Roman Daze. Brontè Dee Jackson
ourselves for our task ahead. Rome is littered with divine pastry havens that serve excellent coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice, as well as sandwiches and freshly baked sweet and savoury treats. Most Italians go to a bar (café) each morning for their breakfast or at least for a coffee and have their breakfast pastry, supplied by the local pasticceria, there. However, the best of both worlds is to go directly to the pasticceria and have your coffee there.
The taking of good coffee and breakfast pastry in a leisurely fashion while sitting down is a Saturday morning treat for my husband and I. It rewards us for the work week we have completed, helps us shift down a gear, lets us catch each other up on our previous week and plan our weekend. It usually takes hours, depending on how big our week was or how much we have to do on Saturday. We often use it as a joint procrastination technique which we willingly enable each other to carry out.
We have our regular cafés, but today we decide to try a pasticceria near our house. The best thing about a pasticceria is the range of baked goods available. There are light, flaky filo pastries and dense shortcrust pastries filled with cream, jam, custard, Nutella, honey, chocolate, cherries or apple in just about every size and shape you can dream of.
‘Are there any of those cream-filled pastries left?’ a woman asks me, straining to see past me as I stand at the counter. She has just run in wearing the uniform of a public street cleaner.
‘Oh Dio (Oh God), I really hope they have them left!’ she says.
She is satisfied and leaves with a finger bun filled with a Piazza Navona-sized amount of cream. I order a piece of shortcrust pastry, thin and crisp, biscuit-sized, topped with sour cherries cooked in their own juices until they form a type of jam. My husband has his usual custard-filled pastry. We sip our cappuccini and, after a decent amount of conversation, ask each other if we happen to feel like another, knowing that both of us will always say yes. This time, we split a flaky pastry base topped with thin slices of apple and glaze. We sip our coffees slowly and put off Il Cambiamento for another hour. Eventually, there is no more putting it off and we head home to begin.
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After labouring all weekend, on Sunday evening we admire the fruits of it in our ‘changed over’ warm weather wardrobes. The next time I am in company, I too will relate the fact that last weekend we spent the whole time doing Il Cambiamento. I too will bask in the admiring glances and understanding nods. I too will feel smug that I have finished it so early in the season and gain satisfaction from being part of an inner circle, in a tradition I once thought of as bizarre.
Chapter 5
Why I regularly need to leave Rome
I feel like getting out of Rome for the day. It is a common feeling, associated with the need to see nature and have physical space around me. This is one of the hardest things for an Aussie to get used to, living in the beautiful city of Rome – the lack of space and greenery. These are things that we see and experience every day in Australia, which Romans do not. Every part of Rome is paved, there are no nature strips, there is no housing that provides private individual gardens and there are millions of people who live within in a small area. There are more people living in my apartment block, about the diameter of two double-fronted houses in Australia, than live on the whole residential block of my former suburb in Melbourne. At least weekly I get an overwhelming urge to go somewhere where I can see the horizon, where there are few people, not much noise and a lot of trees.
Often we spend the day in a large Roman park. Most parks in Rome were once the grounds of substantial royal or aristocratic palaces and now consist of wild woods for hunting, man-made lakes or streams, manicured gardens, tree-lined avenues, pleasure parks for kids, playing fields for football, running tracks, shady grottos and grassy, statue-filled picnic areas. They are a haven for Romans, as they are right in the middle of the city and provide them with a welcome green space to walk, run, play and relax in. Although this makes them eminently qualified in the ‘lots of trees’ category, they sometimes fall short of the ‘few people’ category, particularly on weekends.
Romans also like to get out of the city on a weekly basis. Wherever you go – beach, mountains, ski slopes, parks, forests – it takes hours of sitting in traffic and is always crowded. We have worked out a crafty plan, however, after years of experience. The other thing that Romans do every Sunday is have a big lunch at 1pm. On Sundays, lunch is from 1pm until 4pm, including siesta. So we generally leave our house at 1pm, then leave the park, beach or forest at 4pm. It means we have a relatively, but not completely, people, dog and football free time.
One of our favourite parks is called the Villa Pamphili. It is the grounds of a former aristocrat’s home and includes a stately mansion and art gallery, which is open to visitors. The grounds are miles wide and deep, and there is the possibility of getting lost in them. It consists of walking paths ringed with magnificent laurel trees, an entrance park that is cool and windy even on the hottest days, a formal garden filled with rockeries, fountains, marble-carved benches, a lawn, running tracks with outdoor equipment for exercising, long wild grass and pine trees.
The deeper you go into the park the less people there are, but by Australian standards it is still packed to the gills. Every ten or so metres sits a small clump of people, complete with blankets, food, footballs, bikes, books and music. Some loners are set up with beach towels, bikinis and suntan oil, and some couples are in the long grass and do not want any attention.
I am still mesmerised when I come across this – naked or semi-naked couples on a blanket hidden only by long grass or behind trees so that you don’t notice they are there until you are nearly on top of them and have to quickly look away. When this happens, my husband calmly steers me in the other direction while I am left gaping and pointing and switching quickly to English so no-one understands me.
‘Did ... did you see that?’ I always stammer, pointing.
‘Yes, yes, leave them alone,’ my husband always responds.
‘But ... but how can they do that out in the open like that when anyone can come across them?’ I say.
Then he patiently explains to me that because most people who aren’t married, and some who are, still live at home and share bedrooms with siblings, couples don’t have anywhere else to go.
This use of a public space for very private couplings is a timeless Italian tradition; it is respected and understood. Couples rely on people turning their heads rather than gawking, thereby ensuring their relative privacy. I am constantly amazed by it, however, and amazed at my husband, who notices these things usually before I do and whose reaction is to not look any further. My reaction is to clarify, by repeated attempts at sighting, what I think I have just seen.
Cars are the most popular alternative venue for couples, and old-fashioned ‘parking’ occurs most Saturday nights and all day Sunday. It is common to see cars with newspaper covering up the windows on the inside, thereby assuring a modicum of privacy, while at the same time announcing to all what is happening on the inside. One Sunday, as we were driving past a small field in the countryside, we saw a mini cooper parked in the middle of it. It was completely covered by a floral bedspread, flung over it from the outside.
My husband’s favourite pastime as an adolescent was to go to the local parking lot by the sea on a Saturday night, when cars were parked bumper-to-bumper in the dark. He and his cousin would creep alongside one, then jump up and shine a torch through the window and run away, usually to the sounds of threats and screaming. It was not long, however, before he was joining the rows of cars ‘parking’. He told me that sometimes he would have to circle for ages to find a space.
* * *
This Sunday, instead of going to our local park, we feel the need for more than just the usual respite from the city. We feel the need to actually leave the city. We do not want to drive very far, firstly because that would necessitate getting up earlier, and secondly because we do not want to sit in traffic jams for hours, thereby negating the benefits of the relaxation gained from leaving the city. So we head for a place called Veio, which does not exist any longer. I am intrigued by the fact that