First bites

I’ve had a busy first two days in Rome.

On Friday night I crossed my piazza, the Sant’ Egidio, to the Via della Scala, where my landlady, Sari has her own apartment to meet up for dinner. We ate New Year’s leftovers, drank Italian red and swapped horror stories about tenants. Her last people travelled from the U.S. with their two cats in tow! Not only did they stay in Rome, but were moving on to Paris and then Ireland. With cats.

Christmas lights are everywhere in my neighbourhood. There is a giant “Auguri” (Best wishes) sign lit up on the Via dei Pettinari, just over the Ponte Sisto bridge, and strings of fairy lights flow overhead all the way down to the Via dei Giubbonari. The biggest controversy is over the mile-long strings of gay-pride lights on the Via del Corso, the busy shopping street that runs from the Vittorio Emanuele monument to the Piazza del Popolo, and planned as an anti-homophobic message following the suicide of a gay teen. The local council, who installed the lights, has battled the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party, who want the lights changed to a patriotic green, white and red, ever since. Tomorrow, Epiphany, will see most of the Christmas lights around the city begin to come down.

 

There is a giant Christmas tree at the Vatican, and another in front of the Vittorio Emanuele monument. And the presepe - the nativity scenes – are everywhere. These scenes (mostly in the porticos of the churches) are incredibly detailed, with miniature piazzas sporting bakeries with their ovens glowing, trattorie with turning spit-roasts, groups of villagers playing cards, or at dinner; and artists in front of their easels, or carving wood, or sculpting marble. You can buy the tiny figurines used in these presepe at the giant Christmas market in the Piazza Navona. There are scores of different styles and sizes, and it’s possible also to find tiny bunches of fruit, baskets, foliage and other dolls-house size décor to make your own nativity scene.

 

 Also from the market, every kid in Rome has a helium balloon grasped in one hand – this year there are pink unicorns, Disney figures and my favourite, Minions from the animated film ‘Despicable Me’. And there are also masses of the witchy ‘Befana’ flying on her broomstick, ready to reward the good kids with lollies, and the naughty ones with lumps of coal.

 

Yesterday I went to see some Caravaggios, that big, bad Baroque painter in the naturalistic style. Even in the depths of murky churches his use of the chiaroscuro makes the pictures glow. I began at the French church near the Piazza Navona, the San Luigi dei Francesi. As its holiday time here in Rome, people are everywhere – and of course Caravaggio pulls large crowds. It took some time to get a good vantage point to see both the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and the Calling of Saint Matthew, and even longer to read and digest the commentary displayed throughout the church. It would be difficult to appreciate and understand the symbolism in these paintings without guidance, although it soon becomes apparent to follow the beams of light to see the real, intended focal points in the pictures.

My favourite painting, further along in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo is the Conversion of Saint Paul, the shiny hindquarters of the skewbald horse displayed (and dominating the painting in that beam of light), Saint Paul sprawled on the ground, looking up in his moment of comprehension. It is even busier in here, with all of us straining our necks, and nudging our way in, to get a better view.

 

Back in the Campo dei Fiori market. It’s the season for fennel, oranges, artichokes and puntarelle, that crispy, crunchy, squeaky-on-the-teeth salad vegetable that freshens up winter lunch. Plenty of time over the next few weeks to find this in the restaurants and trattorie. The Romans dress it with anchovies, olive oil and vinegar and it really wakes up the palate. Incredibly time-consuming to prepare, you can buy a special implement to make short of work of shredding the celery-like bulb (that tastes more of asparagus) into the requisite coils.

 

I’ve been having a few Italian conversations, mainly in supermarkets and museums, with an increasing attempt to use the ‘Congiuntivo’, my language weak spot. So I’ve been thinking, hoping, supposing and believing my way through many conversations to get my head around this pesky tense.

 

Today I walked up to the Quirinale to see the exhibition of Augustus, heir to Julius Caesar, and, in August 2014, dead for 2000 years. Statuary, friezes, cameos, intarsia and even household furniture has been assembled from museums all over the globe at the Scuderie museum and the art is spread over two floors, with a thoughtful restaurant buffet inserted in between. So for 15 euros, you can sit and eat wonderful Italian food, drink a glass of wine and look out over a rainy Roman skyline for a while before climbing up to see the second part of the exhibition. Which is exactly what I did today, finishing this evening with a walk through Trastevere before heading back to the apartment.

