I’ve been in enough airplanes now that I’ve gained an innate sense of what they are doing. I can feel subtle changes in speed and elevation.
“We are about to start our decent,” I tell my husband on our flight from Rome to Paris. The first of three flights to return us to Bend, Oregon. Home.
“You’re lying,” he counters, not trusting my intuition.
At that moment the steward crackles over the loudspeakers, first in French and, then, in broken English announcing our descent. I was right. I trust this intuition, this knowing.
I want to have this same innate sense with language.
I do not want to stare, dumbfounded, as a guy gesticulates at me in rapid Italian over the parking meter.
Am I being yelled at because it is Sunday and I am too stupid to know not to feed the meter? Americana!
Is that why the people across the street have now joined in and are waggling their fingers at me?
Or have we inadvertently parked in a restricted zone? Or committed some other unknown Italian atrocity?
I stare blankly at this man with tear pricked eyes. “Non capisco,” I stammer, unsure even in my pronunciation of that simple phrase. I do not understand.
The man continues to berate me – for what I do not know.
I give up and stomp back to our car waving my own hands in frustration. I wipe away tears and we elect to park someplace different. Someplace without gesticulating men.
But the truth is – I am not angry with this man. Rather I am angry with myself.
This. This is a country that I love. And a place I’ve visited more than a few times now. I should know the language. If only I’d made the time.
Rome, in ways that I cannot explain, feels like home. Like coming home. This from a girl who grew up in a small town in the Mojave Desert. The Eternal City is a far cry from lizards and snakes and tumbleweeds. Nor does it resemble the mountains and rivers of Oregon.
Rome is the city of Caesar and Cleopatra and Galileo. The city of Michalangelo and Bernini. It is a city of lights and history. Domes, cathedrals and bells. Popes and Vaticans. Espressi and cappuccini. The sound of tinkling glassware pouring out shuttered windows as you lose yourself in history soaked streets.
I’ve been to Rome three times now. Short stints in what will never be enough time.
I first visited Italy as a teenager. Brought on a whirlwind European tour with my parents and grandmother. My parents were hesitant to enter Italy. Italian men hit on young girls. There are pickpockets. And people who will smash the rear window of your car to steal your video recorder.
Despite my parent’s reticence I spent my eighteenth birthday eating gelato somewhere in the North near the border of other, safer, countries. Pistacchio gelato if I recall correctly, a book held tightly in my other hand.
Side note: I still always travel with a book. Though I have leaned into digital reading as of late.
I first had the privilege of visiting Rome in 2007 – eighteen years after my initial foray onto Italian soil. A late September trip with my husband. An anniversary or birthday or some other combination of celebrations. In other words – an excuse to travel.
Honestly I’d rather travel than have a lavish party any day. For any big event buy me a plane ticket and a AirBnB and I will be content.
We’d left the kids at home during our 2007 trip; our first time being away from them for an extended period of time. The kids were just old enough and my parents just young enough for this combination to work. My father’s Parkinson’s had begun to rear its ugly head.
In 2007, while staying at our house, my parents bought us a new television. We had been using their hand-me-down tv with rabbit ears and this, especially to my mother, was an atrocity.
My mother is a technocrat and could not fathom our lack of technological desire (hint: our money went to travel).
Thus my parents hauled the kids to Costco and bought a new tv. For the record we still have that same television some fifteen years later with no plans to replace it.
For my husband and I’s first trip to Rome we’d brought a little prepaid cell phone. A flip phone where you had to push three buttons to get the letter you wanted to send a text. I’d never really texted before and tried to send one to my mother when we landed. I failed miserably and called instead – eating the international charge.
Phones, back then, were not pocket computers. The iPhone had just been introduced and we were not yet on that band wagon. Of course on this latest trip I paid fifteen extra dollars a day so my husband and I could use our phones as normal. At this point we can afford it.
Phone service allows us to keep in touch with the kids who are now “theoretical adults.” We’d left them in charge of the house, the pets and themselves. And texting was (is) an imperative form of communication with this generation.
But I’m not going to lie – I also wanted our phones to peruse the internet. We might be in the Eternal City but the internet has, for better or worse, captured our minds and imaginations.
But back to Rome.
What is it about this city? The ancient streets. The patina of the walls. The domes. The church bells. The tink tink of glassware. The roar of a motorcycle. A whiff of exhaust. The wah wah wah of a European ambulance. The perfume of pasta and fresh-baked breads. The taste of a homegrown tomato sprinkled with sea salt harvested from a nearby bay.
Had I known what tomatoes really tasted like until I was thirty-five years old? No. I had not.
Tomatoes are not the waxy pale version of fruit displayed in brightly lit American supermarkets.
No. Tomatoes are juicy and tangy. They meld with olive oil. They spark with salt. They pop in your mouth and tickle your taste buds. They taste like the earth and pungent flowers and salt from the sea.
In Rome we also obtained proper coffee etiquette. Cappuccinos until ten am. Espresso after that.
We learned to drink our coffee standing at the bar – getting us the price of the locals rather than the upcharge tourists pay for table service.
Back in the day we ordered our coffees in awful Italian – fantasizing that we’d be mistaken as local despite our stumbling language, Rick Steves Guidebook, and American garb.
Now, in 2022, our language is *slightly* better. We order due cappuccini where previously we’d have said due cappuccinos; a subtle but important difference.
After a long lunch or dinner we order due caffè rather than due espressi. Drip coffee doesn’t exist in Italy except as an americano. If you order coffee espresso is a given.
We’ve gained baby steps in understanding and language. But – I can’t help but wonder. What if?
What if I’d started studying Italian back in 2007, after that initial trip. Truly studying it. I’d be fluent by now. Or nearly.
Of course I was working and taxiing kids and raising a family. Planning meals, Cooking dinners. Doing laundry. Feeding pets. Paying bills. Pulling overnight shifts.
Time. Time was (and is) precious. And I didn’t make the time.
I’m fifty now. But age does not compute in the recesses of my mind. Wandering the streets of Rome I revert back to fantasy.
I want to be a student again. Young and capricious. I want to study language and literature. I want to put on a dress and spin through a piazza and eat pizza and pasta without worry or care. I want to sip wine on a balcony, my feet on the railing, and pretend that I am, in fact, the main character.
I want no responsibility other than to learn and to explore. I want extended periods of time for my mind and body to wander.
I wonder if there are mid-life scholarships for “older” folks. Ones that allow us a sabbatical to dive deep into history and culture and language. Into food and art.
I wonder if someone might want to sponsor my family for a year in Rome so we could wander in wonder. Spinning and twirling, gazing at fountains and pinnacles and down crooked cobbled streets.
But then, I realize, a year would not be enough. A lifetime would not be enough. It never will be enough.
So I must do my best to take it all in. These little snippets that sit before me.
A sunset view of cupolas and cathedrals here. A plate of cacio de pepe there. A tomato. An artichoke. A zucchini blossom delicately fried. A glass of wine drunk in a piazza as the town strolls by. The flower vendor hawking the tiniest lemon tree. A girl smoking a cigarette while leaning against the graffiti. Salumeria windows piled with meats. The Tiber slowly drifting as church bells ring.
Me standing on travertine stairs worn smooth from hundreds of thousands of feet. My feet where so many others have been. I pause and trace my shoe across the indentation, the place where so many others have walked and resist the urge to reach down and stroke the step with my hands or to take my shoes off and stand barefoot on the stone. The sun is warm across my back and, despite my rubber soles, history rises up through my feet.
I am but one of many. Tracing the path of so many others. A small cog in the wheel that is Rome.
Shalet Abraham Writes 