Rome, And Other Civic Constipation

Note: We have returned home, and I am now catching up with the last five days of the trip, which got so busy I couldn't adequately document it in real-time. Several more installments will follow.

As I sit and weep back at the room, forcing concrete grapes out of my ass, I visualize the fruit cup vendor we saw by the Circus Maximus the day before. Would he still be there? How much for a cab? How much for an airlift? If there is a crisis facing the tourist to Rome, it is a diet comprised exclusively of cheap, squishy bread products and salted meat. The only fresh vegetable I saw during our stay was a caper bush growing out the side of an ancient aqueduct, but there was no vendor there to sprinkle them on focaccia. Salads are typically sarcastic bowls of undressed mixed lettuce; carciofi alla Giudia are artichokes deep fried for so long they are essentially potato chips, and come to the tabe on a brown square of paper so greasy it looks like a MOMA piece entitled Sharting Fiat. 

Later that morning we went to the ruins of the Colosseum, one of humankind’s earliest examples of large-scale social engineering through bad taste. Our current mass public entertainment may be as devoid of psychological nutrition as our foods are of corporal nutrition, but at least we’ve moved on from feeding terrified slaves to lions. The rest of the central ruins district feaures the spines and skulls of ravaged temples to human superiority, which create a vibe upon which it is difficult to place one’s finger, but the nearest I can tell is that what I’m responding to is the overwhelmingly postapocalyptic message of this once-apex culture. What none of the brochures and guided tours want to say is, “This will certainly be our fate, as well. Fish will peck for algae around the crumbled foundations of your home; the dome of your city hall will look like a shotgun blast to a melon.” 

I once read about a tsunami that first drew all the water far out to sea, so that hundreds of yards of new shoreline were exposed, and the curious wandered out to explore the neat new area. Then the water returned with a fatal enormity and wiped the foolishly unconcerned people off the face of the earth. Wandering around the ruins of Rome, holding a donut and an iPhone, feels like this.    

A crowd of young teenagers, overwhelmingly female, milled about on the small square near the basic tourist restaurant to which we had surrendered our decartilaginated legs. As we puzzling over whether or not it was actually okay to use the olive oil and balsamic as dip for the bread, as we do at home, the group let out a few chants and began marching purposefully down the cobbles past our outdoor table. I reached for a flyer they offered, which was in Italian, but clearly to do with women’s abortion rights. A curious waiter glanced at it and informed us about the new right wing government’s policy of situating a psychologist between the client and her appointment, a step backwards for a system that had once put a priest in the way, but in more recent times had presented no such obstacle whatsoever. 

Later that night as we relaxed in our fifth-floor room, the sharp report of marching drums startled us to the window. It was the same crowd, now swelled in number, protected fore and aft by police and vans. We had seen a similarly bored escort provided for young, beer-swilling, balaclava-wearing male supporters of a soccer team whose cartoony logo was some sort of animal that winds up in braises; it seems Italian carabinieri are largely occupied with either idly chatting up restaurant hostesses, or disinterestedly guarding the harmless from one another. The only fear I felt in five days in Rome was a woman who jumped off her lover’s scooter, fired a staccato blue streak into the air, and damned him with a very spicy finger.  

THE restaurant

The thing I treasure most about travel finally happened that night: a hole in the wall locals place, hot and loud and entirely disinterested in tourists, opened like brigadoon as we walked down a series of quiet and unpromising Trastevere alleys. There was no stand with a multi-language photographic menu. There was no sign. The waitress clearly wished she hadn’t seen us, but had made the mistake of eye contact, and could not ignore us. I immediately asked for a table for two, no prenotazione (no reservation). She shrugged her shoulders, muttered something as unfriendly as it was unintelligible, and wandered off. I knew this to be a sign more promising than glowing dowsing rods, and we held our ground by the doorway. Soon she seemed to yell to the other waitress that they had two No Langauge people on their hands, and the other woman brought us inside, where an older man who looked like he had juggled at the first Burning Man smiled and, in gently broken English, told us we’d be sharing a table with two strangers. In my poor Italian I said we liked to make new friends, which made him smile, and he set us at a table which might have had elbow room enough for two others, so long as they were toddlers. He then procured a couple festively-colored markes and doodled a squiggly line down the center of the paper tablecloth, and I termed our side the “zona romantica.” This gave him another glimmer of a smile, and I hoped I had  sufficiently defused the insult of our presence. 

When the waiter set down an entirely handwritten Italian menu, my heart leapt. There were the handmade agnolotti, the lamb scottadito, the trippa alla Romana, which had eluded us. None of it would be on the cookie cutter menus at the hundreds of generic trattorias that line all the city’s streets, and I wanted all of it. I sat beaming in the cramped room, with its thick, humid air of browning meat, its walls decorated primarily in little clippings and other newspaper bits whose Scotch tape was so old it had yellowed and crumbled. I heard bouncy music that was not there; I felt kinship which had never been offered. 

Soon the next luckless English-speakers showed up, a very young couple from England, and we chatted pleasantly before the food started arriving. The meal was rustic, unfussy, hot, salty, greasy, rich, robust, and forcefully, unquestionably authentic. As we left, our foreheads steaming and our fingernails shiny, I was bouncing with elation, for my one travel goal had been fulfilled, indelibly marked upon my memory.