 

Casperia

Several weekends ago Jim and I headed out of Rome for a weekend in the Sabine Hills, north of Rome.  We'd heard about a small B&B in this tiny hill town from my brother Chris, who stayed here with his wife Carmel and friends a few years back.  At the time, looking at his blog photos, the town looked like a perfect retreat from Rome -NO cars or scooters, wonderful views over the hill country and an ample terrace to soak up the sun and enjoy a glass of Lazio wine.

From our local train station in Trastevere, its an easy hour to Poggio Mirteto, the closest station to Casperia.  We arranged with our hosts Maureen and Roberto to have a driver meet us (this turned out to be Roberto himself) and set off mid-afternoon. We were on the train and on our way before we hit a rolling sciopero - strike - at Tibertina.  After a hour's wait and a lot of mobile phoning from us and fellow passengers we were on on way again.

The Torretta B&B is an 15th century country house in the centre of the village, which winds around and up to peak at a tiny piazza with the local belltower and church.  The houses are all of honey coloured stone and the streets are paved with more of the local stone.  Its either a steep climb or descent as you walk around the town.

We had booked dinner at one of three restaurants within Casperia, but first we headed out for an olive oil tasting with slow-food expert Johnny Madge, who runs a little bar in the town.  Johnny is an englishman who has lived and worked in Lazio for 30 years, first as a sculptor, and now promoting the fantastic olive oils and wines of Lazio.  His enthusiasm for the local wine and oil is infectious - we tasted a great local white called Grechetto along with mild and pungent oils from the Sabine Hills.

We loved Johnny's bar so much we returned the next night too - there is a convivial mix of locals and ex-pats in the community and it was a great place to meet people and, for me, practice my italian!

Our dinner at Gusto al Borgo was a great experience. We ate in a big dining room of the owner's village house with some home-brewed wine and lots of good warming dishes, beginning with a crespelle with radiccio and sausage and finishing with an amaretti semifreddo.  The house cats joined us for limoncello (four of them) - they were enormous!  There are obviously plenty of leftovers at the restaurant.

Outside Johnny's Bar

Along with some country walks, another great dinner and more time at Johnny's bar, we had a couple of relaxing days out of the busyness of Rome. We enjoyed it so much we know we'll be back in the future, possibly for a longer olive oil and wine tour.

My italian progress

I apologise for a month (a month!) between posts.

Truly, it has been a busy time for me as a language student.  I've now progressed to the top of intermediate italian, which has been an incredible amount of study over the past nine weeks.  At the moment I'm tackling the passato remoto, which any italian speaker will tell you, is an oft-used tense.   I have one more exam to go on the 22nd of this month, and that's as far as I think my brain will manage at this juncture.

At some stage I'll stack up all my language texts from the school, additional bits of printed matter from the many history walks I've taken with Silvia, the museum guides in italian; and the extra bits of material my language exchange buddies have given me and I'm sure it'll be a surprising amount of paper.

Some words continue to stump me and some verbs are just too close in spelling not to mix up, but all in all I can understand most of what I hear, have a conversation with the locals, make a joke in italian and have the beginnings of an italian rrrrrrr in my pronunciation.  This last one is a killer for me.  Try as I might, my "r" sound is disappointingly anglo-saxon.  A bit of wine helps!

So, I'm sure I'll look back on my time here with a lot of love.  It's an amazing city, Rome, for all it's traffic and chaos.

 

Living here in Trastevere means we are in the centre of city, and we can choose to walk over the Ponte Sisto to the Campo dei Fiori, along the Tiber to the Vatican and on to our new favourite part of Rome, Prati (Jim's discovery, and an area he spends quite a bit of time in), or over the Ponte Garibaldi with a right-hand turn at the Largo Argentina to the Campidoglio and the Colosseum.

 

Today we had a bit of a shopping spree over at Prati - a very satisfying pasttime for people under the weather with colds - followed by a late lunch in the Campo dei Fiori, photographed by Jim prior to devouring.  Tonight I've taken a run over the bridge down to Tiber Island, and we're about to head out to our favourite wine bar in Trastevere for an aperitivo before dinner.

