Saturday, January 8, 2011

If, by chance,

you had a map of Rome to hand, and if you had the inclination, you could see quite how far we walked that day, the wettest of Christmas Days: from our hotel atop of the Pincian Hill, by the Villa Borghese, to the peak of the Janiculum and down the other flank. Easily written, those few words - from the top on one hill to the top of another but, as I say, if you had a map ...

That morning, rather than take the Spanish Steps, we turned left and descended the hill along the Via Veneto, one of the main characters in La Dolce Vita, to the Piazza Barbarini with its Fountain of the Triton. There's a thrill to walking in a city that makes itself known in great baroque crescendos - and there are many such amid the slow marching bands of tourists like, and yet very unlike, yourselves - when passing by the small, closed-for-the-day shops selling pork, fowl, pasta, each with its wares neatly covered in sheets of white paper, a corner is turned and there, its pool rimmed by camera-wielding barbarian paparazzi, stands the diva of all fountains, the Trevi, reduced to being a mere backdrop to photographs of proudly smiling children, wives, husbands, boyfriends, et al. That there might be a place reserved in hell, it seems to me, for the inventor of the phone camera - not mine, you understand, just everyone else's - appealed at that moment to my sense of justice.


From there,  over the cobblestones, surely the most cruel surface for tired feet, via the monstrous Victor Emmanuel II monument, to the the Forum where, wielding umbrellas, we walked its sodden paths towards the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine and, eventually, rounding the Palatine Hill with the Circus Maximus to our left we headed off in search of Bramante's Tempietto. We passed the beautiful sixth-century church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, with its simple twelfth-century Romanesque campanile bell tower and portico, reading too late that the crowds in the portico were there likely not for a service but for the Bocca della Verità in which, famously, Gregory Peck did not lose his hand whilst losing his head to Audrey Hepburn, yet with the Temple of Hercules, its neighbor the temple of Fortuna Virile and the remnant of the Theatre of Marcellus in view, it was hard to notice anything else - even the traffic swirling around the puddled lawn where they stood.





Across the Tiber, swift, swollen, and snuff-colored, to the tiny Isola Tiberina with its church and orphanage, then the Cestio Bridge, to Trastevere where we began what became a gruelingly wet climb towards the summit of the Janiculum hill.


Coffee in, coffee out is a phrase that always brings to mind the mother of an old friend who made the Celt and me as much part of her extended Jewish family as her own children - at least, because of her warmth and pleasure at seeing us, that's how it felt. Well, coffee in it was on a cold, dripping cafe terrace, and coffee out in the tiniest of toilets and the first where I noticed what became an Italian phenomenon, a toilet pot without a seat - not that one could have sat if one tried.


There are moments in Rome when the past, not intrusively, is as real as the day. Walking across the square towards the twelfth-century basilica, Santa Maria in Trastevere, we entered to find the nave flanked with spolia columns, and filled with tables at which sat much of the local community lunching, glumly it seemed to me, and listening to a much-applauded ancient priest, a cardinal I think, propped upright by a younger co-worker. An event as old as the church, perhaps, with deep roots in the community - no echo this of Saturnalia with its licensed overturning of social order but more a confirmation, Janus-like, that so it once was, so shall it be.


The facade of Santa Maria in Trastevere is covered with or, rather, built of spolia - irregular blocks of stone with fragmentary inscriptions - an absolute delight of Roman lettering which since I came home has led me to Nicolete Gray's A History of Lettering on my bookshelves.


Taking a short flight of steps we began the climb up the Janiculum Hill to find the Tempietto which, on reaching the plateau with its Baroque fountain-termination of an aqueduct built by the emperor Trajan, and the Garibaldi memorial, was not to be found and indeed was not mentioned by a single sign. We did find it, eventually, as we turned from the view of Rome beneath us - a column or two, part of the drum, just visible behind a narrow, locked iron-gated entrance to the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio. We had to kneel to photograph the little temple and no bad thing, perhaps, on Christmas Day, to kneel at the place where St Peter was crucified. I wish that gate had been unlocked, but I had seen, however imperfectly, one of the two Roman buildings, each separated by fifteen hundred years and many a sodden kilometer, I'd looked forward to visiting.  


Back down the hill we went, past the Villa Farnesini and on over the Tiber, back through the Piazza Navone and the Via della Scrofa to the Spanish Steps, and up to the hotel and a long, hot soak, and a deep, chilled Manhattan.



That evening, Christmas night, we ate an excellent dinner, accompanied by a seagull on the window ledge near our table - an enormous bird watching all that went on in the restaurant and waiting to be fed under the barely-opened window - at the Hassler Villa Medici hotel. The view from the restaurant out over the city to the Basilica was magnificent, especially when viewed while eating the most surprising item on the menu, Christmas pudding!




Photograph of Santa Maria in Trastevere from here. Cannot think why we did not photograph it ourselves. All other photographs by the Celt! 

22 comments:

  1. I'm astonished at how far the two of you walked -- in the rain! -- but gratified that the Hassler did what it's supposed to do.

