The sun is bright in the morning. I roll, creaking, out of the bed and to the window. It takes a while for me to figure out exactly how to lift the cover: it’s not that different a material from the shields guarding jewelers’ shops Philly (so, like Kevlar and whatever is in Batman’s armor). There’s a system of pulleys and levers, and whether you’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing the noise inspires terror. The end is less dramatic: An open window, encased in a door, which leans on a balcony. I step out.
It’s just a street. Scooters pepper the roadsides below. Other apartments line the blocks. Nothing special. And it’s stunning.
I grew up in South Florida, and I mostly hated it. People are surprised to hear this, and I never understood them until I returned, on vacation, from places with winter. Soulless concrete looks clean, relative to the Northeast. A crowded beach is still a beach, relative to most of the earth. Silly chain restaurants are, it turns out, what most people like; and in Boca Raton those places have patio seating in December.
This pedestrian corner of Rome, in a piece of the city garnering no tours, is harmless and simple if you live there. It is glorious to me at 8am on a random Wednesday in spring. People walk and work at ease: you can feel the absence of stress and heated mania powering New York and slices of L.A. and, really, any appropriately chic cubicle factory from San Fran to Shanghai. It’s cool but not cold, and very bright: the air cracks as you move your hand across it. A woman across the way bustles onto a balcony and hangs laundry on the rails with a florid, lyric motion. It looks like she has lived here since Fellini’s debut, and that is a joke which is also a scientific hypothesis.
It’s so fucking pretty I want to weep, and it’s just a day to everyone else. I realize, for the first time in my life, what the beach looks like to other people. I have to explore.
_ _ _
Every time I book an AirBnB with a female host, I hope that I am going to have exotic yet tender sex with the host; and that we will bask in each other’s arms and sweat and sigh, heavily, for a world which no longer exists and may have never; yet which we hope may return, somehow. I don’t hope this in the way you hope that you are going to get a raise at the end of the year. But it at least occurs to me, because I am the dangerous combination of lonely and imaginative which results in either sonnets or tinted vans; and sometimes both.
My host is a beautiful Italian, which means that she is an Italian. We spend a lot of ink on the madness of Nazi Germany – which 4Chan compels me to say is a completely reasonable use of ink. This said: one of the incidental evils of Nazism – and, again, Steve B. and the rest of you cuntfucks: the Nazis were more knowingly evil than any human construction since the Mayans; including the Chainsmokers – was their aesthetic blueprint of the Master Race: blue hair; blonde eyes; German accent. I say this as someone with beginner-level German and a love for the country in my personal luggage: Did they not even fucking see their allies? Christ: Italians are ridiculous. They’re not all stunners in the contemporary sense; rather, they’re Classical: they simply move and talk better than you do: they are made of curves; in language, in form, and in space. They are models of models stretching back centuries; they’re all posing for a painting completed in 1537.
My host has a roommate who is also Italian, and who also sleepily wades into the living room. In this moment of jetlag and adrenaline, I believe that I am a few clever lines and smoldering glances from the three of us bathing in olive oil and tenderly placing grapes on each other’s bare abdomen. Being a man of action, I ask where I might find food, mumble a few nothings, and leave the apartment nursing one of those crooked halfway erections. I am going to have to get better at a lot of things if I want to achieve my filthy hopes and dreams. But I refuse to invest in a van.
_ _ _
I love Roman streets. I had forgotten about them: my memories are stained with the sight of my own feet; dragging myself behind my parents, who yelled at each other and us and consulted maps so comically large I think they were stage props. But now I remember. I remember the ways the cars and bikes stack along the sidewalks. I remember the pastel walls. I remember the stones. The glass shopfronts. The tin café tables. The clean, unadorned buildings – some classical, some Spartan constructs after the war. This area is simple itself; there’s not much of the intricate stonework I know to expect further in the city. But these pink and orange walls are also part of Rome, and part of the memory. The trees a wound of spindles, and the light hovers just over each surface without quite touching it.
I turn down a main drag and find a café. My knowledge of Italian is one handwritten list of simple phrases I half-memorized in a Philadelphia coffee shop the Saturday before my departure. So I decide to order in Italian.
It doesn’t go super well. The patrons crowd a circular glass bar. I pretty clearly do not know where or how to stand: there is a right and wrong way. The right way is to lean on the counter with a foot on the metal footrail, like you’re ordering a drink in a Reno saloon in 1878. Not quite like that, maybe: be more Italian – lean lightly; as if your hand or elbow is not quite touching the bar. I lean way too far in and shift weight a lot. It’s finally my turn, and I blurt out “KAH FEY!” in a panic. (It’s the tone I usually reserve for telling someone, “Watch out for that mountain lion!”) I think I’m sweating.
There’s really nothing like trying out a new language in a live-fire environment: whoever you are, you will feel ashamed at first. You will know that the cornerstone of all human interaction and civilization has been suddenly ripped from you; you are alone in a wilderness of your fellow man. You are deaf and mute. It’s a very stressful cup of coffee.
