Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
unused feel to it, and watched the city come awake - whistling shopkeepers slopping out, sweeping up,
pulling down awnings, pushing up shutters.
I walked through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, up and down the Spanish Steps, window-shopped
along the Via dei Condotti, admired the Colosseum and Forum, crossed the river by the Isola Tiberina to
tramp the hilly streets of Trastevere, and wandered up to the lofty heights of the Gianicolo, where the views
across the city were sensational and where young couples entwined themselves in steamy embraces on the
narrow ledges. The Italians appear to have devised a way of having sex without taking their clothes off and
they were going at it hammer and tongs up here. I had an ice-cream and watched to see how many of them
tumbled over the edge to dash themselves on the rocks below, but none did, thank goodness. They must
wear suction cups on their backs.
For a week, I just walked and walked. I walked till my feet steamed. And when I tired I sat with a coffee
or sunned myself on a bench, until I was ready to walk again.
Having said this, Rome is not an especially good city for walking. For one thing, there is the constant
danger that you will be run over. Zebra crossings count for nothing in Rome, which is not unexpected but
takes some getting used to. It is a shock to be strolling across some expansive boulevard, lost in an idle
fantasy involving Ornella Muti and a vat of Jell-O, when suddenly it dawns on you that the six lanes of cars
bearing down upon you at speed have no intention of stopping.
It isn't that they want to hit you, as they do in Paris, but they just will hit you. This is partly because Italian
drivers pay no attention to anything happening on the road ahead of them. They are too busy tooting their
horns, gesturing wildly, preventing other vehicles from cutting into their lane, making love, smacking the
children in the back seat and eating a sandwich the size of a baseball bat, often all at once. So the first time
they are likely to notice you is in the rear-view mirror as something lying in the road behind them.
Even if they do see you, they won't stop. There is nothing personal in this. It's just that they believe that if
something is in the way they must move it, whether it is a telephone pole or a visitor from the Middle West.
The only exception to this is nuns. Even Roman drivers won't hit a nun - you see groups of them breezing
across eight-lane arteries with the most amazing impunity, like scraps of black and white paper borne along
by the wind - so if you wish to cross some busy place like the Piazza Venezia your only hope is to wait for
some nuns to come along and stick to them like a sweaty T-shirt.
I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you've just missed a
parking competition for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off,
facing in, facing sideways, blocking garages and side streets and phone boxes, fitted into spaces so tight
that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I
had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
I was strolling along the Via Sistina one morning when a Fiat Croma shot past and screeched to a
smoky halt a hundred feet up the road. Without pause the driver lurched into reverse and came barrelling
backwards down the street in the direction of a parking space that was precisely the length of his Fiat, less
two and a half feet. Without slowing even fractionally, he veered the car into the space and crashed
resoundingly into a parked Renault.
Nothing happened for a minute. There was just the hiss of escaping steam. Then the driver leaped from
his car, gazed in profound disbelief at the devastation before him - crumpled metal, splintered tail lights, the
exhaust pipe of his own car limply grazing the pavement - and regarded it with as much mystification as if it
had dropped on him from the sky. Then he did what I suppose almost any Italian would do. He kicked the
Renault in the side as hard as he could, denting the door, punishing its absent owner for having the gall to
park it there, then leaped back in his Fiat and drove off as madly as he had arrived, and peace returned
once again to the Via Sistina, apart from the occasional clank of a piece of metal dropping off the stricken
Renault. No one but me batted an eye.
Italians will park anywhere. All over the city you see them bullying their cars into spaces about the size
of a sofa cushion, holding up traffic and prompting every driver within three miles to lean on his horn and
give a passable imitation of a man in an electric chair. If the opening is too small for a car, the Romans will
decorate it with litter - an empty cigarette packet, a wedge of half-eaten pizza, twenty-seven cigarette butts,
half an ice-cream cone with an ooze of old ice-cream emerging from the bottom, danced on by a delirium of
