Where All Roads Lead
My last stop on the grand tour was Roma, a city that is everything at all once, that I keep returning to and then leaving early.
In spring 2007, a group of us from the semester abroad had planned to visit Spain and Greece after classes ended before we headed back to the States. Shortly before the end of the semester, I abruptly decided I needed to skip this add-on trip and get back to the US. I really think I just told the group that I had to get home, no excuse attempted, and I made my way to the Alitalia office near Piazza Barberini. I somehow managed to communicate with them that I wanted to move my flight earlier, and they exchanged my paper ticket and I left after school ended while the rest of my friends shipped out to Greece. I had hit a wall, similar to the one I hit on this trip, almost exactly 15 years later. On Tuesday afternoon, I moved my Friday morning flight to Wednesday morning and I got home a whole 48 hours sooner.
I arrived in Rome on the train on a Wednesday evening. I’d come from Bari, which was quiet, and popped out into hectic Termini Station at muggy dusk. I was feeling an overwhelm, from the emotions of this being my ‘last stop,’ the busy-ness of the city, the heat, the memories of when I’d been there before - what they were helping me figure out and how they were holding me back.
So I spent a lot of time in gardens and walking slowly around neighborhoods. No more sightseeing or forced marching across the city. Just absorbing the surrounds, trying to integrate the experiences of the prior weeks, and also trying to stave off sweat.
The first five of my nine Roman days were spent in Testaccio, packed with really good food, leafy parks and streets, and well out of the full-on tourist scrum, but still close to the center. Then for my last stop, I moved to the Repubblica area, across from the Opera house and close to the train station so I could more easily get to the airport to leave. This was more solidly in the center of the hubbub and I was so sweaty, like openly daubing my face with towels and handkerchiefs and feeling so that I couldn’t even go outside in the middle of the day. As I stayed as still as possible in the AirBnB sipping tepid water trying to figure out what to do when the sun abated, which ‘thing to see’ would be least crowded, I thought…maybe I just go home. Maybe I’ve done enough.
Flower truck I saw one morning across the street from my apartment in Testaccio
Very good colors
Gelsomina, jasmine, spilling over the courtyard fences, lining the outdoor dining spaces of restaurants, the smell everywhere.
hot as hell but damn, that light
More good colors
Roses and their admirers
Appia Antica, which I biked without a helmet