preferring to stay inside and read.  His view is that they will be in Rome for a while and he has plenty of time to see all the sites.  I must be somewhere in between these points of view.  Frankly, I am getting plenty of time to read and am always anxious to get out and about. 

Today, we kept things pretty low key.  In perhaps the funniest moment of our Roman lives, we decided to go to the Campo to a bar with wireless Internet service.  For the price of a drink you get to use their system.  It is a fine small bar and a drink is not out of the question.  When we get there, it is closed, as is everything on Sunday.  We were disappointed because we wanted to get our E-mails and send a couple of messages, the usual stuff.  Suddenly, I remembered that my oldest son Buddy had gone to an Internet café in Sonoma and when it wasn’t open, he simply took out his laptop on the sidewalk and the signal carried out to him.  The streets in this part of Rome are very narrow and with cars and scooters coming by it is rather dangerous. We set up our computer on a garbage can and in our funniest moment, it worked and I didn’t even have to buy a drink.  There were people in an open café across the street who were rolling there eyes and laughing, but because we know nobody it didn’t matter to us.  Strangely enough, we ran into one of Kimberly’s fellow students from her Italian class less than 5 minutes later.  I am glad she missed our E-mail session on the cans.  Now I know more about garbage E-mails.

The rains continue on and off; we got soaked last night.  We hear that the weather in SF has finally yielded some rain.  I am glad because we always need the rain in Northern California.  My guess is that here rain is not a big issue.

Rome: DAYS 73-74 ROMA SQUARED

SEVENTY-THIRD DAY

ROMA SQUARED

November 25-26

As I sit in my warm and cozy breakfast nook, rain and lightening reign down from the skies, thunder too.  It is Saturday night and we have just returned from a wonderful small music event at the already mentioned Biblioteca Angelica.  Tonight two guys, a wonderful pianist and a poetry reader (in Italian) alternately played and read the concert.  The young and avid pianist was quite brilliant and the reader very emotive and fine.  I did not understand a word he said (Kim caught more words but not a sense of the poems), but it was about thanks to God etc.  It sounded terrific.  The program was Debussy Sonatas that were quite romantic and fervid.  In the middle of the program a thunderstorm hit Rome.  The pyrotechnics were grand and in this beyond belief library, it was a light and sound show. We are only blocks from our apartment, but when it is raining hard, you will get soaked. Yesterday, we found a place to have Vietnamese food, but when I went back today to make a reservation it was marked, Closed.  It seemed easier to make our dinner at home than to brave the rain and so we had a great pasta Carbonara. 

Roma is a place where the sirens are always going.  During the concert the intermittent noise was annoying.  On the street, the noise is oppressive and constant.  There are about 10 different kinds of Police roaming around from the guys who are working for the prison system to the military police. Because this is a capital of a country, there are lots of guys with guns and uniforms of different varieties.  Today on the motorino I was turned away from the front of the Ministry of Justice by a cop who had a totally different uniform than I had ever seen.  I was glad he didn’t ask me for my papers with some sort fascist salute.  The streets are very crowded and personal space is at a premium.  Nobody gets out of anyone’s way and it seems as if we will all run into one another.  I am constantly being bumped, shoved or pushed aside, mostly by little old ladies.  The truth I suppose is simpler then I am able to admit.  We walk probably at a factor of 10 more than when we are at home. 

Today we went to the former stables of the Pope across from the President’s palace on the Quirinal. It is called the Scuderia del Quirinal and has been converted to a magnificent gallery.  The architect for this project, Gae Alentui, is quite famous and for good reason.  She also did the train station at Quai d’Orsey in Paris.  The Parisian project is much larger but certainly no better.  The galleries here are sumptuous and well done.  The exhibit features artists who are using materials beyond oils and going for different materials plus new concepts of spatiality.  The Italian artist Burri is the featured person, but the show includes many Americans including Rauschenberg, Dine, and Twombly.  A good show in a good place.   

Friday seemed like the day after Thanksgiving and the Italian unions turned it into a day off by calling a general strike of all public workers against the proposed Berlusconi government budget.  They came to Largo Argentina less then 6 blocks from our apartment draped in their union flags and colorful scarves and hats.  Quite a sight to behold and of course, everything stopped for the day.  We did do our normal shopping rounds in the Campo including the Internet stop.  We went back to Margherita in the Ghetto for lunch, now my favorite place.  We were seated next to an Italian couple and started a lively conversation.  The man spoke lots of English, having attended a conference at Stanford, and he and his architect wife ended up talking with us through the entire lunch. He is an environmental physicist and works for the agency responsible for green things in Italy.  The usual complaint about no money for this kind of work surfaced and he was a striker.  They gave us some tips about the neighborhood and we ended up going to the movie rental store, joining the “movie club” and renting a couple of DVD’s.  It will help relieve the tedium of BBC World and Euro News, our only 2 English language stations. By the way, we do get Al Jezzera and of course Russian, Bulgarian, and Romanian TV stations as well as many more.