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Roman Daze
La Dolce Vita for All Seasons
Bronté Dee Jackson
“It took only three days to fall in love with Rome. Like all infatuations, I expected it to wear off. I decided that I would leave when I no longer noticed the Coliseum. I am still waiting.”
Twenty years ago, Bronté Jackson won an airline ticket that thrust her into the heart of the Mediterranean. Recently separated, made redundant and evicted from her home, Bronté spent six months recovering in Greece and spending her redundancy package, before making her way to Rome. Roman Daze: La Dolce Vita for All Seasons is a book about living a personal and continuously surprising adventure. It’s about following your heart and what it’s like to live among people who continuously use theirs.
In Roman Daze, Bronté Jackson describes how the seasons, food, family, landscape, rituals and history combine to create and explain the Italian lifestyle and why, from the outside, it looks like la dolce vita.
Roman Daze
La Dolce Vita for All Seasons
Bronté Dee Jackson
Published by Melbourne Books
Level 9, 100 Collins Street,
Melbourne, VIC 3000
Australia
www.melbournebooks.com.au
Copyright © Bronté Dee Jackson 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry : (paperback)
Author: Jackson, Bronté Dee.
Title: Roman Daze : La Dolce Vita For All Seasons.
eISBN: 9781922129345 (ebook)
Subjects: Jackson, Bronté Dee.
Women--Italy--Biography.
Italy--Description and travel.
Rome--Description and travel.
Dewey Number: 920.72
Bronté Dee Jackson’s blog can be found at:
Digital edition prepared by eDilettante
Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy
This book is dedicated to Franceschina and Antonio
Grazie infinite
Acknowledgements to
Helen and Arthur, for their constant support and belief in me as a writer;
to Julie and Terri, for their enthusiastic reading and feedback;
and to Alfredo, for everything.
Prologue
How a raffle ticket changed my life
Twenty years ago I had a normal life. Then I bought a raffle ticket. Who knew two bucks was going to change my life forever?
Everything was on track. I had graduated university, travelled a bit locally, gotten married, was contemplating children and a mortgage, had a professional career, all before I turned thirty. But within three months I had lost it all and instead had a free airline ticket to Europe (via the raffle ticket) and a huge redundancy package (via having lost my job). No husband, no job, lots of money and an airline ticket. And still I hesitated. Then my landlord gave me notice.
I was in my late twenties, not the time you give up your life to go travelling. It was the time to buckle down, get even more serious about your career, do a post-graduate master’s degree, buy a house, or quickly find a man and start procreating. All of these things I had expected of myself and desperately wanted to want enough, so that one day they might seem like the rewards I had always thought they would be. Even though I couldn’t seem to make my life work, I didn’t have the will left to figure out a different one.
I spent the first six months of that long ago trip consoling myself on the beach in Greece and Turkey over the life I had lost, and then admitting to myself the profound relief I felt in no longer having to have it. During that time I had no itinerary or even a vague idea of where to travel. I decided to stay a month in Rome, unheard of in backpacker terms. Staying for a month in one city is a lifetime. When I eventually found myself there it took only three days to fall in love with it, deeply and profoundly, like I had found a soulmate.
My passion for wanting to stay in Rome meant that I accepted any job I could get. Knowing that I had no grounds to apply for legal residence, it was therefore hopeless to think about having any kind of career job. At first I was the manager of an illegal pensione. Then I was a model for an art class, a job in constant demand. And I lied to get work, which at one point resulted in me staring at around 250 people across the counter of a bar at the opening night of the ‘first Australian bar in Rome’, along with Phil, the other Australian who had also illegally stayed and needed to lie about his experience, both of us expected to pull beers rapidly for all of them, neither of us ever having actually done it before. Luckily, Italians are not big connoisseurs of beer and didn’t seem to notice the lack of foam, or the presence of too much, in their glasses. But even the most lowly jobs are not legally open to non-European citizens for more than a few months and I took the only option open to me. I advertised myself as an English language teacher.
A professor from a university contacted me and offered me two jobs: one where I would teach a subject in English that I knew something about to university students, the other one was where I would accompany him all around Europe on free tours, staying in the most luxurious hotels, meeting dignitaries (as this Professor was the only one in his field in Europe) and not actually doing much teaching. This role required me to be his ‘girlfriend’.
But teaching didn’t pay nearly enough to keep me in the habit I wanted to become accustomed to, and after two years I started to look around. I noticed that down the street from me was an office where a lot of people who spoke English seemed to exit every evening. Speaking fluent Italian was a prerequisite for any job in the Italian market, as was the kind of VISA I could not qualify for, so I needed to look at places where English speakers were sought after and where I could work using English as my primary language. One day I walked in with my CV and asked to speak to the HR Manager.
There was no sign on the door or anywhere in reception to identify this building. There was an acronym written across the top of the building – WFP – written in huge letters and surrounded by some circular leaves. This was in the days before the internet, and the