Since I’ve run a soundcheck on my speaking voice, I decide to try for food as well. It is in this moment that I realize I don’t know the Italian word for a sandwich, so I just hope it’s “panini,” since that sounds and looks Italian. (I am a goddam citizen of the world.) And it is! Or at least it’s close enough: the waiter – or, really, the breakfast bartender, which appears to be a profession in Italy – collects the sandwich I want. I peter out when he asks a question with more than two syllables. Seeing this, he points to the panini/panino: “Hot?” Si!
(It’s delicious.)
I mosey down the road and back. There are a lot of people out. It’s just a weekday; a weekday of no particular importance. Romans are walkers, it seems. So that becomes my plan for the day: As I wait to meet up with my fellow travelers that evening, I will walk, and watch Romans walk, and watch Rome.
_ _ _
Italians dress like they’re auditioning for the role of Italian.
As I sit on a park bench, a man who personally remembers the sinking of the Lusitania grumbles and creaks his way across the greenery. He is wearing a Puma jumpsuit that is bright red and blue. His sneakers are white. His conversation partner is close friends with Vito Corleone from the old days: he wears a blazer and worn yet trim sneakers. His pants are loose and yet they fit his frame perfectly; as perfectly, at least, as the trembling shape of a thousand-year-old Roman can be fit. Both of the men wear sunglasses that are more lens than rim. There is tortoise-shell and gold in them.
On the street, later, two other old men walk past me. They nibble at ice cream cones. One wears a red, buttoned shirt and a cap. He has suspenders. They’re both, of course, wearing rubber-soled Oxfords. They gesticulate athletically and theatrically. Really, all of the Italians seem to: I wonder how they manage not to strike each other with elbows when two conversations pass on the sidewalk.
At a café, the waiter is trim and olive-skinned. He wears a vertically-striped apron over his black shirt. Behind the bar, another man wears clean white. His face is smooth, save for dark, perfectly even stubble.
When I sit down with my cappuccino, a couple emerges from the building next. They lean liquidly along the walls smoking cigarettes and sing a duet of conversation that veers toward tonal harmony. He has large shoulders and no stomach, and wears a perfectly manicured sweater and clean, tailored pants; and, of course, the ubiquitous Italian sneaker of fashionable line yet apparent comfort. He prefers wayfarers. She is wearing a dress that is modest and cleanly stitched, yet can barely contain her. Her hair is a waterfall at midnight. She is bored; presumably of how attractive she is.
As in every old world city, not every woman here is a caricature of stately European beauty. But enough of them are so mesmerizing they ruin the concept of women. They make me think I’m never going to be able to tell any girl I date that she’s beautiful, because now I know what that means. And I don’t think I’m worthy of it.
And, not for nothing, this sort of bedeviling grace isn’t exactly flourishing in Philadelphia, PA. “Bedeviling grace” might actually be illegal under state law, on the grounds it is uppity and “kind of faggy.” I try not to think about Philadelphia right now, and I try not to stare. I am not very successful.
_ _ _
I think about moving more than I think about staying places. I don’t think this speaks particularly well of me. But I think that way. And often, I think about the job I would need for the move: When I consider New York or London, I want to be a suit of some kind. When consider Berlin, I want to be an artist who is actually earning something (or earning just enough to be cool).
Here in Rome, I want this job where you just kind of are a place at like 11am in a blazer and fashionable but worn shoes; being. Whatever that job is, it seems to involve like 60% of Rome’s workforce. Somehow it seems like there’s a way to do it badly, but nobody here does.
Some of the visitors aren’t quite as good at it, though: The Chinese are here, as they are everywhere WeChat Moments beckon. They have conspired as a culture to have less fun abroad than my parents. All they know are selfie sticks and guidebooks. Rome seems to confound them. Yes, there are sites to see – hundreds, maybe – but the Chinese fundamentally don’t know what to do here. Italy’s entire economy is just a bunch of dudes vibing the fuck out. To get Rome, it seems from doing as the Romans, is to see some beauty, then stroll, then simply go somewhere and exist for a while. The Chinese I see take many pictures, do not end up in any cafes, and seem more grim and determined than usual.
_ _ _
If you want to feel very old and very horny, and thus exquisitely unclean, try the following:
- Be nearly thirty, with a birthday fast approaching.
- Live in and around a number of American subcultures with no members past 35.
- Alternately, to combine steps 1 and 2: Find a way to consciously approach social death.
- Experience a good long dry spell. Don’t pussy out at like three weeks: go your entire adult life without consistent sexual contact with anyone; and make sure you’ve had none of even the gray, panting, dehydrated stuff for at least four months.
- Walk the grounds of an Italian university.
_ _ _
I turn around one corner, then another, and amble up and down cobblestones, and suddenly the Coliseum appears: a ragged gash in the pure sky. I’m on the far edge overlooking it, not on the flat plaza surrounding it. There are apartments and cafes at my back.
