ROMAN THOUGHTS AND LA DOLCE VITA

What can you say about Rome that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? I could probably think of many things but that would involve my usual themes of supermarkets, travelers’ constipation, TV and politics. I don’t want to do that, not yet anyway. Rome is better than that. Rome is transcendent. It may not exactly be the Eternal City as claimed for publicity purposes, but most places aren’t exactly what they’re claimed to be. New York is not the ‘City that never sleeps’; Bangkok is. Rome in fact was almost entirely depopulated during the Middle Ages, a far cry from its imperial glory days of almost a million souls, wolves finally entering the city walls to take up the slack and see what they could scavenge, just like medieval tourists, just like us modern tourists in fact, crawling through the piles to pass our whiles. Rome is in fact the city that tourists sustained. The Italian Renaissance occurred mostly elsewhere, especially Firenze, as did the growth of cities, Paris and London and Milan and all the rest. The ultimate insult was the Church itself even moving its headquarters out of Rome for a spell. To this day Rome’s only industry is tourism, that and government and religion. It’s NOT the eternal city; that’s Jerusalem.

Rome is a palimpsest, the waves of time washing over it in repeated successions throughout history, leaving silt and sediment and new soil for planting. Like much of Europe its past is its present to us, and it manages to keep re-inventing itself accordingly. With much of space already conquered, at least the easiest pickings, time is the new frontier, and memory is the easiest path. We of European descent know that well, hoarding our souvenirs today and selling them on e-Bay tomorrow. Others have other ideas. For all their past of ancestor worship and vertical blood lines, the Chinese bury all public view of it as fast as they can. You’d be hard pressed to find a traditional district left standing there. They think they ‘gain face’ by emulating las Vegas and turning their country into a Pai Gow pinball machine defined by its bells and whistles rather than its collective soul. Europe doesn’t do that, not much anyway, or at least not yet. Luckily for them America’s already done it, so that’s reason enough to avoid it right there.

Rome is compact. Save that one-day Metro pass unless you want to camp out in the ‘burbs, which is not a bad idea. With e-booking there are some deals to be had out there, since they lack the walk-in traffic of the rookeries surrounding Termini station. How does a room in a sprawling villa for $50 with breakfast buffet sound? TV sucks of course, at least until midnight when the naked girls come on advertising their wares by taking off their wears. That’s reassuring for young boys everywhere. That was always the urban legend growing up- the naked girls come on TV at midnight. Very few hotels of any price will have wi-fi and you’ll be pressing your luck regardless. My place claims to have it in the common areas but no go, ‘local only’, ‘limited access’, etc; you know the drill. I guess that’s the drawback of so much attachment to the past. The present might get overlooked. Maybe they’ll wait and see if Internet passes the one-hundred-year test. Any place that actually has it probably has some other serious disadvantages. I persevere. The time when I can write a travel blog to you in real time is still a ways away. In America it’s pretty standard fare for hotels and easy to find elsewhere for the price of coffee. South America’s not far behind. Elsewhere in Europe and Africa and Asia you can sometimes get lucky, even in places as far-fetched as Phnom Penh and Dakar and Port-of-Spain. I guess Rome figures they don’t need it.

Rome sprawls in time, not space. You can see the Colosseum from almost anywhere, and even the Vatican is not much of a walk. The map makes it look big, but it’s really not. Just walk until your feet get sore, then take a break, and do it again. You can see it all in a day or two. Imperial ruins poke through everywhere, giving the Middle Ages a run for its money. The modern era has hardly made a dent yet. What would it look like if it did? At least supermarkets seem to be making inroads since my last visit five years ago, so that’s good. You don’t have to buy your groceries in bars anymore. The only problem right now is the weather. Europe’s had a rough winter and it ain’t over yet. I certainly don’t remember it being this cold in Marseille at the same time last year. Maybe it’ll be warmer in Tunisia. I hope so. If it is, I may hang there for a while and practice my French. Like any son of Rimbaud worth his verse, I’m just looking for creative derangement of the senses, the better to find some unusual pattern of words or images that have yet to see the light of day. Unlike some others, I’d rather try it without the aid of drugs. I’ve done all that. And I’d like to do it sustainably. Burning out at twenty-two is hardly an option for me now as I close in on fifty-five. In other words, I want to get my trips with trips, hyper-trips to the point of illumination.

