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BEING THERE: ROME

It’s firmly on the tourist circuit, yet visiting is very different from living there. John Hooper has come to see it as a city of many layers, where nothing can be taken for granted ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010

“The first thing you should know is that there is no such thing as central Italy,” said a Neapolitan friend when he learned I was being posted to Rome. “There is northern Italy, which starts around Orvieto. And there is southern Italy. Rome, whatever the Romans say, is in southern Italy.” My former assistant—born in Nigeria and brought up between Congo, Benin and the United Kingdom—found another way to put it. “I always think Rome is the most African of Europe’s capitals,” she once mused.

When the spring rain comes down in vertical torrents and the drains get blocked because nobody clears them and the traffic gridlocks on both sides of the Tiber, I know what she was driving at. There is no other city in which I have lived where the experience of visiting is so distant from the experience of residing. Rome may not be Naples, but the adjective non-Roman Italians reflexively associate with it is caotica.

The traffic offers casual visitors a hint of the underlying reality. A few months ago, a British student was hit on a pedestrian crossing—by a police motorcycle. Motorino (scooter) riders die like flies. Almost everyone I know who owns a scooter has at some time been nastily injured. One was killed. Yet people carry on using them because motorini enable you to zip around in a city that has only two underground railway lines.

So dangerous is scooter-riding that rich Roman parents have taken to buying their children macchinette, or mini-cars. These are four-wheelers with 50CC engines which, because of a loophole in the law, can be driven by 14-year-olds without a driving licence. With certain adjustments, they can go up to 50mph. There are now 5,000 whisking around the city, contributing to the ever-present sensation that Rome is very slightly out of control.

The centre is not dangerous in the criminal sense, though you get the odd bag snatch. Maybe it is because I am a six-footer who until recently kept a Staffordshire bull terrier, but I have lived here on three occasions for a total of more than a dozen years and never been mugged or even pick-pocketed. Nor has my wife. To live in Rome, though, is to be accompanied by a presentiment that anything might happen. Sometimes it does. A few years ago, a priest had said Mass in a noble house on the outskirts and was walking down a passage from the chapel when he disappeared. He had been swallowed up by what is known as a voragine. The ground below the city is honeycombed with cavities (hence the catacombs) and every so often the surface gives way. Occasionally, you see a picture in the local section of the paper of an upended car whose driver was cruising along when the earth opened up beneath it.

Such pictures are emblematic of a city in which nothing should be taken for granted. Power cuts are not infrequent. Our drinking water, in a stately block of flats just outside the centre, arrives in a trickle down conduits that have been in use since classical times. And the lift, which was put in when the building was constructed after the first world war, breaks down every couple of months. I was on a bus not long ago when an inspector hopped on and announced that, because of the annual parade of forestry rangers in the Piazza del Popolo, the bus was being re-routed. Minutes later, we were hurtling along beside the river with the driver ignoring the passengers who were shouting at him to let them off as they were nowhere near where they had planned on going when they stamped their tickets.

The shops all have different opening hours, which means you need to plan expeditions with military precision. Even then, you can arrive to find a notice in the window that says Torno subito (“Back soon”); it is always a surprise when this turns out to be the case. The idea of overlapping shifts that would allow them to remain open all day is almost unknown in shops smaller than a supermarket. And since most dry cleaners, and some other shops, do not open at all on Saturdays, you have to make time in your working week for tasks that elsewhere would get done at the weekend. But then the implicit assumption is that every home has either a housewife or a maid who will always be at home in case a deliveryman, plumber or electrician happens to drop by.

“This is an UN-LIVE-ABLE city,” said a sonorous American voice with the finality of a Judge Judy. She was right, of course. But she said it as I was gazing at the Secret Garden of the lovely Villa Pamphilj, the “New Villa”, so called because it was built a mere 358 years ago. Rome is unliveable only if you cannot see the beauty of its architecture, the elegance of its inhabitants, the benign (if sweaty) climate—and its corrupt, faintly sinister fascination.

“Don’t expect things to be on the surface, the way they are in Paris,” said one of the girls in the flat where I pitched up the first time I came to Rome, as a teenager. It seemed odd advice. So much was easily accessible—from the sights to the patently appetising food that I was served each day by my employer’s cook (I had taken care to be hired as tutor to the son of a wealthy opera singer). But, as I got to know the place, I realised what she meant: that Rome is layered, enigmatic and deceptive.

I have worked in the maze-like historic centre for a total of 11 years. Yet, even today, I find tiny lanes I never knew existed, and tucked away, round the corner, a little workshop in which they repair puppets or bind books, make walking sticks or sew ecclesiastical garments. Until a few years ago, I worked on Largo Goldoni, in the office of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Every so often in summer, usually towards the end of the morning, a glorious baritone or soprano voice would rise above the din of the traffic to come floating through our open windows. In all that time, I never traced the source of the music.

Rome is a city of glimpses: of a richly decorated ceiling seen through the window of a building you never previously noticed; of ruins and trees across the Tiber that you had not before caught at quite that angle or in quite that light, of the courtyard of a palazzo whose great doors are normally kept tight shut.

It is also a city that, to an even greater extent than the rest of Italy, operates on signs and gestures known only to the initiated.

“Is the cernia [grouper] fresh?” I ask in a restaurant near home.

“Beh. Sì. Certo.” There is an infinitesimal hesitation in the waiter’s response—enough to tell me the fish is past its best. I make a non-committal sound and order something else.

