Our apartment was a narrow bedsit affair, with a toilet cubicle that miraculously transformed into a shower with the right adjustment. Despite this, for the budget traveller it offered us more than enough luxury. We had our own little kitchen, a bed beside a rustic wooden shuttered window surrounded by geraniums. To find the apartment you needed to enter one of the manifold hidden courtyards of Rome, excluded from outside view by a large wooden door. The courtyard was always very quiet and washed in a warm apricot colour. Once within its walls you would not believe that you were just metres away from a busy main road – the Arenula, with cars and motorcars screeching by outside.
To sit by the window and absorb the sounds of early evening or lie in bed with an amusing Italian chat show broadcasting faintly in the distance, was to feel like a real Roman. Our limited joint funds also added to the charm of our early evenings indoors. I remember one evening Lukas returning home with an armful of bread, cheese and red wine. With the pulp of pungent garlic buds burning our lips and tongue we gulped down berry-red wine and smeared a heavenly, creamy cheese onto our bread. It was simple yet fresh and essential: a Roman feast.
The days were languid and warm. We ended up doing what I always seem to do when I holiday in Italy: indulge in too many aperol spritz, spend too much money, eat over priced food (generally too much pizza) and thoroughly enjoy ourselves. We spent our days winding through the city, letting fate and opportunity dictate our path instead of guidebooks or any predetermined plan. Despite this lack of planning I believe we saw many of the ‘key’ sites – if you can call them that – the wonderful ruined classical landscape of the capital’s ancient Palatino and Forum and nearby Colloseum, the wonderful sunken archaeological playgrounds of amphitheatres, colonnades, the circus Maximus, the sky-lit eyeglass of the Pantheon. For me, the city was so overwritten with different myths and different stories of beauty that it was difficult to disentangle them. Beside a scene from Roman Holiday was the backdrop to La Grande Bellezza, a forbidding statue by Bellinni or a magnificent proscenium or hidden Renaissance basilica that would have been among the most talked about features of any other city, but in Rome was perhaps not even footnoted – just another item on its bounteous list of cultural treasures. Among these landmarks inscribed by ancient civilisations and modern ones, was the ‘normative’ Rome, a city with buildings that look like they have been rubbed with sand or stained with tea. The grilles of Roman window shutters were lacquered in a vivid aquamarine blue. The plentiful counters of the gelateria pullulating with tubs of creamy ice cream: pistachio, stracciatella, hazelnut (nocce). For a few days we forgot our poverty, I donned my favourite dresses, we drank through straws and took as many silly pictures of ourselves kissing before every major Roman landmark as was humanly possible.
As the days passed by our cultural and touristic horizons expanded. We had a very memorable picnic on the steep banks of the Villa Borghese. A wonderful street musician – primarily a trumpeter was piping away at the top of the hill – which obviously pleased Lukas, who was always scoping out the possibilities for playing music on the streets of a new city. We ate what I came to remember as actually my favourite meal of that trip – ironically self-prepared – a vegetarian feast of good quality cheese, sliced mozzarella, with olive oil and garlic, tomatoes, tapenade, ciabatta bread, peroni beers and strawberries. Afterwards we climbed down through the park through a bizarre subterranean passage, to avoid the motorways that passed overhead and speeding motorists. We sought out the elegant curving ambit of the ‘Spanish Steps’ as they have come to be known by Anglophones. The stairway at end of the busy shopping thoroughfare of the Via Corso was heaving with tourists and day-trippers, sitting alligator-like in their five euro sunglasses, smiling up at the sun.
At the bottom of the steps, having had our fill of both sun and park we decided to pay a brief visit to the Shelley Keats museum. I had remembered from my university studies that Keats had died in Rome, following (though not only caused by) some unkind reviews written by Byron and a number of the British literati. The Keats Shelley museum was a shoe-box of a museum occupying just two floors of a small corner flat overlooking the Spanish steps. Happily it supplied its visitors with a lot of useful knowledge and context: explaining both Keats and Shelley’s poetry individually and within the wider context of British Romantic tradition. They were of course very different poets and not even, really, good friends. Shelley’s money and good connections placed him much closer to Byron with whom he was naturally sympathetic, than Keats’s timid, apologetic talent. It was not a very well curated museum – there was too much information about a too-widely dispersed circle of acquaintance and not enough original manuscripts belonging to either Keats or Shelley on display to really satisfy the curiosity of experts, but it was lovely to be there nonetheless. It was also incredible to stand in the room where Keats died – to listen to the bustle of human traffic ferrying up and down the Spanish steps, that must have been his death knell.
It was also quite moving to read the account of how Keats’ friend and companion Joseph Severn, nursed Keats in his final moments. He was the one who was responsible for commissioning the tombstone inscription that must compete for the title of one of the most bizarre and curious in the English language. It was Keats’ retributive death-bed wish: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Meaning of course, “here lies one whose talent was never acknowledged, doomed to insignificance.” As it turned out, Keats’ self-pitying prognostication was wrong.
833 words a day 