 

I have another post to put up on our weekend away at Casperia in a day or two.

 

Cinecittà Mostra - Cinecittà Shows Off

Walk around Rome for long enough and you'll start wincing at the architecture of the fascist era.   Strictly symmetrical, with a focus on utility of design, these buildings present a no-holds-barred functionality with little decorative value.

Under Mussolini's unified Italy, this modernist style was adopted in the architecture of the 1920's and 1930's, with Rome's Cinema City ("Cinecittà") built to this style in 1937.  Originally constructed for propaganda-film purposes, the complex was bombed during the second world war, and following the war Cinecittà became a misplaced-persons camp.

By the 1950's Cinecittà was once again making movies.  Legendary classics such as the Fellini films La Dolce Vita and Casanova, the american blockbuster Ben Hur and Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet were created here.  And in more recent years Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, and the HBO series Rome were filmed here, too.

Friday at noon we finished our last grammar session for the week and took the Metro line A out to the furthest point on the Anagnina line to visit Cinecittà.  Cinecittà lies about 10km south-east of Rome.

We arrived at the studio in time to take a guided tour in italian, with a handful of us standing in the sunlight listening to our guide recount the early years of the complex, the famous movies that were produced by equally-famous directors and how the intricate crafting of movie sets involves construction of massive wooden mounts, covered in tons of polystyrene, gesso and paint.  And also, how the internal sets are created, used, dissembled and stored in the giant warehouses that stand on the boundaries of the Cinecittà.

We had a great time walking over the huge Gangs of New York set (now looking even more dilapidated) and the impressive sets of the Forum and Subura of the Rome series.  Buildings of imperial Rome are painted in the pompeiian colours of red and ochre, with the "ancient" stones of the forum leading into the jumble of the subura, where the upper-storeys of the houses almost touch each other across narrow alleyways.

Afterwards, we walked though the mostra (exhibition) of sight and sound - a long tunnel-like space is covered in moving images on the floor, ceiling and walls from Cinecittà's epic films - ducking into various smaller rooms to see post-production, costuming and internal movie sets. 

We all agreed it was a fantastic experience.  Although we found the commentary difficult to follow in rapid, non-school italian, it was another facet of learning the language and great to see another side of the city.

After catching the metro to the San Giovanni stop, we ended our day drinking Sauvignon Blanc from the Fruili region at an enoteca in Monti, before walking back down past the Colosseum and Vittorio Emanuele monument in the early evening. 


At the Largo Agentina we said our goodbyes to Karina, who leaves today to fly back to Belgium before Juliana and I resume school again on Monday.  Its been great having Karina around and I'm going to miss her.  The great thing about being here in Rome, aside from learning the language and enjoying the city, is the fantastic friendships I've made over the past few weeks.  We all plan to meet back in Rome in the not-too-distant future.

Exams over, normal blogging resumes

Yesterday I celebrated, along with my fellow students, passing exams and moving on to the next level of italian.  We've all had a pretty hectic week of revision, experienced some jitters, and had lots of practice conversation and review of those pesky past tenses, passato prossimo and imperfetto.

By now, our group is able to converse in jerky sentences about most day-to-day things in italian.  Often we mess up the tenses or use the wrong pronouns, but we're all progressing in the language.  And after a couple of glasses of wine after school, we all seem to  understand each other :-)

Last night, by way of celebration, we started off with drinks at the Cul-de-Sac, a tiny wine bar with a great selection of bottles.  Cul-de-Sac is in the Piazza Pasquino, the square abutting the Piazza Navona and the piazza is home to Pasquino, one of Rome's talking statues.

Pasquino dates back to the 3rd century BC, and was unearthed in the Parione district of Rome in the 1500's.  He's been the mouthpiece for Roman residents for over 500 years, mostly being covered with anti-government (and at one time, anti-papacy) satirical poems.  Walk past on most days and the statue will be pasted with anti-establishment slogans and messages.  From the outside tables at Cul-de-Sac, you can face Pasquino and raise a glass to him.

