Amare/Odiare

For weeks, I've been making purely mental files.

One for the things I'm loving about being here. One for the things I'm not loving about being here.

The files are starting to bulge, so it's time to commit some of their contents to the virtual page.

In no particular order:

Loving:  a place that wants to be SURE you can get a tube of tomato paste. Just how many grocery stores in the states have even one for offer on the shelf?

Not Loving: sticky weather.  This image is actually from a day that involved real rain.  The threat of rain here is average, I think, but how often it actually rains is another matter.  Instead, it is just humid. 

Loving:  Fascist architecture (if you can - and due to geographical limitations that I don't love, understand that I can't!- watch this recently aired Parts Unknown episode, in which Bourdain shows you some remainders of Fascist and Brutalist Rome, and of course, he eats well). As a researcher of 1930s art in America and Europe, I enjoy stumbling across it here. The layers of Rome are varied in time and quality, but the Fascist era's insistence on buildings that would stay solid and intact for ages remains impressive. The inscription - meant to commemorate the creation of my street - reads: 'Martial valor has advanced the borders of Italy, and a new beauty is shed in our city. In the year of the Lord 1937, first of the Empire.' 

Nope - I don't know why there are little furry animal molds for this chocolate for Valentine's Day.  Is that a beaver??  I'll just go ahead and forsake any responsibility right now for what might wind up in the comments section for this blog entry. 

Not Loving:  extraordinary expense.  Oldest chocolate store in Rome.  Because nothing I ordered for my love for Valentine's Day arrived on time (and in fact, I'm still waiting for it - a fact I'm also not loving at all), I got him special chocolates.  They are good quality, but I can't say that they warranted quite that level of expense. He warrants expense, of course...so that's how he got the proverbial box of chocolates. Next time, may have to get the little animal ones - and order my Valentine's gifts WAY ahead of time, like by Thanksgiving.

And don't get me started on the cost of protein. Whoa.

REALLY Loving: truffles. Some very diligent pigs in Italy's countryside began unearthing these little gems a couple of months before Christmas.  Once I was alerted to truffle season - which begins with black truffles and then progresses later to the white ones - I would buy a little one here and there, enjoy a day or so of a really fragrant fridge, and then use it for a meal.  The one pictured here was my vegetable vendor's last truffle of the season (which ended about three weeks ago) which he kindly sold to me for half price...you can go online to get an idea of what truffles can cost, but let's just say that the largest one I've seen here, which was about the size of an eggplant, cost over 1000 euros. My little friend pictured above was about the size of a very small egg before I started hacking away at him. (And no, he never got a name.  Never name your food.)

And why am I not complaining about the expense of a truffle? Because:  specially trained pigs, a super short season, and they can't be manipulated to be better or more rare.  This is not to say that the market for them can't be manipulated, but whatever.  Mmmm.

Ask my vendor what to do with a truffle, and the answer is straightforward:  shave it over pasta (with a butter or other simple sauce) or over soft scrambled eggs. That's it. You are looking at some overzealous shavings here, but the reality is that a truffle doesn't last forever, so you have to take one for the team.  Hardship, let me tell you.

NOT Loving:  being bloody sick - repeatedly.  I had this rock-solid teacher's immunity for years and years, and save for the rare bout with strep (my Achilles heel) or some other very minor malady, I was the one looking at all of her students and colleagues, hacking and sniffing and looking pale, and thinking, whew, I'm lucky. 

Well that luck has run out.

Dammit.

Compromised by struggles with solid, quality sleep (a new development), I contracted strep just after New Year's.  Two weeks later, I was sick with it again.  And three weeks after that, sick AGAIN. 

The Spouse is on his second upper respiratory/coughy gig for 2017.

I have a theory about why this is happening. And it's not just the business of being transplanted to a foreign place. 

Let's look first at how people are dressed here right now:

Now, let's look at the current temperatures, which have not fluctuated for at least the last three weeks:

I don't know why my location is, according to TWC, listed as Parione, but it is accurate, placement-wise.

