have to be electrical sockets, you can at least be different kinds of electrical sockets.
Spring in Rome is an easy thing to adapt to. Foliage bursts out of every possible space available in a concrete-covered city. Where there is a space between wall and sidewalk, there is a sprig of green bursting out of it. The trees, which sit in tiny squares of soil carved out of the concrete sidewalks, are laden with pink blossoms. Not the fly-away, fairy floss pink kind, but the heavy, fuchsia kind with serious, sensuous petals.
Rome glistens in spring; it glistens with new life and with the magic that comes with birth. It is all the more spectacular because Rome sheds everything in the autumn. In winter the city is foliage-free; not a leaf or shrub remains to break up the concrete grey that is everywhere. Luckily, the sun shines valiantly all through winter, although you get used to stark branches everywhere and increased vision as suddenly all the leaves disappear and all that is left are the buildings.
Then suddenly, after a long absence, the colour green is everywhere and envelops everything it can. Tiny daisies with perfect, egg-yellow centres and bright, white petals are present in every stretch of wild grass. They come out to carpet everything with their cheeky presence and their uncontested right to be here every year in April, for only a matter of weeks, just to herald in spring.
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The air is soft and warm and laps at my skin. Everywhere, above and below me, are the new flowers of the season. It has been spring for a month now and the transition is almost complete, from bare grey twigs to soft coverings of bright greens, dark greens, and delicate frostings of white and pink blossom. The delicate baby pink blossom that trumpets the arrival of spring has almost gone. In its place are the heavier white clouds of blossom, the heady white magnolia flower, the highly perfumed white jasmine flower. When the wind blows it rains white petals.
Here, spring is all the more precious because it is brief. In practice it only lasts a month or two before the summer heat overpowers the gentle air and the green foliage’s glare begins to hurt my eyes under the burning sun. The air becomes hot and heavy, the radiance is only present in the very early morning and, like in winter, shelter has to be taken from the outdoors.
Just before leaving Australia seventeen years ago I saw a film called Enchanted April. I went with my grandmother. We both loved it. It was a tale of four women, set in the 1920s in London. They hire a villa in Tuscany for the month of April. They don’t know each other, and share only a desire to escape the cold and wet London spring. They experience the magical powers of April in the Italian countryside and their souls are refreshed, each life changed a little for the better.
I went home in a trance after that movie. It was raining in Australia. The only piece of nature in my inner-city backyard was a strip of mud that must have once been a flower bed. I took off my shoes and slid my feet into it up to my ankles, under the rain, slowly raising each foot, one after the other in order to feel the earth. I sat for a long time under our one tree – that came over the fence from someone else’s backyard – and marvelled at the knowledge that I too could go to that magical place called Italy, and that maybe it could be as refreshing for my soul too.
I think of that film every spring. April truly is enchanted here. The green of an Italian spring is a soft, succulent kind of green. It gently draws the juices up into the veins like sap, causing a feeling of coming back to life after a long, cold winter. It shows that life can be trusted to begin again no matter how long and dark the winter has been and in spite of the fact that everything looks like it has died.
It is April here, now. Enchanted April. And it is possible to be outdoors for as long as you want to in perfect and benign temperatures.
The birds are a riot of noise as I jog around my neighbourhood today, trying to jolt my body back into its new time frame, to stave off the jet lag that I know will soon engulf me. I have just arrived back from a visit to Australia and must get ready for visitors who are arriving tomorrow. The noise, the vibrant colours, the sunshine all help tremendously to keep me awake and stimulated. Everywhere I look there are flowers. Wisteria melts its way along wire trellis and fencing and stops me in my tracks with its perfume. White blossoms weigh down bushes and everywhere there is new foliage. It has the shininess of new born babies and it shyly pronounces itself, pokes, unfolds and sways everywhere. Shades of green, from deep sea to lime, coat the tiny streets and old stone houses. The air is warm with promise.
I run past two women speaking and I take in their conversation. The conversations are always the same and I can almost predict them by now. At mid-morning, which is when I am running, they will be about what the speaker had for breakfast and what they are planning to have for lunch.
When someone told me many years ago that Italians talk about food a lot, I thought they were exaggerating. But they were not; most conversations I overhear in my neighbourhood, at any time of day, with any amount of people, are about food. What someone ate recently, what they are about to eat, how to cook something, where to buy it from, variations on cooking it. Italians are the only race of people I know whose topic of conversation while eating a meal is commonly about what they will eat for their next meal.
Shortly after moving in to my current apartment block, as I was coming home one day, I could see a group of women sitting together at a communal doorway, gesticulating and yelling wildly at each other. I was a little concerned. This area was new to me and still carried the slight stigma of once being one of Rome’s poorest and most crime-ridden areas. I was slightly worried that such an argument might escalate and lead to blows, given that the content was obviously serious and passionate. As I walked timidly past with my head down, I overheard one of the women say, ‘Well the way I make a mozzarella in carozza (mozzarella cheese deep fried in bread) is very different from that. I would first start with frying the bread in extra virgin olive oil from the Sabine region, not from the Piedmontese region.’
Food discussions in Italy are across genders and inter-generational; there is no limit to participation based on sex or age. The best bonding experiences I have with new Italian work colleagues or clients occur when food is discussed. All barriers go down, everyone is equal, and social hierarchies coalesce and form before my eyes. I often find it easier to get people to accept my advice after I have discussed food with them. I once worked with a team of people who started off every morning discussing what they had eaten or cooked the evening before, in detail and with recipes. Not only did I get paid for that time, but I came away with a vast array of culinary skills and knowledge.
So as I run by I hear the women discussing what they will prepare for lunch and how it will fit in with what they will have for dinner, and how it will contrast with what they had for breakfast. I am reminded also of the reason why I think I am in Italy: to learn to live like that. To learn to live one day at a time, with nothing more on my plate – figuratively – than I can handle in one day, and reasonably spaced around three fantastic yet simple meals. I still struggle with it and at this rate will be here for the rest of my life learning how to do it. Not a bad life task.
* * *
I make it to the end of the day without succumbing to jet lag by bribing myself with the promise that if I make it to 8pm I will take myself to my favourite restaurant for a bowl of the world’s best rigatoni amatriciana, a type of pasta with tomato and bacon sauce. After having sampled far and wide, and seventeen years’ worth of Italy’s amatriciana recipes, this one is by far the best. In fact, everything that this woman cooks is unsurpassed. This is attested to by the fact that everyone I have ever taken there is now as addicted as I am. And the best part about this restaurant is that it is across the road from where I live.
Being such an amazing restaurant you may assume that it would be hard to get a table on such short notice. It probably would be if it was easy to see, find or even identify as a restaurant. It is located at the bottom of an apartment block, the kind that is
