Originally Published: 27 October 2016
I'm pining. Much like a certain not-dead parrot that famously pined for the Fjords, I too am now pining for the soft orange facades and knobbly cobbly streets of La Citta Bella. It's not surprising, you always want what you've had and lost, like an old watch, old school friends or not being an adult. So I've figured that the best way of dealing with this pining is to write down my progression through the couple of years spent in the eternal city, in order to enter a state of sweet nostalgia and suckle at the teat of sentimentality.
So, Three years ago (in December) I was on a plane to Rome, thinking to myself what the hell I was doing. I had nothing but a little bit of money in my savings account, a single suitcase full of oversized hand-me-down suits and an overbearing sense of crippling anxiety. Oh and I also had a booking into the 'Movie Guesthouse' a booking I had not made, but was organised for me by my future boss.
Upon arrival at this establishment it was clear to me that at least the beginning of this foray into the unknown for me was not going to be entirely usual. The entire place was a: broken, b:very very small and c: entirely film themed. Not unusual except the owner had really gone for it. To such a level that every surface, wall and window was involved in the decorating of the guesthouse. From the Simpson's room kitted out exactly like Marge and homer's bedroom, with a life sized spider-pig roaming around, to the bathrooms designed to look like you were entering platform nine and three-quarters, with Dobby standing there holding your toilet roll, to my own, bizarrely brilliant room. This room was unlike any I had ever been into, unsurprisingly, as I don't tend to hang out in the props rooms on movie sets.
The entire thing was Batman themed. From the Gotham city skyline outline stencilled around the side, to the dark blue and black nighttime colour scheme, and even the bat-signal spotlight next to my bed with vinyl wall stickers of Heath Ledger's face leering out at me. Most iconic of all in the room however was the life-sized Christian Bale / Batman crouching over my bed. It was always an odd night's sleep there, I'd go to bed safely snuggled in knowing The Caped Crusader was watching over me in my most vulnerable hours, but also I'd wake up to the outline of a man looming over my me every single night and every single night I'd dramatically fling myself across the room to get away from this would be attacker, only to realise it was Master Bruce himself. That was an odd month. I spent most of my time in that room studying Italian textbooks, reading Italian literature (Dan Brown novels count) and eating sliced up pizza from the little shop beneath me, whilst questioning what the hell I was doing.
Alas hostel living is not very cost effective and so as Christmas came around the corner, and Batman got himself a little Santa hat, I started to look for a new place to rest my Tax weary head. I saw many little spots around the city in my search initially for apartments for myself, then shared apartments, then literally any shoebox I could find under a bridge. None none of the above were available. Mostly because I was completely unpaid and so was basically eating up the last of my savings. Luckily, when I was considering asking my boss if it would be OK to simply sleep under my desk like an office cat, in stepped a colleague of mine on her metaphorical white horse. She had a couple of friends who lived just around the corner from our office who needed a new roommate for a cheap 300Euros a month. "Perfect" I thought, my savings may last me a little longer and I wouldn't be reduced to hugging laptop chargers for warmth. So I moved in to what was a reasonably nice 3 bed apartment in the Prati region, where my office was. Although there were 3 beds there were actually 4 of us living there, 2 brothers who shared one twin room and were students from Naples whose family ran a reasonably successful Olive farm (Orchard? Grove? I would google it but I don't want to) and another chap who was quite short and very sweet, smiling and constantly attempting to speak in extremely broken English, with seemingly endless energy.
He looked a lot like Dominic Cooper if Dominic Cooper were about a foot shorter, a foot wider and with only half his teeth. It was a nice apartment, if quaint and a little cramped at times. Especially when one of the brothers (who shared a twin room) had a lady friend back with them. This was always an odd scene to come back to after a night of drinking alone in a bar, as one brother would be standing outside listening through the door to the 'evening activities' until he heard that the deed was done, whereby he would reenter the room to go to sleep. It was even more cramped, however, when Mr. Cooper next door to me was open for business. You see inadvertently I had moved in with one of Rome's most prolific cocaine dealers, which explained where his boundless energy came from. At the time it wasn't much of an issue, though clearly not a great long term plan, but in hindsight it is completely surreal. The number of times I woke up in the morning to find some wired randomer sitting at my kitchen table with a mid-sized molehill of cigarette butts overflowing the ashtray and a little set of weighing scales measuring out fine white powder as I cooked my morning egg was more than any person should experience. Which I'm pretty sure is never. It was not your usual housing arrangement.
