| Deborah Stott | Letter from Rome, 5 June 2003 | |
 Living room, looking towards bedroom;
windows on
right  View towards St. Peter’s – good shot of TV antennas. My “view” is the teeny spire right of center, the very top of St. Peter’s dome  Romana & Pongo: She works as a nurse’s aide in the oncology unit of a hospital, so poor Pongo gets left home alone and doesn’t like it. He’s gotten better as he becomes familiar with my noises, but he still yaps a bit. He’s 10 and Trottolino is 13 and, as you see, very well-fed. I played ball with Pongo this evening to get on his good side. If he doesn’t like you, he bites your toes.
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I thought it was about time I put together one of these travelogues, though I haven’t even been out and about in the city that much, as I’ve been rewriting the “letters” article and trying to restart the “guardianship” article I left about half finished a year ago. So I’ll concentrate on environs, since that’s all I have. The Apartment It’s very close to where Tammy and I stayed two years ago, but otherwise, it’s opposite in every way. While that one was a bit subterranean, this one is on the roof, with lots of light and air (when there is a breeze – and AC when there isn’t) and a cat and dog next door (more about them later). The building is a typical Roman apartment building – a five-story rectangle with a courtyard in the middle. The apartments on the roof are situated around three sides of it, one room deep, with nice big windows facing in towards the interior of the building and ceilings that slope down from them. You get up here by taking the elevator to the top floor and then walking up a flight. Here are some pictures: the interior shots are what were on the internet and are very accurate, and I’ve added some exterior views of the “terrace” (the roof). Very comfortable and surprisingly quiet. The building is on a very busy street, but you hear very little traffic noise, and you can forget you’re in the middle of a busy city. There are five apartments up here, of which three are inhabited by long-term residents. Mine is the only one rented out, and the other one has supposedly been purchased, but it hasn’t been modernized and isn’t inhabited yet. My land-people (-lord and -lady, I suppose) are lovely people, and they had me out to lunch last week at their home near Cerveteri – northwest of Rome towards the sea. They mostly live there, but they did stay in Rome for a couple of months this winter. Unfortunately, I forgot to take my new spiffy and extremely portable digital camera, so I have no pictures of them or their beautiful home, surrounded by flowers and greenery. They tried to make up for it by taking pictures with their camera, but I don’t have them yet. He (Marcello) is a retired civil engineer who used to work on ports, so he’s traveled a lot and is interested in lots of things, including politics. We were in agreement on the sorry state of the Italian government. I’m really sorry I don’t have a picture, because he’s tall and elegant with a very Italian, ironic sense of humor. Giuseppina is much shorter, blond, vivacious, and very charming, and a wonderful cook. She made risotto with funghi porcini (rice and mushrooms, but very special mushrooms) and roast veal – this was lunch, mind you. And home-made ricotta cake, rather like cheesecake. Tammy would love it! We chatted a great deal, and in the course of it, they told me that they’ve only been married two years. Both had been married before and have children and both spouses had died. They met at a party on the beach, very romantic. What was particularly lovely was that they seemed delighted to tell me about it and to hear from me that they seemed, indeed, like newly-weds. None of that European reserve. I’m really sorry I don’t have those pictures. Neighbors Everyone else up here is permanent. Facing me but on the other side of the roof is a family with two children, who play outside on their “terrace” a great deal of the time. I haven’t really met them, though we say “good day” when we see each other. The other main purpose for the terraces is to hang out laundry, and the poor wife seems to do nothing else. Though I did catch a glimpse of her tonight ironing. Next to them is an older couple who have, I think, left to go to their other place for the summer. I met her, Santina, when she came to apologize for hanging her laundry on “my” terrace. The wind had shifted and the grease from the restaurant on the ground floor would get on her clean clothes. She seemed very nice. My first day here, I quickly became aware of a yappy dog next door, so I got a bit anxious about it. Then one morning I opened up the shutters and was met by a cat looking up at me. Both live with Romana next door, and she’s lived here for nearly 20 years, the last two as owner of her apartment. Her husband died, but she has a daughter with her own daughter who come to visit. This evening was the first time we chatted at greater length. I came in all sweaty from having walked back from the Vatican library, and Romana was sitting out on the terrace crocheting (a pink hat for Mackenzie! We’d compared notes on grandchildren the other day and I proudly showed her the pictures Dave had sent, and she apparently went right to work!) The thing is, up here it’s really like a tiny village. The kids play and yell – not in the streets but on the terrace - the women hang out the laundry and cook, and the men . . . well, I’m not really sure what they do, though someone is practicing guitar. But it’s all outside, as if we lived on a small street. Romana says that they often eat together and she’s good friends with everyone. In that spirit, she suggested that we eat together on “her” terrace tomorrow evening – she’s bringing a pizza home. Perhaps I can find some ice cream. Now if I can figure out how to get her some copies of these digital photos. . . Work and Other Things No one is really interested in work. I’ve spent quite a bit of time this past week trying to regain the ability to connect my laptop with the internet by my Italian cell phone. It worked splendidly for the first week, then zap. It stopped recognizing me. I’ve spent hours on the phone with the extraordinarily polite operators at TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile), who have suggested a variety of things, none of which have worked. But they are unfailingly patient and pleasant and always thank me for calling them, assuring me that they are at my disposition 24 hours a day. That makes me happy. During my last conversation with one, I learned that they are not all in a big room somewhere, as I’d imagined, but in rooms all over Italy. Anyway, the phone part works wonderfully and is an incredible convenience, and I’m taking computer and phone tomorrow morning to a phone place nearby and they are going to try to help figure it out. OK, it’s later on Friday afternoon, and the helpful guy at the phone place couldn’t make it work either. So I kept fiddling, installing and deleting, and I’ve finally made it work again. But now another function doesn’t. I think I’d rather have internet access, so I’m not touching anything. I’ll probably send and receive email principally from an internet place, though, because it’s much cheaper. It’s incredibly expensive to use the cell phone as a modem to connect with the internet, because it’s charged not by the minute but by the amount of data moved back and forth. So that wonderful video of funny cats playing that Sherry sent me last week emptied my phone! To resupply it, you go to any one of the thousands of places advertising “Ricaricards” (literally, phone-charge cards) in a number of denominations of the euro. When I say thousands, I mean it; it seems every other store, of whatever ilk, has them: drugstores, newspaper kiosks, travel agents, my local grocery store, and, of course, the omnipresent phone stores. I think it was Linda who was surprised when I told her that the Italians have been hip to cellular phones for far longer than we have. About every third store sells them, and you can get them about half the size of mine, with color video capacity and lord knows what else. It would be nice if they’d carry your groceries home for you, as lugging bottles and stuff gets old fast. I doubt I’d have been a satisfactory peasant woman in the old days. |
