Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
13. Rome
Well, I'm sorry. I had intended to reach Rome as you would expect me to, in a logical, systematic way,
progressing diligently down the length of Germany, through Austria and Switzerland, across a corner of
France and finally arriving, dusty and weary and in desperate need of a launderette, by way of Lombardy
and Tuscany. But after nearly a month beneath the endlessly damp skies of northern Europe, I longed for
sunshine. It was as simple as that. I wanted to walk down a street in shirtsleeves, to sit out of doors with a
cappuccino, to feel the sun on my face. So it was with only the odd wrenching spasm of guilt that I
abandoned my planned itinerary and bounded with a single leap across 1,500 miles of Europe. Travelling is
more fun - shit, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
I hadn't been to Rome before, but I had been wanting to go there for about as long as I could
remember, certainly since I first saw
La Dolce Vita
as a teenager. I love Italian movies, especially the truly
crummy ones - the ones that are dubbed by people who bravely refuse to let a total absence of acting skills
stand in the way of a good career. They always star Giancarlo Giannini and the delectable Ornella Muti and
have titles that tell you just how bad they are going to be -
A
Night Full of Rain, That Summer in Naples,
When Spring Comes -
so you have no anxieties that you will be distracted by plots and can concentrate
instead on the two important things, namely waiting for Ornella Muti to shed her clothes and looking at the
scenery. Italian films are always full of good background shots - usually of Ornella and Giancarlo riding a
buzzing Vespa past the Colosseum and the Piazza Navona and the other tourist sights of Rome on the way
to having either a brisk bonk or a soulful discussion about how they can't go on like this, usually because
one of them is living with Marcello Mastroianni.
Movies everywhere used to be full of this kind of local colour - every film shot in Britain in the 1960s
was required by law, if I am not mistaken, to show four laughing swingers in an open-topped Morgan
roadster crossing Tower Bridge, filmed from a helicopter at a dizzy angle - but now everyone but the Italians
seems to have abandoned the practice, which I think is a huge pity because my whole notion of the world
was shaped by the background scenes in films like
To Catch a Thief
and
Breathless
and
Three Coins in a
Fountain
and even the Inspector Clouseau movies. If I hadn't seen these pictures, I would be living in Peoria
now and thinking that that was about as rich as life gets.
Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria. It was everything
Stockholm was not - warm, sunny, relaxed, lively, full of good food and cheap drink. I went to dinner on the
first night with an American expatriate friend who had lived there for twenty years and he complained the
whole time about how expensive and impossible it had become, but it seemed wonderfully cheap after
Stockholm and in any case, as I asked him, how could you sit in the open air on a warm evening eating a
splendid meal and bitch about anything at all?
'Sure, sure, but you should try to get your plumbing fixed,' he said, as if that settled everything. After
dinner he took me on a brisk walk around the city and showed me how everything had deteriorated - how
the bars of the Via Veneto had no class any longer and were full of German and American tourists too
stupid and sluggish to know that they were being mercilessly ripped off, how Rugantino's, the nightclub near
the Spanish Steps made famous by
La Dolce Vita,
is now a McDonald's, how some once-charming
restaurant or hotel had been vandalized by tasteless proprietors whose only motivation was greed.
I listened, but I didn't hear. Everything seemed wonderful to me, even the monumentally impassive
waiters, even the cab drivers, even the particular cab driver who bilked me out of the better part of 30,000
lire - the pricehe quoted to take me from Roma-Termini to my hotel, without bothering to inform me that it
was two and a half blocks away and could be walked in thirty seconds - because he did it with such
simplicity and charm, forgiving me my stupidity for letting him do this to me. I was so touched that I tipped
him.
My hotel was in a battered, out-at-the-elbow district just off the Via Cavour - it was the sort of
neighbourhood where you could pee on the buildings and it would be all right - but it had the compensating
virtue of being central. You could walk anywhere in the city from there, and that's what I did, day after day,
just walked and walked. I rose daily just after dawn, during that perfect hour when the air still has a fresh,