Six months of this had me suitably immersed into Italian culture, including some parts I really wasn't so keen on being immersed in, and so I decided it was time to find a spot for me to move on to. Preferably alone, and devoid of drug dealers (strangely this isn't a filter on most house-finding websites). Luckily at this point I was being paid and so with the last of my savings, I was able to afford a little spot all on my own, just off Via Dei Coronari. This is a road which the coronary artery is not named after, despite what I regularly told visitors to my apartment. It's a beautiful, vibrant and stereotypical Roman renaissance period cobbled street with a plethora of antiques shops, overpriced cafes and a strange little bonsai tree boutique that also sold shots of Lemoncello leaning over the pedestrians in that wonderfully Roman way, as though the buildings themselves are trying to catch snippets of passerby's conversations. Now living in London I realise how absolutely blessed I was there, I was living in a reasonable studio on what is the Roman equivalent of the Kings road for an extremely moderate rent, bills included. I'd now have to sell off both my kidneys in order to afford anything like it here for just the amount of time it would take for me to die due to not having any kidneys.
I think I was at my best in that little apartment. I was right at the centre of the action, able to wander peacefully around some of Rome's most exceptional sights with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette leaning jauntily out of my mouth, 10 minutes from the Pantheon, 5 from Piazza Navona, 20 from Via del Corso, the main shopping promenade, it really was ideal for an expat looking to familiarise himself with the city. Even better than all this I had finally managed to make some friends! Yes 6ish months into my time in Rome and I was no longer making small talk with tourists and sipping Amaro on my own, now I was sipping it with other people. I had met them in the back room of a small bar, where I was saying goodbye to my only friend I had made since arriving, who was moving back to Naples to live with his girlfriend. we had been siting quietly chatting when a torrent of noise assaulted my ears and a group noisier than all the choirs of heaven and the percussion of hell combined jumbled, bumbled and tumbled into the room. They sat in a large huddle, almost on top of one another, shouting and laughing in a variety of languages, Italian and English being prevalent. After recovering from the original assault of noise and the mandatory British irritation at someone speaking above a whisper in a public place, I realised that they were clearly having a lot of fun. So as my friend said his goodbye and walked off back to Naples and his ball-and-chain I proceeded to make my most in-eloquent introduction by shouting "Hello" just a little bit too loudly, causing the general hubbub to cease and me to suddenly have 11 faces curiously staring directly at me. It was the best thing I did in my entire time in Rome.
I won't go far into who they were, or the details of what we got up to as it will probably make me sad, but looking back it's safe to say they were the reason I ended up staying in Rome for as long as I did. Long meals with 12 of us singing and shouting in a jumble of Italian, French and English, flinging slices of pizza at each other whilst trying to drown ourselves in red wine, picnics in the parks playing games of catch the salami with a three gallon jug of red from the local petrol station pump, and jocular jaunts up and down the country for touristic and alcoholic trips to the many key spots in Italy made me finally feel like I had arrived. I would find myself on my lunch breaks sitting in the little park next to my office, the summer sun keeping me and my sandwich nice and warm, and my sunburn suitably pink, simply grinning at the way things had turned out, I had rolled the dice and come up sixes.
And that's where I will leave year one, drenched in sunlight and the warmer, rose tinted feelings of nostalgia. Year two will come next, whenever I find the energy to dredge up memories long buried for the sake of my mental health.
P.S. Check out the Movie and Comics Guesthouses in Rome if you fancy somewhere a little wackier to stay than your usual grimy hostel. Honestly I cannot recommend sleeping with Batman more.... (Heh).
http://www.moviegh.com/
Part 2
Well now, memories successfully dredged, mental locks broken and many doors I thought permanently, blissfully shut are now open. That means it's time to relive year two of la dolce vita, to placate my itching nostalgia, and perhaps remind myself in some way of the reasons why I actually left Rome's golden domes behind for the cold grey faces and facades of London.
