Europe > Italy > Lazio > Rome > Articles > Ten Cautions of Rome

It has become fashionable to write about the “10 Best” features of a popular destination; in reponse, for future travellers, here are "10 Cautions" over Rome.

Number One. If you use any Italian railway station, you will catch occasional sight of a luggage trolley. Where it originates is one of the most preciously guarded secrets of Italian travel officialdom and you will never learn it. Your best chance of getting one is to stalk someone who already has one. These are usually elderly people who are entitled to a trolley by papal dispensation and carry on it only a slender cardboard case containing a change of blouse whilst you are having cardiac arrest on the concourse with 56 kilos of plastic Michelangelo replicas and dirty underwear. You must follow these old folk up to half a mile along platforms until they find their designated carriage right down behind the engine and discard the trolley. You jump on it gibbering with victory. Interestingly, when you complain about this aching shortage you will receive no sympathy. Do you mean to say your cases don’t have wheels? No my cases do not have wheels. I use big floppy fabric bags that can be thrust lustily hither and thither. Real men do not eat quiche, drive Volkswagen cabriolets or have wheely luggage. You would think that Italian men, so tightly bound in machismo plastic wrap, would appreciate this but apparently, when it comes to luggage, they think as camp as a trolley dolly.

Number Two. The Rome Metro is not to be approached casually or taken seriously. For most of the time in most of the stations you cannot buy a ticket. Human points of sale are shuttered and vending machines may not function or even exist. You must go outside and trawl the street for a ‘Tabac’ which is a hole in the wall with a sideline in Metro train tickets. It sells bus tickets too. Indeed it is a feature of the Roman transport system that you cannot, nay must not, buy tickets on the system itself. The idea that you get on a conveyance and purchase a passage to where you want to go is regarded as deviant.

The Rome Metro has only two lines `A’ and ‘B’ which intersect at the main railway station. In the world of subway engineering this is not exactly the Tube yet it poses such problems to its Roman operatives that they often just shrug and give up on it. The system is supposed to run till around 11.30pm but from any time after tea, one of the lines at least can simply shut down without warning. This does not just confound idiot tourists. Italians with heavy bags yearning for home in a suburb stand there looking betrayed.

Number Three. At the very best from a standing start, a taxi meter displays an illusory 2.70 euros. But wait a minute - no, a second - and it goes up like an executives’ elevator. A cab that has gone for five minutes in dead clear traffic clocks up six euros. If you have bags that have to be stowed, that is one euro each, wheels or not. If you call for a cab, the meter starts running from the moment the dispatcher puts down the phone so relish the cowboy she calls from Florence who arrives with a hundred quid on the clock already. After 7pm the flag fall is double. The 20 minute ride to the serious international airport Fiumico is, however you wiggle it, fifty pounds before the tip which is aggressively courted by the chatty wheel-spinning slimeball in shades. These are the most expensive cabs in the world, outstripping the Germans, for no very clear reason.

Number Four. Vegetarians, run like hell from Roman restaurants. It does not matter how many TV food programs sport the country as a basket of tomatoes and artichokes. Roman menus start with antipastos of sliced meats or soups so thick they could stop a drain followed by pastas so lusciously vascular, passages will seal up out of respect. Then come the huge hot meats, including beast intestines which the Romans adore. If you ask for a vegetable balance they point bemusedly at the back page of the menu where variations on spinach collect dust. The Italians are brilliant with roast potatoes. They should be eaten and with all Italian food including pasta.

Number Five. Be advised that the three-star hotel that describe itself as being a former ancient ‘palace’ converted to stylish accommodation does in fact have its origins in the town house of a long forgotten destitute aristocrat. It has gone through many transfigurations including, usually, that of a military hospital under Mussolini. The building has now been sub-divided and the pensione is somewhere in the middle floors with many, many steps to climb with luggage. Wheely cases don’t help here. One service to you beyond the room is a breakfast of rolls and tiny plastic sealed circles of jam with cappuccino. All in all, one hundred and twenty pounds or so for a night of Victoria Street Band B by the Tiber.

Number Six. Roman parents and teachers dress small children up in disturbing fancy dress for no apparent reason in the middle of the day. A child will suddenly appear round a corner dressed as Zorro with a painted on moustache and a plastic sword. Some infants, dressed as farmyard animals, will take up a piece of the street and throw confetti all over each other. In the Piazza Nuova one bleak morning, about a hundred five year olds waving plastic hammers were kitted out in paper-mache blocks of building stone. Pile them on top of each other and you could have built the Pantheon from mewling infants. There were no festival or saints days in sight and I never asked the reason for it. It seemed dangerously Michael Jackson-ish to show that kind of curiosity.

Number Seven. It doesn’t matter that the daytime temperature is barely five Centigrade or thirty-five, foreigners go thousands of miles from worlds of Confucius or witch doctors to queue and see artefacts they barely understand. The queues outside the Coliseum are bearable because in this ruin there is little to occupy you beyond ten minutes. Serious mental retards queue, four wide, for an hour to stand on the lower loggia of St Peter’s Basilica dome for a view they could heaps more easily have got by taking a public bus up the Palatine Hill. The most staggering queue is for the Vatican museum which is massive tour bus shorthand for the Sistine Chapel. The sadistic clerks of the Curia open it from 8.45 am till 1.30pm only and dumb Koreans who cannot read the signs line up as far back as Turin all morning and never get in. There is only one way to handle the Vatican. Start queuing at 8am. That gets you in a few minutes after opening and then you should storm down the galleries to the Sistine at the far end and have it to yourself and maybe ten other souls for half an hour. Once the tour groups are shunted in, it’s a disco on a Saturday night.

Number Eight. No matter how cold it is, foreigners are almost impossible to be rid of or ignore. In Florence, they are rich American girls walking high on their heels with their pony tails all bouncy, on a gap year, to punish us with strident Valley girl Italian and wafts of Daddy’s money as they pass. Rome is punished with the Irish who tour as professional Catholics and roil on the Spanish steps by showing up drunk in giant plastic leprechaun hats. Some stay on and run bars screening repeats of Irish rugby victories. Beware of these places if you care about being English or Protestant.

Number Nine. Young single Japanese girls in groups are a special category to beware of because they walk very slowly in front of you in a fog of incomprehension which seems to be causing them piling pain and toe corns. The best way to break them up screaming is to beckon a couple towards “Hey sisters!” say you. “Get this. All this Roman religious stuff you are walking around? Well, it’s all about us white people kneeling down in these big buildings and eating the magic flesh and blood of a dead guy who is really alive and God. How does Shinto match up to that then?”

Number Ten. The Romans do not understand a draft. They probably think it is a beer. Wherever you may be sat down in Rome, even in a well heated restaurant, there will be some half open stair door or some forgotten dumb waiter from the time of the Borgias which will be wheezing through cold air. Doors do not quite fit into jambs. Windows sit floppily in frames. Romans disregard this. I know they did not mean to do it but they very thoroughly killed off a pope. When I was there, every time the bronchitic, arthritic, Parkinsonian John Paul II showed an inclination to get out of bed, they stuck him in front of an open window.

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