My final four days of Italy were spent in Rome, which was just as chaotic, ugly, and beautiful as everyone said it would be. We hit the usual spots (the Vatican, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Colosseum) and they were all packed with tourists, but also all stunning and worthy of their place in the standard Roman holiday.
However, we did manage to get off the beaten path. Saturday morning I broke off from the rest of the group to go see the Galleria Borghese. Unfortunately I couldn’t get in as the place was booked through until June, but the museum is not the only remnant of the Borghese Villa. It sits on several acres of calm, leafy parkland with a lot of streams, meandering paths, and eccentrically placed statuary that dates from Roman times up through the nineteenth century. After wandering for a while through the shade (which was necessary, considering that in early May the city was already feeling hot and sticky) I came to the Galleria Nazionale D’arte Moderna, housed in a huge Belle Epoque palace. This was a great “find” as I practically had the complex to myself, and it was filled with nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian artists I’d never heard of; some of them quite good.
The second find of the trip was (of course) culinary. On the recommendation of someone’s host mother, we sought out a place called Sora Margherita, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the old Jewish ghetto in southern Rome. The place had about six tables and you passed right through the kitchen where the whole family was working, arriving at the table where the reservation for “Lincolm 4″ was scrawled on the paper tablecloth. We were immediately given lots and lots of wine, fried artichokes, and a single menu handwritten on oaktag, with a little sketch of the Tiber river that passed right outside the place’s door. The waitress at the neighboring table cheerily insisted that the diners (who were all Italian, as far as I could tell) “Mangiare tutto!! Vai! Vai!” and then grabbed a fork up from the table and offered to feed one woman. Good times.
As I sit here eating my first bagel and cream cheese in a good four months and drinking Dad-brewed coffee, it almost feels like I never left home. Deeper reflections may come in time, but for now I think this semester has shown me that it is entirely possible to live in a foreign country, hop on night trains full of strangers, fly around on intercontinental jets, and communicate in a language not your own.
