While Rome Burns, The Locals Have Gone A-roaming

The Age

Saturday August 23, 2008

Kate Holden

Deserted piazzas and civic-minded winos weren't quite what Kate Holden had in mind as she entered Byron's "city of the soul".

TRAVELLERS NEARING Rome in the olden days used to be welcomed with the rapturous shout, "Ecco Roma!" by their carriage driver, and everyone would pile out and point excitedly at distant church domes.

Robert Taylor, handsome in Roman frock in the 1951 classic Quo Vadis, memorably drawled: "We can see Roam frarm the tarp of the hill." The poet Byron yelped on his arrival: "Oh Rome. My country. City of the soul." And Goethe swooned: "Now, at last, I have arrived in the First City of the World! All the dreams of my youth have now come to life."

More recently, my friend opined, "Jesus, you look knackered," as she picked me up, ashen-faced, at Rome airport after a two-day journey from dear old Melbourne. (For those readers who have never enjoyed international air travel in economy class: think factory farming, 12kilometres up. Add force-feeding, sensory and sleep deprivation, merciless herding into cells, sorry, departure lounges, and cunning techniques of torturous suspense.)

"I was promised," I managed to croak, "the sublime." It came, five minutes later, in the form of a 60cent coffee from the airport bar, and the last waft of air-conditioning I will experience in months.

So I arrived in Rome, ta-dah - and everyone else immediately left. The traffic was thin from the start and is now eerily scanty; the streets have emptied, until they echo desolately to my solitary footsteps; the shutters to all the shops have been welded shut like castle trellises; the piazzas are abandoned, major roads are like pedestrian malls, the fountains are being turned down to trickles, and even the little chaps who sell those hilarious aprons depicting Michelangelo's David's genitals have bunked off. Rome, the Centre of the World, seems to have hit the End of Days.

Do I smell? Actually, I probably do.

The reason for the most dramatic desertion of Rome since the barbarians cut the aqueducts? Absolutely everyone, apart from benighted tourists, extremely tired waiters, and intrepid columnists, is cultivating their melanomas at the beach. Yes, freezing readers, here it's summer. I am amazed to discover that I have skin and that one needs to wear things called sandals. I get emails from home lamenting the cold; I simply cannot believe a word of it. Surely the whole world is an inferno, forcing one to lie limply on a couch in a dim room, weakly gnawing fresh mozzarella and figs, and drooling a cheeky little chianti over oneself?

Rome, of course, is still a hell of a nice place to be hot in. Many have discovered this; Byron eventually calmed down enough to quip:

With all its sinful doings, I must say,

That Italy's a pleasant place to me ...

One suspects he'd been reading Thomas Nashe, who, in 1594, identified Italy as a place where foreigners learned "the art of atheism, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry". All of this would have been much to sybaritic old Byron's tastes. In fact, I can't say my own interest is not a little piqued.

Alas, nothing doing. Rome is a spectral city in August: the buildings remain, but the only witnesses are the herds of tourists, dauntlessly labouring over the blistered plains of piazzas, their caravanserai of stupefied children blubbing from the heat, maps soggy in sweaty palms, all of them crazily intent on seeing the sights through a haze of sun so bright it turns your eyeballs to marble and (thankfully) melts the megaphones of tour guides.

Of course, I am loftily above sightseeing, as I've been here before, and am to stay for several months. I know, poor me. I should mention that the part of Rome I am to live in is not ivy-decked, statue-strewn, or cafe-prolific. That part is a tram-ride, or a long totter down dog-shitty footpaths away. My neighbourhood is like the ugly bits of North Melbourne. There are no vine-shaded cafes or museums; there are few trees but many rubbish bins and ugly 1960s buildings; and I am graced with my very own feral supermarket, where everyone seems to be off their medication, murderous or asleep, and the local winos who live in its doorway generously wash the footpaths with fresh urine every day.

Nevertheless, somehow, heroically, I shall make do. Though the atheism, whoring and poisoning will have to wait until September when things cool down a bit. Readers snap-frozen by August chill, remember: on his own arrival to Rome in 1816, that optimistic fellow Shelley had inscribed upon a signet ring: Il buon tempo arriva. The good times are coming.

Kate Holden is on a Australian Council for the Arts six-month residency at the BR Whiting Library, Rome, Italy.

NEXT WEEK ROBERT DREWE

© 2008 The Age

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