(Piazza Trilussa, outside Freni and Frizzioni during aperitivo)
Aperitivo: This is a wonderful Italian tradition that apparently has been popular in Northern Italy (it has been around in Florence for years, at least) for a long time and is only now making its way to Rome. Here’s the idea: Italians eat dinner late. 8:30 is really the earliest you can show your face in a restaurant and not be immediately marked as touristi. But, bars and enotece (wine bars) open after the afternoon siesta, around five. But, no Italian drinks without eating. Doing so leads to unseemly drunkenness, another sure sign of being a touristi. In order to solve this problem, drinking establishments put out food. Some places just put out some bruschetta and some olives; some put out elaborate spreads, including pastas and slices of pizza, little savory baked things, salads, etc. You can eat as much as you want after you buy a drink (often drink prices are slightly elevated when the food is out).
On Tuesday, Jeremy and I did a Trastevere aperitivo crawl, going from bar to bar until we had eaten enough for the night. We started out at a very hip place halfway up the Gioncolo hill, called Il Barreto. Great music, and a gorgeous terrace that would have had a terrific view if the vegetation had been trimmed a little. I suspect in the summer, that place is just about the coolest around, but it was pretty empty the night we went in, and a truly lackluster aperitivo: only bruschetta, and no plates. Also, the walk up the hill included a quarter of a mile of narrow, twisty road with no side-walks, which felt like imminent death. A lot of Roman traffic feels like imminent death; it makes you appreciate the drink that much more.
Back down the road of death, and on to a unmarked wine bar which our guidebook tells us is called Il Meschita. Great, great wine selection, and a spare, minimalist feel that keeps the tiny space feeling cool. But, again, a lackluster aperitivo, nothing but a mozzarella salad. Finally, we hit the jackpot: Freni and Frizzioni (Clutches and Brakes – it’s in an old garage), a large bar on a hoppin piazza (Piazza Trilussa) with the single largest aperitivo I have ever seen. An interesting tuna and tomato penne (that I think caused Jeremy’s eyes to cross in horror), three or four rice dishes, three or four different couscous (does couscous have a plural?), five or six vegetable dishes, salads, crudités, even a sauce bar. We sat outside on the square with all the people, watching a magic show and talking with an American ex-pat who said he had created a new economic system called “ethical capitalism” that didn’t involve exploitation. Funny how he stopped talking to me when I asked him if he agreed with Marx that all profit was exploitation – or was it that that was when Jeremy joined me?
I really think my single favorite thing about Italy, better than the art, better than the food, is the outdoor nightlife. In Florence, I loved San’Ambrosio bar and square. When we visited Rome last summer, we had an amazing night here in Trastevere, in which the entire neighborhood felt like one big piazza, with everyone eating, drinking, walking, talking outside, wandering from place to place listening to music and people watching. It’s the reason we wanted to return to this neighborhood. It is a little touristy, or to be more accurate, a little too studenty (the big John Cabot campus is just around the corner, and I think there are other campus in the area as well). There are a number of “american style bars,” which means cocktails, and one heinous place called either Deejay Bar or DJ bar, depending on which window you read, which actually has a Wednesday night special, all you can drink fro 20 E. This is a wholly un-Italian idea. Only Americans drink to get drunk in Italy. The central square in Trastevere is Santa Maria, and at night it has all the trappings of Piazza Signoria or Repubblica in Florence: Africans selling light up geegaws, martian spray paint art, people pretending to be statues, horribly deformed beggars, restaurants with menus in five languages and big pictures of their food. It’s a real zoo.
But, get out of Piazza Santa Maria, even 50m, and it can start feeling really Roman again. There’s a bar I like, Santa Calisto, that serves cheap Italian beer (which makes Budweiser taste good) and seems to always have soccer on, and I’ve yet to hear English there. And there’s Piazza Trilusso, where Freni and Frizzioni is, which feels like a more urban San’Ambrogio.
Of course, it isn’t all bad being a tourist in Rome. Wednesday, I donned my best tourist gear, complete with sneakers, and did the Vatican Museums, which are totally overwhelming. Will someone kindly explain why I entered St. Peter’s with bare shoulders last summer, but had to borrow a sweatshirt from a nice German woman to enter the Sistene chapel? I understand about respecting sacred spaces, but the chapel is more sacred than the place where the Pope says mass? So, thank you, nice German woman. Brian, if you are reading this, you are totally right about the Sistene Chapel. The ceiling is so far away, the room is dark, the crowd is overwhelming – it doesn’t have much impact. The Last Judgment has far more impact in person than the ceiling. That human-skin with the self-portrait is surprisingly powerful in a way that never hit me in reproductions.