The problem with practicing French of course is finding a country I like that speaks it. It’s hard to learn the language of a country you don’t especially like, though Marseille last year was an improvement. If there’s anything more pretentious than Parisians themselves, it’s people pretending to be Parisians, e.g. Bonairenses. And though the Maghreb speaks it often and well, it’s still NOT the first language, and overhearing and understanding a language spoken among native speakers is the final test of fluency. My next option may be Madagascar, which still uses that colonial language, not odd considering it has many competing local dialects. What IS odd is that all those local dialects are Asian in origin, from Borneo to be precise, reflecting an ancient migration of probably humble proportions. Even odder is that English is now one of their official languages also, EVEN THOUGH NO ONE SPEAKS IT, at least not outside the tourist areas. I think they just one-upped Thailand in some category of wackness, though I’m not sure which. Sounds like my kind of place. Stay tuned.

My inability to master French in my two months in French-speaking countries is a sore spot with me. I did study for two years at the university basic and intermediate levels after all. I understand more Italian on TV with no formal study and less than two weeks in-country, at least equal to Portuguese, thanks to my prior knowledge of Spanish. Portuguese pronunciation deviates from the spelling almost as much as French, and if it indeed sounds like a drunk Frenchman trying to speak Spanish, which it does, then French must be like a drunk Portuguese trying to speak English. The Maghreb is interesting from a linguistic point of view, pure Old World, the linguistics of language acquisition, not abstract theory, the language acquisition of a prostitute with her eyes on the prize between your thighs, hot rize plus and the finest buns ever was, i.e. consummation and fulfillment and y’all come back now, dahlin’. The average Moroccan taxi driver probably speaks more languages than the average UN interpreter, though a footnote is necessary. Tourist-oriented vocabulary is limited, and I heard as much bad Spanish there as English.

These European vocabularies are all closely related, mind you, though also notable is their mastery of local as well as classical Arabic. The language they speak to me there depends on their shifting perception of who and what they think I am. That’s not code-switching; that’s chaos. It’s a trip. Sometimes I get so bumfuggled I forget which language I’m speaking myself. Of course English’s only legitimate claim to the international standard is its analytic isolating quality, hard to appreciate unless you’re Asian. People who speak half a dozen Asian languages can’t figure for the life of them why Spanish verbs have several dozen different endings, when only one is necessary. Don’t ask me why, but English is only lightly inflected that way. Other than that its only claim to ascendancy is its imperialistic status. It’s a mess orthographically.

I picked up a bad habit in the Caribbean, i.e. booking ahead. This runs contrary to the backpacker’s credo of spontaneous emission. When it’s time to fly, then fly. That’s a metaphor; flying is the problem actually, that and expensive accommodation. When you’re traveling overland, there’s hardly a reason to book more than a day or two ahead really, unless rooms are tight and dear. You can’t do that in the Caribbean. They won’t let you. They’ll call you on those fake hotels you write in on the landing card. ‘Happy House’ indeed! Then the room they found me was the one I stayed in long term anyway. That’s the nice thing about the slow season- rooms are easier to find and cheaper. Of course this slow season may last a few years. We’ll see how gas prices respond in the next few months. If the speculators get over-anxious they may kill the coming summer season in its infancy. It’s not entirely coincidence that huge gas price surges were followed by the Next Great Depression. Though predatory lending may have been the immediate cause, it’s all part of the gold-pan get-rich-quick philosophy of the son-of-Reagan Republicans.

Big news here is the Japanese finance minister showing up drunk at the G7 economic summit. Did that make CNN? I bet it made Fox. What else is new in Rome? Well they seem to have finally perfected the combination toilet/bidet, so that doesn’t have to take up space next to the bed like in France. This is good for those of us accustomed to the Thai system which has a rubber hose and nozzle next to every toilet. This was probably intended for the chambermaids, but creative minds couldn’t pass on that opportunity to stay clean and green. The Italian bowls even have the water jetting sideways instead of straight up the you-know-what-hole, so that’s even wilder (and easier on sensitive tissues). But I digress. Tunisia’s next on the list, on the other side of the Mediteranean, the crossroads which have seen Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Normans, Romans, Carthaginians and Greeks all claiming pieces of turf in their own good time. To this day Malta, European to the point of Euro currency, even still speaks an Arab dialect, albeit written in Roman alphabet. How’s that for multi-kulti patchwork pragmatism? That comes next after Tunisia. Stay tuned, and pray for sun.