Esotericism is about creating exclusivity. If you have tourists pouring through your city 12 months of the year, you need to create a fellowship—however invisibly defined—for those who actually live there. There is no initiation ceremony, of course, but there comes a day after many years when you suddenly realise the cab drivers have stopped trying to rip you off, that people assume you know the result of Roma’s last match, and the lady in the bar takes you aside and says “Dotto [which roughly translates as “squire”], you shouldn’t be paying these prices.” She means the ones on the wall.

Rome is not just a city of secrets, but one that encompasses a secret city—the walled Vatican, a place you cannot visit without an invitation. Many Romans have never seen the inside of it, yet it infuses the life of their city, making it more conventional and hierarchical, and perhaps less dynamic, than other capitals.

Many of the misteri d’Italia (the unresolved conundrums of Italy, particularly in the second half of the last century) lead—or seem to lead—to the other side of these bulky ninth-century walls. Such as why the man who was Rome’s most powerful gang boss is buried in the crypt of a basilica—a privilege supposedly reserved for popes, cardinals and emeritus bishops.

Ever since it was incorporated into a newly unified Italy, Rome has been a rather frightening place for other Italians, a place where their lives can be changed by decisions over which they have no influence. For the Northern League, it is Roma ladrona (“she-thief Rome”), a city that sucks in the hard-earned profits of northern entrepreneurs to fund its own lazy ways and the extravagant lives of a decadent ruling class.  Silvio Berlusconi went to Rome as a Milanese outsider, a free-enterprise campaigner. Now look at him. Throwing parties in his Roman palazzo with four women for every man.

Not that the Romans are shocked. But then they affect not to be shocked by anything. Express the slightest hint of surprise or disapproval over how, for example, the last governor of the region surrounding the capital was filmed taking drugs and having sex with a transsexual and you get a shrug and an expression that says: “You expect me to be shocked? Listen, we were ruled by Caligula’s horse.”

Later came Pope John XII, who was accused of castrating one of his cardinals, and Donna Olimpia Maidalchini. The sister-in-law of the pope who built Villa Pamphilj, she is said to have made a fortune by licensing the brothels of the capital on behalf of the papacy. In between, well, there were the Borgias. Bad rulers and good, they each added a layer to a stack that reaches down to the very first stratum laid by the city’s founders, Romulus and Remus, the brothers who were suckled by a she-wolf.

If you believe the fairy tale, that is. Lupa was also the word for a prostitute in Latin. So the founding legend may well be a charming story wrapped around a disillusioning, earthy reality. Very Roman, that. 

GOING NATIVE:

WHERE TO STAY
Hotel De Russie  Among Rome’s finest (and costliest) hotels. Contemporary style in the heart of the Renaissance city, near the Piazza del Popolo. In summer you can dine in the peaceful, terraced gardens. Via del Babuino 9, 00187; +39 (0)6 328881.

Villa San Pio  One of four reasonably priced, elegantly appointed hotels on the Aventine hill, the most tranquil of the seven. These stylish retreats are a brief walk from the old Circus Maximus and a short taxi ride from the centre. Via Santa Melania 19, 00153; +39 (0)6 570057

WHERE TO EAT
Dal Bolognese  A club-like restaurant, quite modestly priced, serving simple yet exquisite food. Tom Cruise was so impressed that he hired them to do his wedding dinner. Piazza del Popolo, 00186; +39 (0)6 361 1426.

Enoteca Ferrara  In a warren-like complex of vaulted spaces near the Tiber in Trastevere. There is a bar, then a wine bar, a restaurant and finally a cheaper osteria. Imaginative cooking and a long wine list. Via del Moro 1/a, 00153; +39 (0)6 5833 3920.

For ice cream, some of the best places are Ciampini, Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina 29; Giolitti, Via Uffici del Vicario 40; San Crispino, near the Trevi fountain at Via delle Panetteria 42 or by the Pantheon, Piazza della Maddalena 3; and, close to the Vatican, Old Bridge Gelateria, Via Bastioni di Michelangelo 5.

STREETWISE
Most years, the best month is October. If you must come in the school holidays, avoid the summer. Most of Rome is safe, though the area round Termini station is best avoided at night. Taking a cab from the airport can be traumatic. If your hotel is within the Aurelian Walls (check in advance), the fare should be €40 from Fiumicino and €30 from Ciampino. No more. Otherwise, it is what is on the meter. Some drivers leave the meter on the out-of-town 2 tariff; they are supposed to change it to 1 at the ring road (raccordo annulare).

WHAT TO SEE
As well as the obvious sights such as the Colosseum or St Peter’s, these are worth a visit.

Palazzo Altemps  A breathtaking display of ancient sculpture from the collections of noble Roman families. Piazza di Sant’Apollinare 46, 00186; +39 (0)6 683 3759.

Santa Maria della Concezione  Not for the squeamish. The crypt is decorated with the remains of around 4,000 deceased friars and others. Some are in a semi-mummified state; the skeletons of others were dismantled to create adornments including flowers consisting of vertebrae and a lantern made of toes. Via Veneto 27, 00186.
 

SHOPPING
If it has to be Prada or Fendi then you need Via dei Condotti, which begins at the Spanish Steps. But good clothes are also to be found in nearby streets, and particularly in the parallel Via Frattina. The Romans themselves are just as likely to shop along two streets outside the historic centre: Via Cola di Rienzo, across the Tiber, and Via Po, due north.

(John Hooper is the Rome correspondent for The Economist and the Guardian.)

Picture Credit: oneillsdc5, filip1, Ed Yourdon, SpecialKRB (all via Flickr)