Five Things I Learned About Rome (While I Was Away This Summer)
This week was back-to-school for kids in Italy. Even though my son has long graduated I still have the habit of closing out summer vacation according to the academic calendar. I spent this summer mostly traveling outside Italy. There is no better way to understand where we live than by seeing it from afar so the following is my list of summer learning in five points:
Everyone loves Rome. Or at least, everyone has an opinion, a story, a memory, or a dream about Rome (and Italy).
I miss Rome, mi manca Roma or “Rome is missing to me” when expressed in Italian. When I’m away I miss the beauty, the rhythm of life, the food of the Eternal City.
Rome is my reference point for everything. From lifestyle to cost of living, this summer I found myself measuring everything against what it’s like here. Rome is my baseline. (Note: this does not mean everything is always better here. It’s not.)
Even when I’m away Rome is near. Roma, and Italy in general, is in the news a lot. Maybe this was just a summer trend - I read lots of articles on the high temps and tourism - but nearly every print newspaper or magazine I picked up while travelling featured something about Italy.
Rome has its own speed. I’ve unknowingly learned the art of slowing down since living here. From the way I walk to my tolerance for waiting in lines, I have become more flexible in how I interact with the world around me. Dealing with bureaucracy and other inefficiencies in Italy has trained me to be more patient. For better or worse, things here take time, things move slow. While this can be incredibly frustrating, especially when it comes to paperwork and home repairs (it took us nearly two years to get a new boiler in our building - two cold winters!), things generally get worked out, eventually. I think that being surrounded daily by ancient ruins, being in a place that has learned how to live with the past (and make good use of tight spaces), a city in which il bello - beauty - is baked into the everyday has worked its way into my approach to life. I have an awareness that immediacy might not be the point, that an instant is also an eternity, a portal to the past and also to the right here right now.
The push and pull of living here, one foot forward toward the future and the other firmly set in the past, this Roman way of life, is now familiar to me. This summer I learned that you can take Rome with you. And I did.
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So glad you're back and posting again! Definitely agree with you about Rome being everywhere and on the tip of everyone's mind-- there've been times over the summer when I thought "is anyone not on their way to Rome?" And that's before Jubilee year. Must say though, you probably picked a good summer to be away. It really was an epic heatwave--not only in intensity, but in length. Bentornati.
We just bought a house in a little town about an hour north from Rome, and I am definitely learning #5. We gave ourselves two weeks to come and try to set up utilities and get furniture so we can come back in December and spend Christmas here with the kids. And everything requires a half dozen extra steps I didn’t know about beforehand. But it’s so beautiful here, I’m relishing every moment.