I have a water bottle, and a notebook, so I sit on stone steps under the sun and stare, and think about a lot of things but mostly think about nothing. Traveling may be easier than ever, but it’s still expensive; even indulgent, like past generations of American feared. But it is these slivers of time, simply existing somewhere new, that are worth the dollars and euros and renminbi. I will spend on wine and food and transport and museums after this, and this moment, which costs nothing, is the one I’ll keep with me in my back pocket when I leave.
_ _ _
Behind the Coliseum, and stretching up from the Forum and National Monument, there is a web of apartments and shops draped over one of the seven hills (do not ask me which one). I walk up and down cobblestone and past homes. Earthy, weathered yellows dominate. The streets, which form a grid in the flats, curl around each other: rivulets through deep-colored rock. Romans stroll to and from somewhere; in and out of complexes. But they are isolated: the roads are quiet and sometimes still, except for scrape of my heels.
I find a café – and maybe “find” is too aggressive a word; maybe I was just walking, and a café accosted me, for the reason that this is Rome. The clock’s starting to pull the sun off its perch, and this can only mean one thing: it is time to find out if Rome has open container laws.
The cafés here usually advertise as “bar,” which makes perfect sense since, liquor or no, small food shops and streetside restaurants all have the same glass bar, and an attendant behind it who I can’t bring myself to simply call a “bartender” – where are the suspenders? The chic glasses? Where is my lecture about the difference between Chartreuse and Maraschino?
This attendant is a middle-aged woman who cuts off my garbage Italian with her perfect English, and is not amused by anything about me. I ask for the restroom, and she raises a Stephen Colbert eyebrow. “You pay?”
Yes, I fucking pay! I look for a table, but the last one is snatched while she dismisses my person with her eyes. So I ask for a beer, and she says they have a large Peroni; and I ask if I can walk with it; and I can.
The size of this Peroni is I think “barrel.” It’s one of those massive 750ml bottles that I lived off in Shanghai; only the beer inside it is good. I can’t help but grin: I’m back.
I head down an alley that looks like it might be a dead end. There’s a path into a rock face at the end of it; I wander through, and on the other side I’m suspended on a boardwalk above the ruins of Rome. The Coliseum is now to my left. The wingtips of pegasae on the National Monument peek over the trees.
I lean against the railing and sip. It’s been a while and I forget: is this what love feels like?
_ _ _
I stand before the Forum of Augustus.
It was built 2,014 years ago. That’s impressive. But the remains aren’t: they’re mostly detached stone punctuated by archeological markers. They’re surrounded by larger buildings and equally famous residue of antiquity.
So the grandeur is in the mind of the viewer. It is in the power and weight, measured in stone multiplied by years, of this sacred ground. And if you believe in history, not as a list but as a guide and the only true link between us and the future, then this is truly sacred ground.
As I walk around Rome, and as I walked around London the day before, I walk around something else. I slowly circle the black, ashed-out pit in the center of me.
I fear a lot of things, but these fears have rarely met politics. Now, after a year saving money and suffering the strictures and koans and pollutants of the Chinese education system, the country I longed for might cease to exist, because of its own fears about ceasing to exist.
My countrymen are trying to burn their own world down; to purify it with fire, as Italians far older than the Romans might have. I stare at the rubble of authority. Death finds us all, and then it find our things: our homes, towns, temples, customs, and countries. I don’t understand this urge to seek Death; to call him, and to say, “Here, take my neighbor whom I hate!” and think, somehow, that he will leave you. Cesar isn’t here anymore; neither is his city.
Conservative Americans believe in history. They believe in it more than liberals at large, even though liberals tend to be the historians (the academy takes a hard left turn; the conservatives are not wrong about that).
The current liberal trend is not simply to deny a set of policies from the right, but to deny an interpretation of history. This sacred ground is of passing interest and no reverence to the id of the American left: it is the femur of an empire’s skeleton, and empires are all carcasses worth note only for their slavery and presumable repudiation of women’s rights. In the ways the United States is an empire, it is necessarily evil. This thought is unspeakable – and, it seems, beyond articulation – to conservatives.
I wonder how often Roman citizens mocked and jeered this place. This now holy place was just a big building in which government happened. We have those, and we all but assault them. We are a historically wealthy, if perhaps fleeting, empire; we spit on the sacred ground. I think this profoundly angers a certain type of old conservative.
The conservatives are the ones, right now, with the matches; they are the children with the gasoline. Yet they are also oddly right: Our American wealth is in our ideas about ourselves, and these are eroding. Not all of them: our ideas about what makes each other evil, less, debased, and doglike remain; they’re stronger than ever. But there’s no vision of American identity to subsume that animal savagery. We on the left have been so eager to find the money changers that we have razed all the temples.
The tallest column of this forum, at the precipice of its steps, looks to be about 2/5ths of its former height. It is gouged by weather to a nub.
_ _ _
I walk.
I walk miles of Roman street and avenue; away from hills and into plains. I see arches and shops and trees and Vespas buzzing like gnats. I manage to find the one poor slice of pizza in Italy. One random Wednesday to all of Rome; all of it but me. I walk with a beer in hand; I sit in shops; I turn back up alleys to see the angles I missed. The hours peel off the stone. The sky is magenta, then pale orange, and then ink.
It’s time.