And the American University in Rome's tweet, which may say it all:

AUR‏@Life_at_AUR

#RomanFact: While it may feel like spring to you, it's still winter to the Romans...now put your coat back on before you get sick.

Why are we repeatedly getting sick?  As evidenced by the coats and scarves and (seemingly) continuously running heaters in building and transportation interiors, there is a dire (and, to my mind, irrational) fear here that getting or being cold - or even cool, for that matter - will harm you. And it's perfectly sincere.  A friend was once prohibited from sitting in a certain seat at a given table by a maitre d' in a Roman restaurant who hastily explained that the a/c vent would blow cool air on her directly, and this would have grave consequences. He insisted that she sit in another chair.

Of course science tells us that in reality, many common viruses and other nasties love warm environments, full of available hosts who are simultaneously touching everything and breathing on each other. But science stands no chance in a Roman winter.

A recent article tentatively suggests that it could be true that being cold could enhance your risk of getting a cold, but the empty tissue and OTC cold medicine shelves in these steamy businesses full of puffy coat-wearing, scarf-swaddled aliens - who appear to never, ever sweat under such conditions -  tell me otherwise. The college kids I've known over the last few months - who are more like the Romans and less like me (mountain girl, here: please bring on the chilly temperatures, and can they stay that way long enough for me to wear my awesome sweaters for a few weeks?), and therefore better bundled up, on average - struggling to have a healthy week or more through the extremely temperate winter:  the one who got a string of colds and shared them with his classmates, the one who's just getting over mono - yeah, they're evidence to the contrary.
I think that I understand now why much of Rome - and perhaps Italy, generally speaking - is governed by timed heating regulations. Depending on the building you're in, it is quite likely that you will have only a select number of hours in a given day in which your heat will run.  You cannot have your heat on all day.  While costly energy consumption and the reality that you aren't in your dwelling for hours of most days are fair and understandable reasons for this, I would bet a lot on another reason:  given their druthers, many Italians would be most comfortable in almost sauna-like conditions, 24 hours a day, all while wearing woolen and cashmere sweaters, puffy coats (or, to the horror of some, fur coats), double scarves, hats, gloves and boots.
All extremely stylish, mind you.

Loving: small Italian towns.  Since September, I have visited four.  I shot this in the smallest of them, early on a very quiet Sunday.  I was strolling around with a former student, and we had already stepped into - and quickly out of - a small church that was clearly preparing to hold funeral services (the casket was already installed, but almost no people were present).  Minutes later, we saw a number of similarly dressed people carrying musical instruments and assembling around the corner after parking their respective vehicles.  This town is so small and so quiet on the first half of a Sunday that we could hear the otherwise unseen band, playing a jaunty tune, as it ambled through the streets several minutes later. What we did not realize until we finally saw them was that this was the funeral procession, led by the family and the band and followed by ordinary citizens. They were walking an established, circuitous and yet comprehensive route, paying visible - and clearly time-honored - respects to a recently departed community member.
When I look at this image, I see actual texture: old bricks and rocks and paving stones. Warm, worn and rugged. And I also think of other abstractly textural, layered qualities: of the quiet of a town with almost no traffic, the occasional, soft brrring! of a cyclist announcing that they're coming up behind you, the murmur of town dwellers stopping to speak on their afternoon passeggiata, the periodic shouts of children - utterly safe and sans parents - playing in the streets, and the horns and drums announcing the solemn but not altogether despondent mood of a group of people commemorating a concluded life. They've all done this before.  They will continue to do it, too.

Beautiful.

NOT loving: lack of availability of select American programming.

Paying for American Amazon Prime does not necessarily mean that you can access Prime videos and movies when you're not in North America.  When I attempt to watch 90% of Prime's content, this ^ is what I get.

I can see any cable channel's site online and watch teaser videos that last about 2 minutes, thereby only frustrating me further when I find that I cannot watch a full show here - also because of these geographic licensing restrictions. In the case of cable programming, if I don't have a subscription, I'm not as cheesed.  I can sort of understand this.

But I am super cheesed with Amazon, who is happy to take my money and give me almost nothing in return.  

