by Bill Bryson
I walked through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, up and down the Spanish Steps, window-shopped along the Via dei Condotti, admired the Colosseum and Forum, crossed the river by the Isola Tiberina to tramp the hilly streets of Trastevere, and wandered up to the lofty heights of the Gianicolo, where the views across the city were sensational and where young couples entwined themselves in steamy embraces on the narrow ledges. The Italians appear to have devised a way of having sex without taking their clothes off and they were going at it hammer and tongs up here. I had an ice-cream and watched to see how many of them tumbled over the edge to dash themselves on the rocks below, but none did, thank goodness. They must wear suction cups on their backs.
For a week, I just walked and walked. I walked till my feet steamed. And when I tired I sat with a coffee or sunned myself on a bench, until I was ready to walk again.
Having said this, Rome is not an especially good city for walking. For one thing, there is the constant danger that you will be run over. Zebra crossings count for nothing in Rome, which is not unexpected but takes some getting used to. It is a shock to be strolling across some expansive boulevard, lost in an idle fantasy involving Ornella Muti and a vat of Jell-O, when suddenly it dawns on you that the six lanes of cars bearing down upon you at speed have no intention of stopping.
It isn’t that they want to hit you, as they do in Paris, but they just will hit you. This is partly because Italian drivers pay no attention to anything happening on the road ahead of them. They are too busy tooting their horns, gesturing wildly, preventing other vehicles from cutting into their lane, making love, smacking the children in the back seat and eating a sandwich the size of a baseball bat, often all at once. So the first time they are likely to notice you is in the rear-view mirror as something lying in the road behind them.
Even if they do see you, they won’t stop. There is nothing personal in this. It’s just that they believe that if something is in the way they must move it, whether it is a telephone pole or a visitor from the Middle West. The only exception to this is nuns. Even Roman drivers won’t hit a nun – you see groups of them breezing across eight-lane arteries with the most amazing impunity, like scraps of black and white paper borne along by the wind – so if you wish to cross some busy place like the Piazza Venezia your only hope is to wait for some nuns to come along and stick to them like a sweaty T-shirt.
I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off, facing in, facing sideways, blocking garages and side streets and phone boxes, fitted into spaces so tight that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
I was strolling along the Via Sistina one morning when a Fiat Croma shot past and screeched to a smoky halt a hundred feet up the road. Without pause the driver lurched into reverse and came barrelling backwards down the street in the direction of a parking space that was precisely the length of his Fiat, less two and a half feet. Without slowing even fractionally, he veered the car into the space and crashed resoundingly into a parked Renault.
Nothing happened for a minute. There was just the hiss of escaping steam. Then the driver leaped from his car, gazed in profound disbelief at the devastation before him – crumpled metal, splintered tail lights, the exhaust pipe of his own car limply grazing the pavement – and regarded it with as much mystification as if it had dropped on him from the sky. Then he did what I suppose almost any Italian would do. He kicked the Renault in the side as hard as he could, denting the door, punishing its absent owner for having the gall to park it there, then leaped back in his Fiat and drove off as madly as he had arrived, and peace returned once again to the Via Sistina, apart from the occasional clank of a piece of metal dropping off the stricken Renault. No one but me batted an eye.
Italians will park anywhere. All over the city you see them bullying their cars into spaces about the size of a sofa cushion, holding up traffic and prompting every driver within three miles to lean on his horn and give a passable imitation of a man in an electric chair. If the opening is too small for a car, the Romans will decorate it with litter – an empty cigarette packet, a wedge of half-eaten pizza, twenty-seven cigarette butts, half an ice-cream cone with an ooze of old ice-cream emerging from the bottom, danced on by a delirium of flies, an oily tin of sardines, a tattered newspaper and something truly unexpected, like a tailor’s dummy or a dead goat.