So we left off when things were going well, summer drew to a close and winter slowly marched in. Well actually in Rome the winter doesn't really march in slowly, it's more of a gut-punch to your belly as you're walking down a dark alleyway listening to your favourite song about sunshine and birds. The sudden shift from blistering heat to darkness and Russian winds is both awesome and shocking, and particularly perplexing to a British person, who is used to autumn gently introducing you to the cold of winter like an owner introduces you to a nervous dog, allowing you to acclimatise to the cold before it sets in. With Rome there is no such delicacy.
One day you're in shorts and t-shirts and the next winter has bitten the tips of your nose and fingers off and you're lying shivering on the floor of your apartment wondering what to wear because you threw out your warm clothes when you moved here. If you're an Italian you put on your mandatory shiny puffer jacket. I swear these things must be government issue because not a single Italian, male or female or in-between leaves the house without putting one of these god awful, unholy, shiny, noisy, tacky, terrible pieces of outer-wear. They are a true abomination to what is usually such a fashionable race.
Fashion qualms aside, Autumn ticked through and my lovely little apartment nestled near Piazza Navona began to become a little more inhospitable. Italy hasn't discovered central heating yet, it's more something that other countries use, not theirs because they have a beautiful hot country full of sunshine aaaaaaall year round. This means that for three months every year everyone simply freezes to death rather than admit to the rest of the world that sometimes it does in fact drop to below 10 degrees. It's an excellent way of periodically culling off the weaker parts of society, the elderly, the infirm, the young and the unprepared expat such as myself. If I'm being honest though the fact that I was waking up with last night's water frozen in my kettle was actually secondary to the fact that I had at long last run out of my savings, and therefore it was unfortunately time to find cheaper accommodation, more befitting of my meagre salary.
Christmas itself was a joyous occasion however, and introducing our Italian friends to British traditions such as maintaining a dangerous blood alcohol level throughout the entire month of December and covering every inch of your food in delicious thick gravy, explained to Italians as 'fat water' (strangely not too popular that one), was both enjoyable and interesting as it made me realise how, despite the overruling theme being inherently christian, and increasingly commercial, the preexisting festivals of each country manage to drip into the scheme of things, changing and altering the way in which we celebrate to create bizarrely different occasions. Maybe one day I'll write about that, probably not though because I'm lazy.
My New years resolution that year was apparently to be homeless, and so I cancelled my contract with my apartment before having anywhere else to live and sent myself into a total panic during my final week of living alone, before on the day of my eviction I found a little spot down the road to move in with a friend, another friend and an astonishingly creepy old man. He was genuinely like something out of 'a stereotypical guide to your classic Mediterranean pervert'. We affectionately dubbed him 'Creepy Uncle' on account of him being the landlord's uncle and that he would stalk around our bedrooms at early hours of the morning or stand outside the bathroom and try to have low wheezy conversations with you when you went for a pee. He wasn't too hostile though, more of a short fat, and slightly greasy voyeur with an excellent Mario bros. moustache. Three weeks of this was more than enough however, and finally I moved into a permanent fixture, what I thought would be my lasting accommodation for the many years to come in my time in Rome.
During the initial period in this new accommodation, around the time where winter thaws to spring, it became apparent to me that I had reached a ceiling with my job. I was caught in a situation where the firm wasn't justified in paying me any more than my current pittance as I simply didn't have the qualifications, and so I had to make the decision as to whether I wanted to stay and study law in Rome, or move back to the UK to pursue other paths. This wasn't a decision that was urgent however, as work was content to keep paying me for what I was doing, and I was content to sit and expand my waistband and so in that beautifully millennial way I simply put my head in the sand and avoided making any form of commitment. This was strike one however, and the idea that perhaps I wasn't staying in Rome forever anymore was seeded.
Strike two came some time at the beginning of the summer. In fact this was strikes two through ten, although it's all a little fuzzy I'm afraid, probably due to trauma. Gird your loins kids, this bit gets a little freaky. So I had moved in with an old friend of mine, and a brother and a sister, the brother was gay (this wasn't a problem, but is extremely pertinent to the story) and the sister was a nurse who worked every hour of the day, whilst the brother worked no hours of the day, but rather slept and made snide comments about dishcloths, as is the prerogative of at least one housemate in every shared accommodation.