    (For the third year in a row, I've resolved: Next Christmas in Rome!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good heavens...I was exhausted just reading about it. A well deserved meal, indeed. Thanks for the memories!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ancient, thank you for the recommendation - the Hassler was superb and we're tempted despite our hotel further up the hill being very good to stay there on our next visit to Rome. Christmas is a lovely time in Rome if it does not rain.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lindraxa, thank you. I cannot tell you how sore my feet were at the end of each afternoon. I was grateful for a bathtub I could actually fill to my neck in hot water.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A perfect post, and one has adored your posts whilst away. Each more poetical than the last. And perfect. We trod the same route this summer, and lo did I share your experience with cobble stones there. Misery. And the Trevi Fountain! I thought I was in a mosh pit when we visited it, or a Cadmus painting of a New York subway Hell, there were so many of us (or is it "them"?) there. We ran to a taxi afterwards and were relieved to sink into a sofa and a martini at the Hotel de Russie's bar only 15 minutes later...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Good morning, Reggie, and thank you. Oh, believe me, its "them"! I cannot tell you how many times I saw people, in Florence for example, posing in such a way that in the photograph they would be grasping, as it were, David's penis! I cannot understand the need to be photographed in front of a famous building or piece of sculpture but it is a cultural phenomenon that has grown in scale since the invention of the camera-phone.

    We had Christmas Eve dinner at Hotel de Russie - following one of your suggestions in a previous comment - and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Hotel de Russie is owned by the same company that owns our Florence hotel, the Savoy.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Ah, Blue, I am happy you enjoyed the Russie when you visited Rome, and that Reggie was able to recommend it to you, a fellow traveler as it were. Thank you. RD

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm exhausted from Googling all your tour stops. This post of just the 10% of the iceberg that's above the water.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Having never been to Rome, I am simply GREEN with envy. So glad you had an obviously fantastic trip!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Terry, thank you. There's quite a bit more to come. Watch this space, as they say.

    ReplyDelete
  11. ArchitectDesign, thank you. It took me a long time - more years than I care to remember - to get to Rome, but having seen the wonder of it all I know this was but the first of journeys there. I'm hoping to go back this year and at a time when the weather is a bit more temperate.

    ReplyDelete
  12. What a wonderful, if not exhausting, vicarious trip I took with you this morning. I was only in Rome once, rather briefly (Roman boyfriend), and have been dying to go back ever since. Even in the rain it is inspiring. I hope I will remember to reference this marvelous post if I ever have the opportunity to go in the not too distant future.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Love the bird from the facade of Santa Maria. And the lettering. And the photographs in general. What a Christmas Day you had!!!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Quintessence, thank you. After two and a half days of heavy rain, believe me it was a relief to see blue skies and to walk without an umbrella. I fell in love with Rome and of the three cities we visited it is the one that will draw me back.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Janet, thank you. I love lettering - in the sixties I learned how to set type by hand from a case - and have never lost my interest despite the plethora of "suitable for the computer" fonts et al.

    The bird is cute and was just one of a number - the one we could get at without climbing the wall.

    ReplyDelete
  16. I think the bird looks like the ghost of Christmas present—all knowing, but hours numbered—what a lovely reminder to enjoy every minute. I think you were made for Rome at this age of your life, able to enjoy the past, make sense of it, find pleasure in it while your cold tired feet are firmly planted in the present. So look forward to your travel journey.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I've just had the time to thoroughly enjoy this. Here I’ve found all the benefits of a beautiful walk through Rome, without the weary feet! I do remember appeasing my youngest’s tired feet in Rome by taking the little electric buses that bump along those narrow cobbled streets, honking at each crossroad. That was a great experience in itself. As for times where the past is real today at Sta Maria in Trastevere,I can’t forget a moment when sunlight shone through a window very suddenly illuminating the golden mosaics of the apse and everything was so different for about 2 minutes. It must be common enough but it seemed so special. But maybe that wasn’t exactly the past…

    ReplyDelete
  18. It has been much too long since I was in Rome but now, after reading this post and admiring your photographs, I feel I have been back for a lovely virtual tour... now, if only I could taste that Christmas pudding!

    ReplyDelete
  19. home before dark, thank you. I found that little bird very attractive - both the drawing and the idea that it had been drawn, scratched into the stone, nearly two thousand years ago.

    ReplyDelete
  20. le style et le matiere, thank you. I did not see the little electric buses anywhere or maybe I might have taken the weight off my very tired feet. I've had those moments when light has broken through and what was hidden suddenly is clear - not always a good thing, I suspect.

    ReplyDelete
  21. W.E. thank you. Christmas pudding is so easy to make - try googling "King George I Christmas pudding" and have a go. If you do, let me know, I might be round with a spoon. The only problem is it should after cooking be stored for months if not a year. Like a wine and fruitcake it gets better the longer its matured.

    ReplyDelete
  22. I love this place, greeting fromBelgium

    ReplyDelete