immensely, I was quite content for my passion to be spent on a city. Many years after this decision had been made Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character in the television series Sex and The City, echoed my sentiments exactly when she continually rhapsodised about New York and it being her love. I understood completely how you could go out and have a date with a city.
Like any infatuated lover I never, ever tire of my beloved. I never tire of looking at her buildings and monuments, her galleries and museums, her ruins and her shops, her windy streets and long placid boulevards. At first I told myself that once I stopped gaping in awe at the Coliseum every time I saw it then I would go home. It has now been seventeen years and I am still gaping.
The difficulty with determining when enough is enough is that the longer you are in Rome, the more it reveals itself to you. Like a lover that does not want you to leave, it throws ever more tempting situations at you. It shows you deeper and deeper layers of itself, layers that are not noticeable as a tourist. It reveals itself in ways you can only begin to experience once you stop moving. Rome can thrill and impress anyone at a glance, the way Sydney Harbour can. Who isn’t impressed by either place at first glimpse? But once you have shown your commitment, once you have demonstrated you are willing to dedicate time to her, there is layer upon layer of further magic, mystery and take-your-breath-away beauty, for as long and as often as you care to look for it.
* * *
I have been dating my love for many years now and we are definitely ‘going steady’. Which is how I can tell it is about to rain. I know her many moods and temperaments because, like any good girlfriend, I have spent many hours observing her.
I am sitting at this moment in a tiny cobblestone piazza about the size of a handkerchief, just down the road from my house in a Roman suburb, well away from the tourist haunts. I am shaded, believe it or not, by gum trees – good for soil drainage, or so I am told – on a park bench made from strong old wood and wrought iron. I am gazing at a small fountain. A woman’s head sculptured in stone juts out from a pillar. From her mouth a continuous stream of water flows, via ancient Roman aqueducts, into a tiny stone pool below. It is cold, clear and drinkable. There is a steady flow of humans and birds that come to bathe and drink from it, some carrying it away in their water bottles (only the humans do this).
The pillar is topped with a sculpture of a gigantic stone egg, the symbol of this neighbourhood, and repeated throughout it at various entrances to piazzas, buildings and staircases. The pillar also forms the beginning of one side of a very wide and long staircase leading up to another piazza at the top of a hill. The steps are shaded by overhung trees and at the moment a couple is having lunch on them, in between long bouts of kissing. At the piazza on the top of the hill there are four stone archways on either side of the square. They open up onto a series of gardens, walkways and semidetached houses which spill all the way back down the hill until the lowest of them ring the piazza in which I am sitting.
I love this spot and come here regularly. It is five minutes by foot from my apartment. It is quiet, peaceful and full of birdsong. It is a forty-minute walk south of the Coliseum. This suburb dates back to early last century and was purpose-built by the Italian government as a social and architectural experiment in community development. It took the form of a small, self-sufficient town, sitting well outside the walls of Rome at that time, in the midst of muddy fields. The Italian authorities then transferred the poorest of inner-city families, some against their will, to live in these quasi-rural idylls. The idea was that these families would then have lifelong public housing at reasonable rates and not be at the mercy of landlords, unsafe housing or homelessness.
The fact that it was far away from their previous neighbourhoods and communities was hoped to be offset by the provision of semidetached, single-storey houses, set in communal gardens and surrounded by space. It was not something the average Roman, or in fact any European city-dweller, could usually hope to live in. High-rise apartment blocks with front doors that opened directly onto the street and hanging washing out the windows or across balconies were the average city-dweller’s prospects. Gardens and green space was for royalty.
This suburb was therefore considered the height of excellent social planning at the time, and in fact still is, in providing housing for the poor. Even Mahatma Gandhi toured the fledgling suburb during his trip to Europe in the 1920s to learn how other cities dealt with housing their poorest families. The rents were, and still are, peppercorn. The town came complete with schools, theatres, churches, communal baths, parks, shops and restaurants. Many well-known architects of the time lent their services and entered into the architectural competitions that produced designs for the buildings. As a result, many of these buildings are icons today. There is an emphasis in the architecture on open, round piazzas and communal spaces, all of which are still in use today. Arches and rounded buildings are also a common feature and were designed to produce an atmosphere of openness and community between the new inhabitants.
One hundred years later and the suburb is a small island surrounded by kilometres of apartment buildings, as the rest of Rome has engulfed it. Rome still consists mostly of apartment blocks without gardens, and although there are now sidewalks between most front doors and the street, there are no nature strips and trees are rare. These one-and two-storey houses set in their own gardens, therefore, create a rare setting. They provide a quiet refuge and the feeling of being in a small country village rather than in the centre of Rome which, because Rome has grown so much, it now is. The gates are always open and anyone from the public can walk into the gardens and communal spaces. I admit it is only because I am a resident that I dare to.
It is a close-knit community. Many generations of the same families live here and Roman dialect is spoken rather than Italian. The Roman football team is so revered here that people often paint their houses in the colours of the team, which are bright red and yellow just in case you were thinking they were taupe and sand. One house has a mural covering the entire front wall that shows all the faces of the team members and their coach. It is a bastion of traditional, fiercely proud Romans. There is a strong sense of identity among the families from this area and it is easier to feel like an outsider here than in other parts of Rome. The architecture that was designed to create an openness among the residents worked, and resulted in a fiercely proud and strong community.
The communal garden areas are immaculately kept, not by the authorities but by the residents, even though this is still all government, or public, housing. Bowers of roses frame makeshift wooden seats and arches, planters hang off the back of park benches, low planters bloom with flowers and herb gardens, and fruit trees nestle between stretches of lawn and pathways.
Traditional Roman cooking and small trattorie (informal, often family-run restaurants) abound in this neighbourhood. It has become famous for it. They are hidden in basements, under stairs, behind shutters and in archways. They often do not have menus, signs or vacancies, unless you book or they know you. They are often bare in décor, use plastic sheets instead of tablecloths, have harsh lighting and televisions blaring loudly. They produce food that is cooked daily by the signora of the team, which is usually a family, from ingredients procured that morning, so there is not much possibility of a pre-prepared or pre-cooked menu. They are, in my humble opinion, as yet unrivalled by any meal produced within cooee (Australian term, meaning ‘shouting distance’) of an historic monument or in the centre of Rome.
* * *
It is now just after 1pm and a peaceful silence has descended over the neighbourhood. If you want to go for a quiet walk in a park, pick your nose in public, somersault naked in the street (just in case you lost a bet), go to the post office or a supermarket while visiting Rome, do it at 1pm during the sacred Roman lunch hour (or two). The streets are deserted. The more deserted they are, the better you know the restaurants are in that area.
In my neighbourhood, from about 11am onwards, delicious smells start to waft out of windows and onto the streets. Although I generally make it a habit to go out and walk during the