We have foresworn getting cable here, but this business is enough to possibly make us change our minds.

Loving: I am in art heaven. Period.

Every Monday, my Italian teacher asks the class what we did over the weekend, and we are to answer in Italian, of course (we've moved to halting, and in my case, embarrassing, conversational level work in the class <well, in theory> and the instructor never speaks in English unless he has to).  My answers very often enlist the phrase 'veniamo il museo (fill in the name here).' (And that's correct, xenoglossophiliacs (lovers of foreign language), I am not yet past the 'me want cookie' phase of learning Italian, so NO tenses.) 

Lest you think it's been all Italian art all the time....I've been to see an Edward Hopper exhibition:

Edward Hopper, Soir Bleu, 1914, collection: Whitney Museum of American Art
I love this brooding, strangely well-constructed painting. 

Rome has a pretty sizable number of civic museums, which make sense when you consider the sheer number of artifacts that must be distributed among a number of venues.  After years and years of projecting his image on the lecture hall screen, I was thrilled to finally see this lifesize work in person:

Boxer at Rest, bronze, c. 300-50 BCE, Palazzo Massimo alla Terme, Rome

And contemporary art venues also abound here.  MACRO Testaccio is a converted slaughterhouse.

The forms situated between the laurel swags just below the cornice are cows' skulls.

Inside the cavernous space remains the metal railing network near the ceiling, designed to facilitate the sliding of carcasses on hooks from one area to another. Ah Rome - you never try to forget your origins.

At the Chiostro del Bramante (a Renaissance-era cloister <designed by the famous Bramante> - a space designed to adjoin but still keep separate a cloistered community like a convent or monastery with a nearby church), a modern/contemporary exhibition entitled, simply, Love.  (And we were encouraged to take pictures - amazing)

Tracey Emin, Those who Suffer Love, neon, 2009 (collection of the artist?)

Gilbert and George, Metalepsy, 2008, courtesy of the artists and the White Cube

Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, installation (mixed media), 2016 (this is an enclosed installation, with lit glass 'pumpkins' on the floor of an entirely mirrored space, so a panorama seemed appropriate)

In some cases, I don't have to go into a museum.  Instead, Rome is the exhibition space.  Take this sampling from a wild video series that was staged in my neighborhood, using select church facades as big video screens:

My art soul is very, very happy.

NOT loving: bureaucracy!  Yes, I have to sign my name three times whenever I move money from an American to an Italian bank account (the signatures have to do with acknowledging the withdrawal, the transfer and the changing of currency, and the signatures are all on separate pieces of full-size paper).  I know American college students who recently had to perform this important formality - for which they have excused absences from classes - in which they obtain their official Permit to Stay.  This involves going to an office downtown and waiting for hours until they are asked to sign two forms.
And then they are free to go.

Here's our car:

She arrived in early August.

Now, we could have been like lots of other people from near and far who bring their vehicles and just drive them with their original tags, with the plan in mind that if they are stopped, they will feign ignorance of the law. 

Nope.  Nope, nope, nope.  We are believers in rules. 

Before you think this is a heap of self-righteousness, realize that the price we've paid for this belief is a wait of impressive and infuriating length - for the legal tags.

Just last week, we got the new tags. 

And we are still waiting on the sticker we have to have (which couldn't be applied for until the tags were produced) in order to drive in the historic center of the city.  (Not that I want to ever drive in this city, mind you, but the fines for accidentally driving into the historic zone without said sticker are not pretty, and there are cameras designed to capture those violations everywhere) 

Over the last six months (we were prepared to wait about a third of that time for this whole thing to materialize...and we were brazen enough to believe that THAT was lengthy), I would periodically ask:  what's the news on our tags? 

The answers were anything from "just a couple more weeks," to "what tags? you don't have a car here, do you?" to "sorry there's been a delay, because your forms were first filed during Ferragosto (that infernal all-of-August holiday for most Italians, during which the mind-numbing bureaucracy grinds to a total halt and in-progress paperwork often mysteriously disappears altogether), it might take a bit of extra time" to "oh, any day now."  