Even the litter didn’t especially disturb me. I know Rome is dirty and crowded and the traffic is impossible, but in a strange way that’s part of the excitement. Rome is the only city I know, apart from New York, that you can say that about. In fact, New York is just what Rome reminded me of – it had the same noise, dirt, volubility, honking, the same indolent cops standing around with nothing to do, the same way of talking with one’s hands, the same unfocused electric buzz of energy. The only difference is that Rome is so wondrously chaotic. New York is actually pretty well ordered. People stand patiently in queues and for the most part obey traffic signals and observe the conventions of life that keep things running smoothly.
Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive. They don’t queue, they don’t pay their taxes, they don’t turn up for appointments on time, they don’t undertake any sort of labour without a small bribe, they don’t believe in rules at all. On Italian trains every window bears a label telling you in three languages not to lean out of the window. The labels in French and German instruct you not to lean out, but in Italian they merely suggest that it might not be a good idea. It could hardly be otherwise.
Even kidnappers in Italy can be amazingly casual. In January 1988, a gang of them kidnapped an eighteen-year-old named Carlo Celadon. They put him in a six-foot-deep pit in the earth and fed him, but they didn’t bother sending a ransom demand until – listen to this – the following October, nine months after they took him. Can you believe that? The kidnappers demanded five billion lire (£2.5 million) and the desperate parents immediately paid up, but the kidnappers then asked for more money. This time the parents balked. Eventually, two years and 100 days after they took him, the kidnappers released him.
At the time of my visit, the Italians were working their way through their forty-eighth government in forty-five years. The country has the social structure of a banana republic, yet the amazing thing is that it thrives. It is now the fifth biggest economy in the world, which is a simply staggering achievement in the face of such chronic disorder. If they had the work ethic of the Japanese they could be masters of the planet. Thank goodness they haven’t. They are too busy expending their considerable energies on the pleasurable minutiae of daily life – children, good food, arguing in cafés – which is just how it should be.
I was in a neighbourhood bar on the Via Marsala one morning when three workmen in blue boiler suits came in and stopped for coffees at the counter. After a minute one of them started thumping another emphatically on the chest, haranguing him about something, while the third flailed his arms, made mournful noises and staggered about as if his airway were obstructed, and I thought that at any moment knives would come out and there would be blood everywhere, until it dawned on me that all they were talking about was the quality of Schillaci’s goal against Belgium the night before or the mileage on a Fiat Tipo or something equally innocuous, and after a minute they drained their coffees and went off together as happy as anything.
What a wonderful country.
I went one morning to the Museo Borghese. I knew from a newspaper clipping that it had been shut in 1985 for two years of repairs – the villa was built on catacombs and for years has been slowly collapsing in on itself – but when I got there it was still covered in scaffolding and fenced off with warped and flimsy sheets of corruga
ted iron and looked to be nowhere near ready for the public – this a mere five years after it was shut and three years after its forecast reopening. This is the sort of constant unreliability that must be exasperating to live with (especially if you left your umbrella in the cloak-room the day before it shut), but you quickly take it as an inevitable part of life, like the weather in England.
The care of the nation’s cultural heritage is not, it must be said, Italy’s strong suit. The country spends $200 million a year on maintenance and restoration, which seems a reasonable sum until it is brought to your attention that that is less than the cost of a dozen new miles of highway, and a fraction of what was spent on stadiums for the 1990 World Cup. Altogether it is less than 0.2 per cent of the national budget. As a result, two-thirds of the nation’s treasures are locked away in warehouses or otherwise denied to the public, and many others are crumbling away for want of attention – in March 1989, for instance, the 900-year-old civic tower of Pavia collapsed, just keeled over, killing four people – and there are so many treasures lying around that thieves can just walk off with them. In 1989 alone almost 13,000 works of art were taken from the country’s museums and churches, and as I write some 90,000 works of art are missing. Eighty per cent of all the art thefts in Europe take place in Italy.