 

After dinner in the truly lovely Via della Pace, more wine, and a mixture of italian, english, french and flemish conversation we headed off home in different directions.  My walk took me through the Campo de' Fiori, over the Ponte Sisto and on to the Via delle Cinque.  It's been warmer and drier this week, and crowds of people were out enjoying the clear night.  At 11.30, some groups of revellers were only just sitting down to dinner, and my local bar, the Ombre Rosse, was hotting up.

 

I had all good intentions of heading over to the Monti district today.  It is a characterful, up-and-coming part of Rome and I've heard so many people praise its restaurants, tiny winding streets and artisan workshops. Monti is located slightly uphill away from the Colosseum and is described as a much less touristed, more "local" part of the city.

 

I took a detour through the Pigneto district and on to the Trevi Fountain, specifically looking for the Ace of Cups, incorporated into the Trevi fountain during construction.  A local curiosity, I learned about it through one of my italian tutors back at home.  At the time I made a mental note to look for the enormous stone cup, created by the fountain's architect Nicola Salvi.  The story goes that as work on the fountain progressed, a local barber who had a shop in the piazza was very loud in his criticism.  Salvi put the big travertine cup in front of Barbershop to block the barber's view (and his criticism, presumably). 

 

Up behind the Trevi, and approaching the Quirinal Hill, I headed back down past the recently re-opened excavations of Trajan's Market.

 

Around 2pm I was getting hungry and the rain started to fall.  Having come out without an umbrella I was getting drenched, and eventually ducked into a doorway near Trajan's column.  That doorway opened into the Enoteca Provincia Romana. 

 

So, the upshot is, I still haven't visited Monti.  But I spent a fantastic couple of hours looking over the excavations of Trajan's Market from my table inside the enoteca while the rain fell.  The Provincia Romana showcases products from the Lazio district (of which Rome is part) - from Affile to Zaporolo, my menu informed me - and a very good lunch, with wine, is 15 euros.

 

Tonerelli filled with spinach and ricotta, sauced with slow braised pork and sage is the best pasta I've ever eaten.  With a glass of light red wine, and espresso and biscotti to follow, I'm in food heaven.
 

Obelisks and Obika

I've had a great relaxing weekend in Rome. The weather has been clear and sunny (albeit cold), and there's been a good mix of study and leisure.

Saturday started with a school trip up to San Giovanni in Laterano, the "official" church of the papacy. One of the great things about my language school are the cultural trips, usually involving some aspect of ancient Rome. These take place every Wednesday evening and some Saturdays, and are usually led by Silvia, a historian engaged by the school. Silvia's enthusiasm and knowledge of ancient, medieval and baroque Rome is fantastic. And her italian is slow, clear and easy to understand :-)

Quindi, Saturday morning saw me crossing the Tiber at the Ponte Garibaldi and haring off to the Lateran for our meet-up. Despite the cold and my lightweight coat, I was almost steaming by the time I sped up towards the obelisk of San Giovanni.

Don't you find the obelisks of Rome fascinating? Trophies of Rome's conquering heroes, 13 of these giants exist in piazzas all over the city. Eight were shipped to Rome from Egypt between AD 40 and AD 400, using specially constructed ships to carry the weight of the stone. The obelisks were transported down the Nile to Alexandria, and across the mediterranean sea to Ostia. Pliny wrote about these ships in his Natural History, and it's thought ships carried the obelisks suspended under the water to bear the weight. 

At 11am, our small group huddled at the base of the obelisk under a bright blue sky and listened to the exploits of the Emperor Constantine - his creation of the original church in the 4th century and his battle against Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge - and the remodelling and enlargement of the  church under Pope Sixtus V, and further embelishment  by Borromini in the 1600's. And we learned too that the Lateran obelisk originally stood in the Temple of Karnak in Thebes before Constantine had it shipped to Rome in 357. Standing first in the Circus Maximus, the obelisk was moved to its present location in 1588. As Rome's tallest, it can be see directly from the Colosseum taking the approach along the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano.

 

The interior of the cathedral of San Giovanni is certainly magnificent but we were all captivated by the cloister. Curved and twisted columns, inlaid with mosaic, line the covered porticos of the cloister, guarded at each of the entrances to the central garden by stone lions and tiny sphinxes. Along the walls of the cloister, sarcophagi, statuary and fragments of columns are embedded.

