Europe > Italy > Lazio > Rome > City > Articles > Rome: a personal memoir

It would be nice to claim that it was the eternal pull of art and beauty that brought me to Rome thirteen years ago. In fact, it was the toss of a coin.

At the time, I was living in a student flat in Cambridge, getting stuck into that post-degree miasma - sleeping late, trying to write a novel, doing a bit of deejaying, dithering about in a pleasant relationship with a girl who was too close to focus on.

One day I decided that I’d had enough of England: it was time to leave. The pretext came when I met a German girl who invited me to stay with her in Berlin. First part of the mission accomplished: I was out of England. But Berlin didn’t really do it for me - it was like London with Germans. And neither did the girl I’d taken up with.

Cue a phone call back to my on-and-off Cambridge partner who, I had realised, in a blinding flash (complete with angelic trumpets), was the girl for me. Was she still interested? She was, luckily. Where should we meet? Not back in England - it was too wet, too familiar, too full of garden centres and parents. We decided to toss a coin: heads Rome, tails Paris. She tossed it, and it came up heads. Or so she says.

I arranged a lift down to Rome with three young Berliners in a big, battered Mercedes. They were off to Sicily to try to take back a baby the girl had left there the year before, after a holiday romance that turned sour. We had to stop in Munich to get some long-dead part replaced, and then it was on over the Brenner Pass, avoiding the motorways as much as possible in order to save money.

It was just after midnight on the second day when we arrived in Rome: early September, still hot. I waved goodbye to the Germans in Piazzale Flaminio and walked through to Piazza del Popolo, where I had an appointment. I never did find out whether they got the baby back.

Walking in through the Porta del Popolo is the best way to approach Rome for the first time. I’ve always thought that if I’d taken the city from any other side I would have left years ago. Over the gate it says 'Felice Fausto Ingressui' - “for a happy and hopeful entrance”. OK, so they wrote it for Queen Christina, the prestige Catholic convert, in 1655 - but nobody seems to mind if you appropriate it.

It’s the sheer theatricality of the place that hits you first. That obelisk, flanked by four Napoleonic lions spewing water. The symmetrical Baroque churches on the far side, one with a round dome, the other with an oval one, a device designed to tease the eye away from the plain fact that one church is bigger than the other. The two bars on either side of the stage - with the actors’ dressing rooms. In the blue corner, Canova, as patronised by Federico Fellini; in the red, Rosati, featuring Pier Paolo Pasolini and his cronies.

But these were associations I came to later: which prompts me to wonder whether I could ever peel off the layers to get back to that original, bewildering Rome of autumn 1984. For example, I would have walked along the Via dei Fori Imperiali then and thought: Ancient Rome. The Forum. Need a drink of water. Now I think: Nice pizzeria around the corner, run by two Egyptian brothers. This is where I came on the demonstration against the Gulf War with my three-month-old daughter, and got caught up in the tear gas. This is where I first rode my Vespa, pretending I was in a film. There’s the shouting bag lady - and so on.

So anyway, there I was, walking across a practically deserted urban stage set. And there, on the steps of one of those trompe l’oeil churches - I think it was Santa Maria di Monte Santo, the narrower left-hand one - stood the leading lady.

We stayed in a pensione in Via del Babuino, just around the corner from the piazza, run by an ancient couple who tried to make breakfast as English as possible - not realising that that was what we were escaping from. We took refuge in the Bar Taddei just down the road - I still pass by for a cappuccino and a budino di riso whenever I’m in the area. One of the barmen was about seventeen, with oddly white skin and flushed cheeks: not a Roman complexion at all. If you went into a pub in London thirteen years after your first visit, the chances of finding the same staff behind the counter would be close to zero. But the rosy-cheeked barman is still there, as is the ancient man behind the till (he doesn’t look a day older) and the “local artist” who sits and drinks at one of the tables out the back.

And then, of course, came the downside. The search for a flat (foreigners welcome - as long as they don’t ask for a contract), the search for a job (teaching English to petrol executives in a place so far out of town they were still building it), the carta bollata (stamped paper for official documents - and it was always the wrong kind), the permesso di soggiorno or residence form (“What do you think this is”, a policeman screamed at me on one of many visits, waving the form I’d just filled in, “a piece of toilet paper?” I made the mistake of nodding).

It’s not really a city that comes out to meet you, Rome - all that theatricality can seem a bit of a bluff. What it does is to be itself as seraphically as Buddha - knowing that sooner or later you’ll come to accept it for what it is: old, dirty, impressive but unimpressed, beautiful but a bit shabby, frustrating, exhilarating, as innocent in its rip-offs as it is in its denials, nonchalant on the surface but frantically hungry for praise underneath. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

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