This casual attitude to the national heritage is something of a tradition in Rome. For a thousand years, usually with the blessings of the Roman Catholic Church (which had a share in the profits and a lot to answer for generally, if you ask me), builders and architects looked upon the city’s ancient baths, temples and other timeless monuments as quarries. The Colosseum isn’t the hulking ruin it is today because of the ravages of time, but because for hundreds of years people knocked chunks from it with sledgehammers and carted them off to nearby lime kilns to turn into cement. When Bernini needed a load of bronze to build his sumptuous baldachino in St Peter’s, it was stripped from the roof of the Pantheon. It is a wonder that any of ancient Rome survives at all.
Deprived of the opportunity to explore the interior of the Borghese, I wandered instead through the surrounding gardens, now the city’s largest and handsomest public park, full of still glades and piercing shafts of sunlight, and enjoyed myself immensely, except for one startled moment when I cut through a wooded corner and encountered a rough-looking man squatted down crapping against a tree, regarding me dolefully. I hadn’t thought about this much before, but Europeans do seem to have a peculiar fondness for alfresco excretion. Along any highway in France or Belgium you can see somebody standing beside a parked car having a whizz in the bushes only a foot from the road. In America these people would be taken away and beaten. And in Paris you can still find those extraordinary pissoirs, gun-metal-grey barriers which are designed to let the whole world see who’s in there and what he’s doing. I could never understand why we passers-by had to be treated to the sight of the occupant’s lower legs and upper body. Why couldn’t they build the sides six feet high? If a guy went in there we knew what he was doing; we didn’t have to keep an eye on him, did we?
I remember once watching a man and two women – office colleagues on their way to lunch, I guessed – carrying on an animated three-way conversation while the man was standing in one of these contraptions. It seemed very odd to me that they were talking as if nothing extraordinary was going on. In England, if such a thing as a pissoir existed, the women would have turned away and talked between themselves, affecting not to be aware of what their colleague was up to in there. But then, according to Reay Tannahill’s Sex in History, in eighteenth-century France aristocratic men and women thought nothing of going to the toilet together, and sometimes would repair en masse to the privy after dinner in order not to interrupt their lively discussions. I think this explains a lot about the French. As for the Italians, in the working-class argot of Rome if you see an acquaintance on the street, you do not say ‘How are you?’ or ‘How’s it going?’ but ‘Had a good crap today?’ Honestly.
And at the end of that enlightening digression, let us make our way to the Vatican City and St Peter’s – the world’s largest church in its smallest country, as many a guidebook has observed. I had always thought of the Vatican City as being ancient, but in fact as an institution it dates only from 1929, when Mussolini and the Pope signed the Lateran Treaty. I arrived wondering vaguely if I would have to pass through some sort of border control and pay a steep fee, but in fact the only obstacle I encountered were two dozen jabbering men all trying to sell me slide strips or take my photograph with a Polaroid. I directed them to a lady in a Denver Broncos warm-up jacket fifteen feet away saying that she was my wife and had all my money, and they all rushed off to her and I was thus able to cross the great piazza unmolested, pausing only to attach myself briefly to an American tour group, where I learned the aforementioned fact about Mussolini and the Lateran Treaty and was informed which balcony the Pope would come out on if he were going to come out, which he wasn’t. This was interesting stuff and I would have stayed with them longer, but the guide quickly spotted me because I wasn’t wearing a baseball cap, a warm-up jacket and trousers in one of the livelier primary colours. She informed me that this was a private party, and clearly wasn’t going to continue until I had slunk off.
St Peter’s doesn’t look all that fabulous from the outside, not at least from the piazza at its foot, but step inside and it’s so sensational that your mouth falls open whether you want it to or not. It is a marvel, so vast and beautiful and cool and filled with treasures and airy heights and pale beams of heavenly light that you don’t know where to place your gaze. It is the only building I have ever been in where I have felt like sinking to my knees, clasping my hands heavenward and crying, ‘Take me home, Lord.’ No structure on earth would ever look the same to me again.
