Rome Is Many Cities

The train from Florence to Rome took us through mountain valleys and long, long tunnels, substantiating what I learned in Latin and history classes about the Ancient Rome being rugged and rocky and really only suitable for growing olives and aspiring conquerors.

Like every other Italian city I’ve visited, but perhaps to an extreme, Rome possesses several identities all at once, in a kind of jumbled harmony. The first I saw was Rome as a big world city on the scale of London/NYC/Paris. It was the biggest mainland European city I’d been in so far, eclipsing even the sprawling Barcelona. It seems inevitable that modern cities of this magnitude grow towards each other in a practical way – cities this big don’t function without some sacrifices to efficiency. The train station was huge like an airport a ten-minute walk in one direction just to get to any exit. Then we took a metro train to the neighborhood where our AirBnB was, near the Vatican. Throughout this trip, Italian language aside, we could have been almost anywhere – whether you’re in L.A., London, or Rome, big urban public transit is what it is.

We emerged in a quiet neighborhood with a broad main street, flanked with shopping options and tourists, and quiet residential side streets that told us we were no longer downtown. Our AirBnB was on the same block as a classy-looking gelateria with a line out the door, which we were sure to investigate as soon as we’d rebounded from our transit lethargy. It was perhaps the best ice cream I had in all of Europe.

In the evening we wandered toward the Vatican and saw a second face of Rome, of Catholic Renaissance Italy. Well, first we got pizza, but more on that later. The Vatican is nearly empty at night, but you can still get in there and walk around. The Piazza San Pietro, where the Pope addresses people, is enormous, encircled in columns and cathedrals, dramatically lit, grand everywhere you look. The canonization of Mother Theresa was going to happen in just a day or two, so the plaza was being set up for the ceremony, with a big icon of her displayed in front of the basilica and a big seating area roped off.

We took the scenic way back, crossing a couple fancy bridges covered in Renaissance statues, passing Castel Sant’Angelo, an ancient Roman castle that was later renovated and used by the Catholic church for hundreds of years. The bridges were populated with people snapping pictures and merchants trying to catch their attention, but at this hour the crowd was pretty thin and nobody bothered us.

The next day our goal was to explore some areas Jane hadn’t seen yet. We would save the big sights for the night and check out some of Rome’s more modest offerings. Just a short walk east from our place was a busy area full of restaurants and shopping, interspersed with the ridiculously fascinating ancient sights and relics – even outside of Rome’s oldest areas, ancient stuff is just strewn the city like it’s no big deal. In Piazza del Popolo there were plenty of tourists snapping pictures of the 3,200-year-old Egyptian obelisk, 67 feet high and covered with hieroglyphs, brought to Rome 2,000 years ago, broken and lost during the slow collapse of the empire, rediscovered and restored almost 500 years ago. That stone has been standing in that spot for twice as long as my country has existed, and it’s life has been seven times longer than that. And for most tourists it’s an afterthought. That’s Rome for you.

We explored a huge park on a hill, Villa Borghese – a big rich estate with lots of nice landscaping, good for a pleasant walk and a breathtaking view of the city. If you look around long enough you’ll find a big pond there where you can rent little boats and float around in relative peace, listening to the wind swish through treebranches and ancient stone archways. We didn’t rent boats, but we watched some happy little turtles swim around. Then we made our way back to the AirBnB, getting more for a late lunch – more on that later.

That night we saw another Rome. I’d seen hints of it in the other Italian cities, and I would see it again in tiny pockets of France, but Rome is the only place where it really persists in earnest. All within a brief walk of one another lie the ancient Roman coliseum, the forum, and the Pantheon, among countless other relics of Rome’s most ancient era. They’re still busy at night, but you can walk right up and touch them without much hassle. The Pantheon is enormous and solid; at night a big crowd gathers in front of it to sit on the steps and eat and drink and talk. The coliseum looms darkly, its arches all ominous shadows. Parts of the forum are illuminated at night by bright floodlights. In some places they’ve put up bleachers for people to sit and muse at the still, stoic ruins. And even in the middle of the night, people do. Because of the way cities tend to sink over time, or rather the way the land tends to rise and leave the old parts behind, the excavated portions of the forum are sunk below street level. From the elevated seats, it feels like ancient Rome is performing on a stage for the modern world, putting its best columns and arches forward.