The Vatican Museums have a lot of stuff. It isn’t a particularly thoughtfully set up museum; every room is crammed with objects, any one of which would be the focus of a room in a lesser museum. The result is that each individual object is subordinated to the experience of the whole, which I suppose is part of the purpose of these palaces – to impress with the wealth, power, and taste of the popes rather than to showcase individual art items. The same with the frescoes. The Raphael rooms are astounding – I actually much preferred them to the Chapel (but then, those rooms didn’t imply my shoulders were offensive to God) – but it was really hard work to make out individual scenes and effects. My eyes wanted to slide over the details, because every room has so many too many details to take in.
The other thing I noticed was how well the classical and Egyptian statuary stood up to this effect. Sure, the mile long hallway of classical heads was too much, but a lot of the marbles had a coherence and presence that draws the eye in and around the piece, so that you don’t get distracted by the surroundings. Even the busy pieces, like the Laocoon or the Nile (both of which I thought were great, great, great), seemed to give my eyes places to rest. Or, perhaps the Popes just had better taste in statuary than they did in paintings. How awful is the contemporary art section?
A final observation on being touristy in Rome: no on is ever happy in a tour group. Whenever you are near the Campadoglio or St. Peter’s, you encounter these groups, twenty people wearing ear pieces following someone holding an umbrella aloft. To a person, everyone in those groups looks tired, bored, harried, and unhappy. I feel horrible for them. You know that for a lot of them, this is the trip of a lifetime, something they have saved for and planned for years. They signed up for a tour so that they wouldn’t miss anything, or because they were intimidated by making the arrangements themselves, or a host of other reasons. They were excited. But there is something about being herded around from one great sight to another, not being able to sit down when you need to or pause when you want to or blow by something that I think must suck the life out of the experience. Plus, I guess many of these groups don’t’ stay in Rome, so they are bussed in from cruise ships or the suburbs, so everyone is tired. That is just no way to travel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the traveling experience. I used to teach a provocative essay by Walker Percy called “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he talked about how our pre-packaged expectations keep us from every really coming into contact with the outside world. We look at the Grand Canyon and see the post card, or are disappointed when we see something that doesn’t look like a post card. We reduce other people to types – I met a real Roman today, or a Jew (see how it’s a slippery slope from here to racial profiling) – and experiences to, well, to blog entries, I suppose. Even when we have a completely unexpected, unpredictable experience, we are so worried that it is “authentic” that we miss what is really going on around us. I see this problem here in Rome a lot, particularly in museums. People walk up, take a picture, and leave without every once looking at the object not through their camera screen. I think Percy is right, and that they are missing something. The individuals in the tourist groups have handed over their sovereignty, their ownership of their experience in Rome to a tour guide, and it leaves them with not much for their time and money.
But I also think Percy is wrong. I don’t think our expectations are the problem. I think many people don’t know how to look at something, or that their situation keeps them from being able to really look at something. If anything, it’s our expectations that make us slow down. Take the Sistene Chapel. Yes, not my favorite, but for so many people, it is the only thing they saw in the entire museum complex, because it is the only thing they had enough context about for them to want to understand it. There is no such thing as an “authentic” experience of the Sistene Chapel – there is just looking at it and having it mean something to you at that moment. Or having it not mean something to you at that moment, which is also a real and meaningful experience. Context, expectations, pre-conceptions that turn out to feel right or wrong, these are necessary mental apparatus that allow us to process our experience, as necessary as our sense organs. Are they distorting? Of course, but so are our eyes and ears (as any good empiricist will tell you). In the end, they are what we have, and it is only our fetishization of an “authentic” experience that gets in our way.
I want to say that I don’t think I’m a particularly good traveler. I’m easily intimidated socially, and even in English I am bad at striking up conversation with strangers. I don’t like being lost, and I get stressed out when things don’t go according to plan. I follow guide book recommendations slavishly. Really, my only strengths as a traveler are my willingness to eat anything and my ability to walk happily for hours and hours. The question remains, what does make a good traveler? I wouldn’t want to be the Texan out to get him some real spaghetti and meatballs (Italians never eat the two together – meatballs are a secondi, while pasta is a primi), but if he gets what he wants and enjoys it, then clearly his dinner is a success. I want good Italian food, but even I’m not racing out to try the grilled milk-fed calf intestines (amusing translated on one menu I saw simply as “typical Roman food”), even though Rome is famous for eating offal. So, really, how am I different from the Texan? As I mentioned in an earlier post, a lot of the pure joy of being in Rome – and there is a lot of pure joy to being in Rome – comes from being near highly recognizable sights. Would it mean as much for me to be at the Spanish Steps, or Trevi fountain (which, Danielle, really is breathtakingly cool, especially at night) if I had never seen Roman Holiday? Certainly they would have meant something very different, and I suspect they would have meant less.
Sorry for the pretentious rambling, especially since I have no great new insights or conclusions. Traveling does this to people – or, at least, it does it to me.
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