I wandered down the wide central aisle, agog at the scale of the place. It is 730 feet long, 364 feet wide and 438 feet from the floor to the top of the dome. But as Mark Twain noted in The Innocents Abroad, the trouble is that because every bit of it is built to such a scale you have to remind yourself continually of its immensity. The four grand pillars that support the dome don’t look that mighty in such a setting until you find yourself backing up to one and suddenly realize that it is fifty feet wide, and the baldachino does indeed look, as Twain said, like nothing more than a magnified bedstead, but it is more than half as high as Niagara Falls. It was only when I looked back down the length of the church to where more visitors were coming in, and I saw that they were like insects, that I had a sudden, crushing sense of just how big this place was. It occurred to me, too, that although the building was nearly silent and seemed almost empty – every clutch of visitors had an area of floor space about the size of a football field – there were none the less hundreds and hundreds of us in there.
I had a look at the ‘Pietà’ – in a side vault behind a glass screen and a barrier that keeps you so far back you can barely see it, which seemed a bit harsh just because some madman attacked it once years ago – then went to the Sistine Chapel and the museums, and they were naturally impressive, but I confess that all visual experiences were largely wasted on me after the spacious grandeur of St Peter’s.
I walked back towards the neighbourhood of my hotel along the Via della Conciliazione and was pleased to find the street crowded with souvenir shops. I have a certain weakness for tacky memorabilia, and in my experience no place is more reliable in this regard than shops specializing in religious curios. Once in Council Bluffs, Iowa, I agonized for an hour over whether to pay $49.95 for a back-lit electric portrait of Christ which when switched on gave the appearance of blood flowing perpetually from his wounds, before finally concluding that it was too tasteless even for me and at any rate I couldn’t afford it. So I thought I might find some suitably tasteless compensation here – crucifix corn-on-the-cob holders or a Nativity pen and pencil set or a musical ‘Last Supper’ toilet-roll holder or at the very least a crucifix paperweight that said MY DAD WENT TO THE VA
TICAN CITY AND ALL HE BROUGHT ME WAS THIS LOUSY CRUCIFIX. But all the shops sold a more or less identical assortment of rosary beads, crucifixes in 120 sizes, plaster models of the basilica and Pope John Paul dinner plates, none of them in remotely bad taste (unless you really went to town and bought a dozen papal plates for use at dinner parties, but that would cost a fortune), and so I trudged on. One of the worst parts about living in the 1990s is that crappy souvenirs are so hard to find these days.
On my final morning I called at the Capuchin monks’ mausoleum in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione on the busy Piazza Barberini. This I cannot recommend highly enough. In the sixteenth century some monk had the inspired idea of taking the bones of his fellow monks when they died and using them to decorate the place. Is that rich enough for you? Half a dozen gloomy chambers along one side of the church were filled with such attractions as an altar made of rib cages, shrines meticulously concocted from skulls and leg bones, ceilings trimmed with forearms, wall rosettes fashioned from vertebrae, chandeliers made from the bones of hands and feet. In the odd corner there stood a complete skeleton of a Capuchin monk dressed like the Grim Reaper in his hooded robe, and ranged along the other wall were signs in six languages with such cheery sentiments as WE WERE LIKE YOU. YOU WILL BE LIKE us, and a long poem engagingly called ‘My Mother Killed Me!!’. These guys must have been a barrel of laughs to be around. You can imagine every time you got the flu some guy coming along with a tape measure and a thoughtful expression.
Four thousand monks contributed to the display between 1528 and 1870 when the practice was stopped for being just too tacky for words. No one knows quite why or by whom the designs were made, but the inescapable impression you are left with is that the Capuchins once harboured in their midst a half-mad monk with time on his hands and a certain passion for tidiness. It is certainly a nice little money spinner for the church. A constant stream of tourists came in, happy to pay over a stack of lire for the morbid thrill of it all. My only regret, predictably, was that they didn’t have a gift shop where you could purchase a boxed set of vertebrae napkin rings, say, or back scratchers made from real arms and hands, but it was becoming obvious that in this respect I was to be thwarted at every turn in Rome.