This was all very well and good, and the house was nice enough, if a little far from the centre. For three months we lived as a happyish little family, until my friend decided that actually she wasn't happyish and wanted to go live somewhere else. Too many comments about dishcloths I imagine. And so another chap moved in, who also happened to be gay. Again, very much not a problem (the lady doth protest too much?). The problems began when he started bringing his boyfriend home, and my other previous housemate also started bringing his boyfriend home. These visits were sporadic at first, then became slightly less so, then became frequent, and then became permanent. Suddenly I was living in a four bed house with six people, this was cramped as you can imagine, especially with a kitchen the size of a shoe-box's shoe-box, however I was happy to bite the bullet as the rent was deliciously cheap, despite the thin walls.
The really real issue arose when the boyfriends started inviting their other boyfriends home. Quite a lot of other boyfriends in fact, perhaps slightly more boyfriends than would be considered sensible to try and fit into one bedroom. This eventually culminated in me arriving back from work one day, after a long and hard day's taxing, to be confronted with my housemate's door wide open and collection of similarly long and hard limbs belonging to a variety of different gentlemen of varying levels of body hair and physical fitness. Like a scene out of a carry on film, albeit a particularly x-rated one, the toilet next to the door flushed and a completely naked, rather rotund man with an astonishing amount of navel and shoulder hair stepped out, looked me up and down and then asked me in a truly gristly Italian smoker's voice 'whether I was joining', smacking his lips slightly and drying his hands on my face towel. To which I politely declined.
I moved out a week later, luckily the estate agents through which I had found my previous solo flat had one spare they were more than happy to move me into at short notice, and so with a begrudging phone call to the bank of an angry Dad and a sigh of relief greater than all the hairy orgies I had been unfortunate enough to listen to, I was in my own little apartment, just next to the highly popular region of Trastevere and summer was in full swing.
This was when I made the decision that it would be my final six months in Italy. Despite the joys of being in my own place, if I was honest with myself I had very little future to look forward to beyond summer. I wasn't getting any younger, and with my current state of pay and lack of options for improvement within the tax law world, not that I particularly wanted to improve within that world, on top of various other... scarring... occurrences, it really felt like it was time to start setting things up for the next step. Italy had provided all it could for me and I was grateful for it, but it was time to leave before I began to resent it, whilst it still held a place in my heart and not the pit of my stomach. I say Italy had provided all, but in fact come that final September, as the evenings slowly started to shorten and the Russian wind began to pluck the trees, it managed to give me one last surprise in the unlikely form of an American. I won't go into many details about said American because this blog isn't that personal, but a year later she is still a vital part of my life, despite being 3000 miles and a whole dramatic car crash apart. Even when you think you've had it all the best things can still turn up where you least expect them (namely Tinder) and provide you with more than they or you can ever know.
And so I whiled away the last of my days sampling and savouring every last bit of Italy I could, fixing to memory the smell of the streets after a rain storm, the first taste of pizza from the restaurant under my flat, the sight of the Starlings weaving clouds over St. Peters' dome in the dying sunlight. Rome lends itself to sentimentality and longing. Even when living there it was hard not to feel a deep sense of desire for the city, a need to be in it, to walk the streets at night sampling the light bites of street sellers, to pop into little shops selling trinkets and clocks, or to dive into a hidden church to escape a swerving fiat 500 only to find yourself confronted with a Caravaggio hanging in an alcove next to the alter. The sea breeze blowing in from the Mediterranean catching the bakeries and open air markets, the taste of the first glass of terrible red wine from the local trattoria as hordes of bemused tourists spin on the spot holding up the evening traffic, and that warm glow you get when you arrive at a pizzeria on a Saturday night and a table of twelve people cheer your name and make a space for you whilst shoving garlic bread and pasta into your mouth before you even have time for a friendly hello these are the things I remember a year on. The brain is wonderfully adept at forgetting the bad and remembering the good, but I would like to think that there was simply a lot of good to remember about Rome.
And so in a whirlwind of cheap wine, good food, tearful goodbyes and more tearful promises to come back soon, I finally I found myself standing in the airport at Fiumicino, waiting for my gate to be allocated the customary half hour later than it's meant to be, letting out a deep and somewhat shuddering breath, with a little less excitement than I had had almost exactly two years previously standing in Heathrow.
And so ends the nostalgia trip, who knows, maybe one day I'll make it back to Rome, these things have a way of happening, especially if you buy a ticket and get on a plane. Until then though I have some very special memories, the good, the bad and the hairy and they have given me a platform with which to go on to make the next parts of life even more exciting.