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! 

Vin chaud and white lights

It's three in the morning and here I sit, glass of hot vin chaud - the spiced and brandied red wine I made earlier this evening to have with leftover boeuf bourguignon, and it finally hits me that after a more than a week of visitors, Christmas parties, finals, grading, faculty meetings, and yet one more party to come, that it is only eleven days before we set off on our winter vacation. Normally, we would take the winter vacation in New York but this year we going to Rome, a city neither of us has been to. Florence is on the itinerary as is New Year in Venice. Of all the buildings I'm going to see, Bramante's Tempietto is the one I'm most most looking forward to.

Christmas, in its own way, a festival of lights, when in the short, dark days of the northern midwinter fires were lit not only against the cold, holly and mistletoe, the greenery of the old gods, hung above doors and windows, and trees ornamented with candles. One of my most clear memories of childhood Christmases is of a card printed with a snowy coaching scene that because of its metal foil surface and a shred of embossing glinted magically in the light of the fire. The magic of that glint, the glow of fire in a dark room, the blue shadows beyond the slab of light from a window thrown across snow, has never left me. Last night at our condo holiday party the major decorations were large glass vases filled white lights and white twigs from which hung many icicles - to me the most glamouring of combinations, frost and fire. It's good sometimes to snatch a few seconds, just to appreciate how light in the dark is so essential and elemental a condition.

When, last weekend, I asked the Celt what we might serve for his sister-in-law's last-night-with-us dinner with friends he immediately said boeuf bourguignon, gratin dauphinoise and roasted asparagus with a bought-in fruit tart to follow - suggesting he'd hitherto given it a tad more thought than had I. Boeuf bourguignon it was but the odd thing is I realized I'd never made it before. I'd made the Flemish version of beef in beer, slowly stewed beef with prunes and red wine, even stroganoffed filet (the "t" is not silent in this household) with sour cream and mushrooms - in fact over the years I'd stewed a lot of beef but had never done the classic, Julia Child popularized, blogged-about and movie-starred boeuf bourguignon. Well, I made it and I can tell you honestly it was a total disappointment - until, that is, on reheating two days later and with the last minute addition of buttered mushrooms and pearl onions, it had evolved into the most salubrious of casseroles. There's a morsel, perhaps not served well by a second and third reheating, left for lunch tomorrow.

As to gratin dauphinoise, and this is where I recognize the irony of taking anti-cholesterol medication, I like it simple - well-seasoned, thinly-sliced potatoes, layered with cream and lots of garlic (none of the rub the dish with garlic nonsense) and slowly, slowly baked. Simple, subtle, and salacious.


I shall resume posts about connections, circles within circles, next week.