Inconsistent Consistencies

The Aurelian Walls were built to define the boundries of Ancient Rome.
Michelangelo's last great work for Pius IV.

Every morning as I head to school through the Aurelian Wall at Porte Pia (and when did I ever think I would write a sentence like that) I am struck by how inconsistently consistent things are in Rome. From day to day things can be very much the same and yet entirely different.

The Number 36 bus at 0845 in the morning can be standing room only or half empty when it reaches my stop. Now that everyone has returned to the city bottle necks are a morning traffic given – but one morning it can be at Via Zara another at Porte Pie and a third at Santa Susanna. I can be almost alone walking down Via Nazionale at 0910 or in the middle of gaggles of tourists and Romans heading to work. My morning Cappuccino at 0920 can be a solitary enjoyment or I can be surrounded by Polizia from the station next door to the school.

Every morning an old beggar man sits on the top step at Santa Maria della Victoria – except once a week it is an old woman and it’s never the same day of the week. The beggars working Via Nazionale are always the same – and not even in the Middle East, have I seen such open displays of severed limbs and diseased bodies – but they change street corners from day to day and sometimes even during the day. And the two gypsy squeegee woman at the intersection of Via Asmara and Via Nomentana (the main intersection nearest the apartment) can be counted on to be there every morning but even they switch corners on a daily basis.

Perhaps I am just noticing these things because I come from a small government town where everything was pretty much the same from morning commute to morning commute – same people on the bus, same beggar on Lyon Street, same bus driver etc. But it does make the time go by on that fifteen or twenty or maybe forty minute stand or sometimes sit on the bus.

4 Settembre – Santa Rosalia

Parolo Inglese? Non! Que fachi?

There are many countries where language is not a problem for Laurent or I – the U.S., England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Mexico, Spain, France. Sure there may be the occasional problem understanding quaint local accents and idioms and often the natives have trouble understanding our mid-Atlantic or Québécois accents – though in the case of the later its mostly done to let you know that you are from a former colony (lost to Britain back in 1763) and therefore your French is inferior to the nasal, English-laced, honking of the average Parisian. But we can get by.

Here in Rome it has become obvious that getting by just won’t do, learning Italian is a must. In the major tourist areas English may be the lingua franca but here in Nomentana it’s Italian. Not that anyone is obnoxious about it – we’re in Italy not France – just that the average person here doesn’t speak English. I do have some vocabulary based on years of listening to opera but the chances of having to scream Ohime and faint into the arms of a fat tenor or husky barihunk (Ohime!) are extremely remote. Laurent has Spanish and there are enough similarities that he can get by for basics. But we are going to be here for four years and frankly Sunday night when we had to explain to the maid upstairs that water from her flower pots was cascading onto our balcony and soaking our guests, basic wasn’t enough.

So starting next Monday (27 agosto – Santa Monica) I will be spending four hours a day, five days a week in a classroom – Laurent will be taking a more intensive course in late September. At the moment we are five in the class – two young girls from Africa, a French chap, an Iranian woman and I. The school, Ciao Italia, has a good reputation and has come recommended by several friends and colleagues. We’ll see how good they are – if they can teach this old dog some new linguistic tricks they are good!

21 agosto – San Pio X Papa