Italy Part 5: Out of town

The view from the hill-top village of Selci

Charles Dickens writes enthusiastically of the trips he made out of Rome into the countryside. He could have said just the same thing today. We did three great jaunts, all in a northerly direction: to Viterbo, to Anguillara (by Lago di Bracciano), and to a friend’s house at Selci, in Sabino. Having arrived on the local train at Fara, our friend Giles (he’s English, with an Italian partner) took us to look at the hill village of Poggio Catino – not a tourist to be seen (apart from us of course), and remarkable for a great limestone solution hollow. After he prepared the sort of impromptu lunch that I have never been able to master, we got back to Rome by taking the train at Poggio Mirteto. Working out the train times and the stations where the trains actually stop was a bit of a nightmare – the timetables are not all that intuitive, and having got to the station you have to remember to validate your ticket before getting on the train. Failure to do it leads to a hefty fine, a great source of income from tourism. All these trips offered photo opportunities, or perhaps more accurately opportunities for photographic clichés.

In fact, I’ve in fact taken the same photograph several thousand times – a narrow street or alley turning off at an angle in the distance, a street lamp projecting from building artfully silhouetted in the foreground, slightly sinister gathering shadows, preferably a few ‘authentic’ locals, a street sign or two to fix location, a predominance of colourful washes on the buildings themselves, stone steps or balconies or flowers in tubs welcome. London, Rome, Florence, Istanbul, Havana, Riga – through my camera they can all come out looking rather similar. (Hard to do the same thing in New York. Or, these days, in over-planned modern Singapore.)

Viterbo - or Anguillara?

Earlier I mentioned the state-of-the-art train between Florence and Rome. For the Viterbo trip we took different routes there and back; the outward journey was on a service that’s still privately owned, separate from the main network. The trains were a throwback to half a century ago, showing no great evidence of maintenance, at the cosmetic level anyway. In fact, looking at people going about their lives in Rome (and in Florence too, I think), you could see the impact of the economic problems besetting the country over the last twenty years. People don’t dress with the same flare as in the past; they’ve lost much of the old swagger. Service in Rome was always haphazard and disorganized, but this time there was an air of disillusion and general grumpiness that I don’t remember noticing in the past. Grafitti are everywhere; it’s obvious that public budgets are being squeezed. If you knew London in the 1970s, you would recognize the signs. The Metro was obviously built on the cheap, and maintenance is clearly limited to operational essentials. It’s gloomy.

The train arrives at Viterbo station. Some Italian public architecture of the 1930s has Fascist associations, but it works very well, even so.

 The atmosphere of Rome couldn’t be more different from the manicured, controlled Singapore to which I returned. Living in Rome might drive me nuts – it’s hard to say without trying it, and anyway I think I would have enjoyed it more in my thirties than in my sixties. But I left Rome with a great sense of regret, and anticipation of the next trip.

Italy Part 4: South to Rome

You're never far from a church, in the old centre of Rome.

We took the train from Florence to Rome, a Red Arrow service fully the match of any long-distance train I’ve used in Europe. Arrival at Termini was followed by a laborious, exhausting, panting, suitcase-dragging trek to a hotel further away than it looked on the map. I say ‘hotel’ – it was originally just an apartment in a fairly modern block. The bedrooms were a good size, and each had its own bathroom. Sadly they weren’t adjoining (en suite, as the daytime TV programmes put it), and a night-time pee meant opening and shutting doors as silently as possible and crossing the common corridor – and the need for some form of clothing.

Detail of the Colosseum. The brick reinforcement on the left was added in the 19th century. An earthquake of 1349 led to the collapse of much of the outer wall, and the whole site was used as a quarry for building materials for many centuries.

I’ve been to Rome many times. I can’t claim to be a Rome expert. My travelling companion knows a lot more about it than I do. But I can find my way around.

In a ten-day visit, It’s impossible to absorb more than a tiny fraction of the variety of Rome’s historic art and architecture. Charles Dickens wrote about the city in his ‘Pictures from Italy’. After describing some of the ‘holy’ relics housed in many of the churches, he says:

‘The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells, and sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ; of Madonne, with their breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle like a modern fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously attired in gaudy satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold: their withered crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with chaplets of crushed flowers; sometimes, of people gathered round the pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and preaching fiercely: the sun just streaming down through some high window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across the church, to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost among the echoes of the roof. Then my tired memory comes out upon a flight of steps, where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the light; and strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and palaces, and hovels, of an old Italian street.

Pope Francis doing his stuff of a Sunday morning. The window is quite distant, seen from the Piazza, and you need a longer telephoto lens than anything I had in the bag.

Above (all three): frescoes on the ceiling and dome of Il Gesu, the mother church of the Jesuits.
Over-the-top literally and aesthetically, but quite spectacular.

Detail of Bernini's 'Four Rivers' fountain in Piazza Navona. This is the River Plate.

Religion’s lost much of its hold these days, and anyway most of modern Rome was developed well after Charles Dickens’s time. Outside the historic core, a lot of it looks like any other big Italian city. But it’s not hard to make a connection between his account and what you see today. Perhaps one of the differences is the vast number of foreign tourists. Dickens describes tourists in Rome in satirical terms, but in the 19^th century there were not that many of them. On a Sunday morning, when today’s Pope makes his appearance at the Vatican balcony to bless the crowd, I would judge that Italians are a relatively small minority. The impact of mass tourism is everywhere, with vast quantities of globalized tourist tat indistinguishable from the stuff you see in London. Made in China or wherever, certainly not in Italy.

Mosaic decoration in Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome  (1140-43).

Of course, those parts of Rome dating back to the Renaissance and mediaeval times, not to mention ‘Ancient Rome’, carry the most potent historical message. But many of the streets we now see as typically Italian were built in the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries. Nevertheless they are sufficiently different from their London contemporaries that we see them as ‘typically Italian’, particularly those big apartment buildings planned around a courtyard with a grand, communal street entrance, generally with a formal classical façade.

Tourism is getting bigger all the time.

Prices have shot up. In the early seventies you could get a pretty good lunch with wine for around 3000 lire. Rome was cheap. Now the prices are comparable with London, much of the décor homogenized vaguely international, and the quality not always reliable. A bit like Paris in this respect. I’m very much in favour of the UK’s membership of the European Union, but the Euro currency is a different thing: almost anyone in Rome will tell you of the sneaky price increases that took place on the transition from the Lira to the common European currency. The same thing happened in the UK, although perhaps not as brazenly, when we moved from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency.

Mass tourism, destroying the very target of its attentions.

Italy Part 2: Guidebooks

I always take a guidebook. I promise myself to do serious homework in advance, so I can spend my travel time looking at things of interest, and not the guidebook. When it comes to it, I fail to do the preparation – and even on the trip itself, give only cursory attention to the guidebook. From that, I conclude that my interest in the minutiae of art history etc. etc. is superficial.  The key things in guidebooks are good maps (essential), checklists of key sights, and opening times.  For deeper stuff, a slow assimilation of information works for me, best after the event. Guidebooks make most sense after the return home, when I can visualize what they are talking about. 

The danger of this approach, of course, that you miss things. On this trip to Florence and Rome, I took a heavy-ish guidebook that I already had, and bought two more small ones. They weighed down my suitcase and I hardly used them.

Corso Vittorio Emanuele, Rome.