We crossed over to the Scala Sancta, the sacred steps, and watched groups of people climb the ancient steps, thought to have been brought to Rome in 326 from Jerusalem. Medieval legend says these are the steps Jesus Christ ascended to meet Pontius Pilate. Pilgrims and the devout climb the stairs on their knees as an act of holy indulgence. At the top of the stairs is a sanctum containing an ancient relic, the icon of Santissimi Salvatore Acheiropoieton (or "not made by human hands" - that is, the work of angels). During Easter the Scala Sancta are climbed by thousands of pilgrims who make the journey to Rome.

 

Our Saturday tour was a long one, with about four hours touring the Lateran complex. We had a late lunch on our way back down to the city, afterwards walking down though the late afternoon sunlight to the spot that always seems to be Rome's marker, the Vittorio Emanuele Monument.

 

As always, after a few hours of italian my brain is tired. But on Saturday I was bodily tired too - a lot of walking (10-12 kilometres)! Today has been a relaxing day, with a walk through the Largo Argentina onto Rome's Via Condotti and the Spanish Steps.  The winter sales continue: Hermes, Armani, Max Mara,  Prada and Furla are clearing their stores for Spring.  Bargain hunters are everywhere and the Via del Corso was packed with people.  There were so many people sidewalks were abandoned; most were walking along the city streets.

 

It was all a bit crazy, so for sanity's sake I dropped into Obika, the mozzarella bar in the Campo de' Fiori for a glass of wine and a plate of San Daniele prosciutto and fresh cheese:

 

before heading back for a long and newsy Skype with Jim, followed by an hour with one of my conversation exchange buddies, also via Skype, on my weekend in italian. 

Monday marks the beginning of my fourth school week, with an exam at the end of this week to (hopefully) move up into the next level.

Wish me luck!

It's not all wine and roses, y'know

I'm going to come clean: I'm finding it tough being a student.

I know, I know - you think I'm sitting about in cafes, drinking endless cups of espresso and ambling idly off to school for a couple of hours, don't you?  I can relate to this, because that's pretty well what I envisaged for myself.  I'd just put in a little bit of effort and somehow, miraculously, the language would just wash all over me.

This is emphatically not the case.

For starters, every weekday, for three and a half hours, I sit in a schoolroom listening to, or talking in, italian.  No breaking into english.  No sneakily using the internet to translate a tough sentence (though trust me, Google Translate does not translate; neither does Babelfish).  No opening your dictionary and checking out a word.  And its rapid-fire italian too.  Don't know, or can't differentiate, the difference between ho sbagliato (I made a mistake) and ho svegliato (I woke up)?  Well, avanti! Work it out and move on!

On top of that, there's about four hour's study a day, to get through the set revision and prepare for the next class.

On top of that, there's the need to read as much as possible, talk as much as possible in everyday situations, and watch the news, documentaries, sit-coms, commercials - in fact anything that will help with the spoken word.

When Friday evening comes around, I feel quite liberated.  I excitedly plan the walks I'll take through Rome, the museums I'll visit, the shopping I'll do and the leisurely coffees I'll drink.  I don't do Friday's revision because I'm planning my weekend, chatting with Jim on Skype, or messing around on the internet in a devil-may-care, hey-what-the-heck-it's-Friday sort of a mood.

So I spend Saturday sitting in cafes, smiling at everyone, strolling down to Trastevere or over to the Campo de' Fiori, and having a bit of social time.  Then I realise it's Sunday and a) I haven't done my laundry or any shopping and more importantly, b) I haven't done my homework and it's all a mad scramble again for Monday.

Sometimes I feel like this:

When I want to feel like this:

Despite which, I have to say, I'm loving it. My brain is engaged, and sometimes I can grammatically make myself understood. I actually get a kick out of having a conversation with the cashier at my local supermarket, or an even longer conversation with one of my language exchange buddies. Just today, I talked for half an hour about the concept of dumpster diving, and the adoption of food-scavenging, by the X- and Y- generation middle-classes. I might just nail this language yet.