I’d been to Rome once before – a long, long time ago, in 2007, when I was younger and (marginally) less cynical, and certainly more enthusiastic about ticking off the proverbial Things To See Before You Die. I thus came to Rome on an overpriced, overpromised Contiki tour (slash booze cruise), in which our four days in Italy included maybe 48 hours in Rome and most of those included getting on and off the bus (bloated, hungover) to stand in queues in blinding May heat and snap those terribly original photos of one another in front of This Famous Building and That Famous Statue. By the time we actually entered the Sistine Chapel – which I’d longed to see since reading about it in the Children’s Encyclopedia when I was six or seven – the place was shoulder-to-shoulder with ninety billion other tourists, and there was no air, and certainly no atmosphere; just bodies moving en masse, and we had to rush through because the bus was about to leave and we’d already spent two hours of our allocated three in the damned queue (sans Panadol for our hangovers) and barely had time to look at the ceiling let alone appreciate it, and then we were out again and on our way to some other Famous Thing. Or a bar, I don’t recall.
The Contiki experience would turn me into the anti-tourist. I swore, after that trip, I would never again follow the beaten path or visit another Lonely Planet-recommended monument, and I would only consult Trip Advisor to find out exactly where everyone else was going so I could go in the opposite direction.
My plan for celebrating the big four-oh this year was to go to Madrid, because I liked the supermarkets and I liked the weather, and I figured two months in Buenos Aires would equip me with enough Español to integrate somewhat.
But I didn’t really learn Spanish (Spanish is fuckn HARD and fuckn IMPOSSIBLE if your time is generally otherwise committed to working/running/eating things). And worse, Madrid turned out to be insanely overpriced. The cheapest Airbnbs were upwards of $NZ3500 a month, and reviews generally seemed to mention the presence a lot of black mould and cockroaches and windowlessness and FUCK THAT.
And then various social media-related forces combined and brought Rome to mind, and it turned out that Airbnbs were sliiiightly cheaper than Madrid (wtf right?!) and no mention of cockroaches or mould, and the idea of turning 40 in Rome seemed kinda neat.
So I did, and it was better than neat. Even arriving at the godawful hour of 5am and being unable to check in until 11am was made less unbearable by my gym being 400m from my Airbnb and providing GIANT BACKPACK-SIZED LOCKERS so I could run my stupid jetlagged butt to consciousness on the treadmill and then shower and have several espresso at the cafe over the road before attacking the day. And although rather munted and half-floating through the city in a kind of undrugged stupor, I still managed to eat everything I could see (suppli, pizza, crostini, pizza, a discounted red grapefruit) and find a supermarket and buy EVERYTHING that just doesn’t exist in New Zealand (sheep cheese! Aperol! Rittersport! Kefir! Spinach for $2/kg! Wine $4/bottle!) and smirking at the 2km-long queue outside the Vatican.
My 40th birthday started with a run and a phone call home, then a food tour of Trastevere (more suppli, pizza, coffee, tiramisu) and a new Bowie t-shirt, several-several spritzes, an enormous bowl of garlic mussels all to myself, a phone call to my sis (w/cheese and more spritz) and volumes of chocolate. A pretty darn good way to mark the start of a new decade, I thought.
And then I moved to Tor Pignattara.
The day I arrived, I thought I’d made a huge mistake. It didn’t help that it was a public holiday and almost everything was shut, my previous Airbnb host was messaging me with accusations of breaking his stovetop (to this day I have NO idea what that was about) and my new digs was about 5km out of the city centre and, well, a bit of a shit hole. Trash covering every street, graffiti covering every wall/window/sign/shop front, weed, well, everywhere; boozed lurchy men lurching and slobbering and yelling at the clouds. The only direct route to the city was on the rickety old tram that came quite regularly but never at its scheduled time. And, as home to Rome’s largest Bangladeshi community, I wasn’t sure I was in Italy at all.
But by the time I left, I was in love.
Everyone was so nice. At the supermarket, the pizzaria, the tram, the bar(s), the grotty little off-license(s): nobody rolled their eyes when I couldn’t speak Italian. They either switched to English or got out Google translate, and it was all very jovial, quite unlike my experience in other cities and certainly quite unlike the way Kiwis treat non-English speakers. And, perhaps because of the distance from the city and the general lack of order, there wasn’t a tourist in sight, let alone any I LOVE ROMA t-shirts or Colosseum keyrings or sexy calendars.
I went running every weekend in Parco degli Acquedotti, this gigantic 240 hectare park with enormous aqueducts dating back to 38 AD – can you even get your head around that?! These incredible things are still standing after 2000 years: most homes in New Zealand barely last a couple of decades. Every time I saw these huge structures I would get all silly and gape-y and have to take more photos, because honestly, they kinda blow your mind.
And despite its gritty streets and snivelling homeless and the great blasting fireworks every night announcing another drug drop (I’d usually run past the burned shells the next morning), Tor Pignattara grew on me. Between the graffiti and overflowing skip bins there were decades-old restaurants and family-owned pizzarias and a real sense of warmth and fun. Especially at aperitivo hour (and, well, lunchtime and brunchtime and a few other hours of the day) when the seats outside cafes and bars would fill up and everyone would natter over pizza and wine and beer and whiskey and spritz (it may have been just me with the spritz).
Oh, and the rest of Rome. Amazing, obvs. Amazing, every day without fail, despite the absolute unrelenting hordes of Americans (and Brits, and Chinese, and Spanish, and Australians, and and and) and their incomprehensible determination to drag silly little wheelie suitcases behind them down the cobbled streets and into every damned cafe/museum/church/tiny Roman bathroom.
But best of all – in both the city centre and Tor Pignattara and even the freakin’ airport – was the food. Nowhere else in the world have I enjoyed food so much as I did in Rome, because nowhere else in the world is food as fresh and as delicious and as available and and abundant and affordable. You couldn’t walk a single street without being wooed by pizza or pasta or cream-filled pistachio cannoli. It is everywhere, everything, all of the time, and I would go back again just for the food. Because that’s the kind of person I am.
Oh yeah, I did go to the Vatican. Properly, this time. On the second-to-last day of my five weeks in Rome. By then, the Americans and Brits and Australians had all mostly fecked off, and there was no queue, and no wheelie suitcases, and I stood in the Sistine Chapel for a solid fifteen minutes and listened to the (very Catholic) audio guide explain the various intracacies of The Last Judgment, and I was satisfied. And then I went and had some more pizza.
I know Rome has its problems (I’ve been reprimanded and lectured by more than one Roman expat) and I know I only saw its shiny happy exterior. I also know things would be quite different if I tried to put down roots there. Which is probably why I won’t go back: at least, not until the 2025 Jubilee is done with, which is something I have zero interest in but some 20 million something pilgrims and tourists are very interested in, so I’d rather keep out of their way until they all go home. Then, we’ll see.
a woman wanders 