What it took was the power of the superior of a superior who spent an agonizing couple of weeks waiting for their tags, and their complaint finally spawned our tags too.

Italians are the first to admit that their country is legendary for its bureaucracy. So I'm not really saying anything that isn't already well-known.

But I still don't have to love it.

Loving: street scenes and oddities.

As I've previously said, there are tons of fountains in this city.  Most run constantly.  Does a lack of a lot of rain impact this?  So far, no.  I think that this is because Rome is a watershed - and there are 2000ish year old aqueducts that still serve her. 

One particularly plain fountain in the neighborhood where I do most of my food shopping is situated on a corner.  I've kind of made a game of 'take a picture of who's there today' for the routine times I pass.

This day, the four-footed. 

And this day, the two-footed (but moving about town on two wheels, obviously).

And to close this post, something I just noticed today, when I elected to turn down a street I didn't know and allowed myself to get just a little lost:

This place:  a pure duality of blessings and shortcomings.  Just like any other place you'd call home. 

Voce IV

So, some substantial amount of time has elapsed since my last substantive post, and it's not due to forgetfulness, or being too busy, or any other sorts of common - valid or otherwise - excuses.

I thought about writing.  I thought about it a lot.

I even started a few drafts.  And they continue to sit in the hopper, half-hearted and woefully unrealized.

I could not summon my voice and feel justified in using it - even to describe the banal blue sky under which we all sit, regardless of our literal, global position.

There has been a wall of sound, instead.  A chorus - or a cacophony? - of voices heard from across the Atlantic, so troubled, so serious, so strained and so confused.  So much to absorb.  I listened.  I read. And I'd have fingers poised over the keyboard, and then just let them drop, time and again.

I routinely concluded that anything I might say that was not about current events would be relegated to the status of trivial fluff.  Or worse:  anything I might say would be truly derided as willful ignorance of matters far more weighty than whatever new thing or thought I might encounter on this journey of living in a new place.  I have even felt tonally paralyzed; it would not be acceptable to sound happy or crack a joke.  It would also not be acceptable to complain about minor fodder - daily irritations or strange inconveniences.  I wasn't in a twist about these anticipations.  I presumed that they were natural and justifiable.

Thus, I said nothing because I thought it was the right thing to do.

What it took to get me back on here was prodding from two women who don't know each other (yet share the same name) but essentially know that the world continues to turn, despite pain and grief, despite minor miracles, despite the plodding of every working soul who still has to arise, sip coffee and put one foot in front of the other in order to go and Do Something, every day.

One of them said - to her social media circle, which happens to include me - "...If it isn't personal, it isn't social, and it sure isn't political. I read the newspapers (the real news). Show me your life, not just what you read over coffee."

OK.  Fair enough.  My world still turns.  And maybe you'd like to read about it, because I won't be talking about what I've read over coffee.

I can talk about what I heard while having tea, though. This is my (recent) life.

Valentine's Day is celebrated here also.  St. Valentine's head (well, most of his skull) is located in Santa Maria in Cosmedin, a church I regularly pass by on my bus rides through the city.  Against the backdrop of red paper hearts in shop windows, Roman Catholics (oh, and Lutherans and Anglicans, although not so many in this city, probably) can recite the story of his martyrdom, although there are many versions.  Origin stories for February 14's association with romance vary widely, too.

On my first Valentine's Day in Rome, I sat at my dining room table, drinking hot tea and looking over my online class submissions.  Normale.  And the regular sounds of the city - the cars, buses, motorinos, foot traffic between the Pantheon and Piazza Navona, the chatter of visitors (and their cranky children) walking below my windows - gave way to the growing sounds of a chanting crowd.

This is the view from my window, which overlooks an alley that is usually highly populated with tourists walking either to or from the Pantheon.