We also stopped by the Trevi Fountain, a massive, ornate outdoor fountain from the 1700s where dozens of epic statues hang out and splash around in the water together. The best part was watching a continuous flow of tourists pose for selfies in front of it, politely waiting their turns for the best spots. When they had pals or boyfriends their photo shoots were more subtle, but you could still pick them out. They were the ones trying so desperately to look unimpressed, downcast, wistful, or tragic. I hope their pictures turned out nice. We were very entertained.

The next day was the last day of Jane’s European vacation. We had decided to go out strong, squeezing in as much exploration as possible before the reluctant, inevitable goodbye. By sheer luck, the forum was free to enter that day, so we were able to wander around the ruins by foot, touching walls and stepping down stairs. We bumbled our way into a 4th century Christian church, Santa Maria Antiqua, that adjoins the old forum, now excavated and with much of its early Christian art and architecture still intact.

You know that feeling you get when your surroundings totally overwhelm you, when you experience something so wholly beyond your trivial little life that your rational mind shuts off and you feel nothing but wonder until it recovers? I hope you’ve felt it. If you haven’t, it might be time for you to take a vacation. I usually get that feeling from nature – wading out into Lake Michigan, climbing a mountain in Colorado or Washington or the Scottish highlands, or a sand dune beside Lake Superior. Nature exists on such a scale that when enough of it confronts you at one time, it’s hard to keep your priorities still. But I felt the same feeling in the Roman forum, walking down the same paved streets where, 2,000 years ago, citizens of one of the most advanced civilizations and most powerful empires of all time walked. As far as I know, none of my blood is Italian, but I still felt like I was walking among my heritage; in many ways, all of western civilization spawned from Rome and Ancient Greece, so I think the feeling was justified. I felt removed from time, like the timeline containing the ancient and the present had bent back on itself to convey me to a time almost too storied, too familiar, to have ever been real.

By this point, it was settled that I was going to meet Jane in Glasgow before going home, so the weight of our goodbye at the train station was lessened by the knowledge that we would be hanging out again in just a couple weeks. She would fly back home and get back to work, and I would spend one more night rambling around Rome before meandering through Switzerland and France and grabbing a cheap flight from Paris directly to Glasgow. Then I would have about a month to enjoy the company of my new favorite lass and a ridiculous, charming city before concluding my trip. It had been a very affirming two weeks for our little relationship, and although the logistics of our relationship were still frustratingly uncertain, our confidence in each other was only getting stronger.

A quick note about pizza. I had the best pizza of my life in Rome, twice. I say this because there are so many different kinds of perfect pizza, it hardly seems fair to force them into a single category. Much like how Chicago and New York style pizzas have their own distinct appeals, these Italian pizzas were truly special in their own ways.
The pizza place near the Vatican was casual street pizza made with care and invention. You take a number, point at the pizzas you like, and pay by weight. On display are a constantly rotating selection of strange and wondrous pizza possibilities, pizzas of every color and concept, so many vegetables and cheeses and meats and seafoods that I’d never fathomed having on pizza. It was all made transcendent by the dough, an exciting blend of crispy outside and fluffy inside that I could eat forever.

I have less to say about the Napoletana pizza place I went to after visiting Villa Borghese, but it was perfect in its own way. Apparently modern pizza came from Naples (I just looked this up – turns out Ancient Romans had foccacia but not pizza), and now pizza places that claim to follow that tradition have to work to get recognized by a selective Napoletana pizza society. There was a place in Pittsburgh that was part of that, and it was great. This was vastly better. Napoli pizza has a thin crust and sharp, intense toppings. They’re less into the consistent, solid layers that American pizzas have, taking more liberties with their topping arrangements. You can usually see through to the crust between the toppings, as they often have a white sauce or olive oil instead of a solid tomato sauce layer, which is fine because the crust is delicious – light and crispy. My pizza was a calzone, folded only about halfway over itself, and packed with the richest cheese in the world, as well as various meats and veggies that complemented each other beautifully. This pizza was not trying to start a revolution, just representing the epitome (to my mouth) of the purest, most traditional pizza form around.

Those pizzas are a nice illustration of something I think Rome does very well – balance. Yes, it’s got some amazing things to go see, and its status as a tourist hub is well deserved, but while a city like Venice lives mostly off of that appeal, Rome feels very alive. Yes, traditional food is made traditionally there, but there are plenty of neighborhoods where cool young people are making cool young pizza too.