What you may not understand until you live in a place like this is that all kinds of protests occur with regularity.  They are planned so well in advance that the police and the city know about and prepare for them beforehand.  I often receive tepid, objective reports from the Embassy - days ahead of the scheduled times - about transportation strikes of one type or another, or demonstrations for various unions and political parties (while many in the U. S. would like to have more than two, it is still dominated by two political parties...here, I don't even know the actual count), announcing the designated location or demarcated path through the city for an organized march, complete with forecasted crowd sizes and the intended hours for the activity.  It is clear that this is a part of life in Rome (or Athens, or name-another-big-Mediterranean-city).  People will take to the streets to make their voices heard.  And other people will make way for them. Voices are allowed. And while they may utter things that get no honor or action, those voices are heard.

Most of the time, you can find out about such events well ahead of time and plan accordingly. Sometimes, you can't. Bus route and general traffic diversions due to these events have put me in a pickle on a couple of occasions; I've twice missed my Italian language class because the bus I always take diverted wildly from its established line and I wound up at the Termini train station instead.  Lesson learned:  it pays to keep your ear to the rail, if there's advance warning to be had.

So generally, that aforementioned city preparation involves the polizia, the carabinieri and other sorts of security forces appearing en masse, brought by handy vans that are longer than usual vans, and they make for convenient barricading devices if there is a need to manage a crowd.

But this past week's Valentine's Day protest clearly came as a distinct surprise - to everyone.  A large number of people marched down my street, blocking traffic.  Their target audience was the Italian Senate, which is on this street.

This raucous noise kept up throughout the afternoon and into the early evening.  

So, what were they protesting? The potential establishment of the Bolkestein Directive, an EU measure that reduces regulations on independent businesses.  So business owners came out in full force, expressing their concerns for protecting the sanctity of their businesses, which were earned and established by abiding by regulations that would no longer have teeth if the path to new business was made easier for other competitors.

The following day, I went to a class in another part of the city.  My bus ride home did not go as planned.  A diversion! I walked to my street, and found it devoid of traffic.  Why?  Ah, another protest!

This one was planned for.  Here is my view:

This protest was staged by taxi drivers who are very upset about the presence of Uber.  Lots of talking through bullhorns.  Some chanting.  But otherwise, a very calm assembly.  It continued into the evening:

This is actually a heavily trafficked (cars, buses and motorinos) piazza on my street - completely blocked by a significant crowd.

See those dapper men in black on the lower left?

They let me walk through their loosely assembled line to take this photo.  And then they would not allow me to return the way I came - so that I could get into my apartment.  I was informed that I would have to take the roundabout way.  This entailed a number of blocks of walking in this circuitous fashion, encountering more security forces who pointed me - again! - away from my destination before I could get to it.  All because it was determined that I shouldn't get closer to my neighborhood, which is comprised of the 'French quarter' of the city (and is always staffed with security) and other government buildings nearby. It took quite a bit of time to get home.

The following day?  More taxi driver protests in the same place.  This time, I was able to charm some security guys into letting me walk down the middle of my oddly empty street and into my apartment building.

The week concluded with a taxi strike; the Uber issue is not going away.  Imagine Rome's two airports - both very busy - with almost no taxis.  And tomorrow, my fruit and vegetable vendor and all of his peers will strike, because the Bolkestein issue is not going away, either.

I visit this stand twice a week, usually.  But not tomorrow.

And on Wednesday, a bus strike.  Awesome.  I don't know why, but it probably involves some trade union issues.  Those happen pretty frequently.

Over dinner, the Spouse and I talk about the complexities of these economic scenarios and others, which are often tied strongly to Italy's membership in the European Union.  The complexities are worrisome and they prevent decisive side-taking - not that I have a side I can legitimately take, as a guest.

This topic seemed like the best one for re-entry into blogging.  Not only is it fresh, it resonates.  Life in a new place can be just as fraught with tensions that arise from similar-but-not differences in ambition. This prompts thoughts about just how fair it is - or isn't - to be prescriptive to or for others.  There are parallel universes where vituperative voices rise in response to real or perceived threats.

It is also clear that whether or not you think a problem is yours, it can become yours.  You are not immune.

And, you are not alone.  The world may not be watching, because it has its own pressing matters, here and there...and there and here.

But it - or at least some part of it - is listening.