Midnight riders find action

There’s nothing quite like the 4 a.m. (sometimes inspired by jet-lag) scooter ride through Rome.

Last year, we took the “midnight ride” a couple times, and were entranced by a city that went from totally asleep (no one else, but the cops, at the Trevi, Spanish Steps, etc.) to starting to awake (the vendors opening up at Campo de’ Fiori, the coffee bars receiving their first customers).

Ah, but this year was different. We took our 4 a.m. ride on Sunday morning, May 2. But, as we instantly learned, from the many young people lining via Ostiense, hanging around cars in the parking lots there, etc., at 4 a.m. it was still the evening of May 1, the huge Italian holiday and a Saturday night.

Instead of seeing the city asleep and waking up, we were watching the city go to bed. There were cars on every street. There were a dozen people at Trevi and the Spanish Steps (photo at top). On the other hand, via Veneto was quiet (see second video below. And, unusually, Campo de’ Fiori was completely empty. Not only had the young people gone (perhaps to Ostiense), but of course no stalls were w\opening on a Sunday morning.

There were some unusual moments – dodging the street cleaning machine at Trevi, watching with the Trevi police - through the back window of their car - the tv shows they had on in their car (you can see both of these in the first video below). Dianne

Rome: Walk(s) on the Wild Side

When we first imagined Rome the Second Time as a book, we roughed out a chapter--ideas, really--titled "Walk on the Wild Side" (from the 1956 Nelson Algren novel, A Walk on the Wild Side or the 1972 Lou Reed song, "Walk on the Wild Side"). The chapter would be aimed at the most intrepid of Rome tourists, and it would include elements of the Rome experience, past and present, that were mysterious, somewhat forbidding or intimidating, or unusual enough to jar the sensibilities, to give one a sense of having contact with a Rome that was hidden and seldom seen. We decided against the chapter title--we didn't want to scare off our core audience--and toned down the content for Rome the Second Time, yet we tried to preserve a sense of real adventure.

We were reminded of all this not long ago when Jason Hitchcock Creeley, writing on the Rome the Second Time group Facebook site, asked whether there was "a tour of some kind in Rome or a mention in a guidebook...about the more surreal, even seedier side of Rome. Maybe Pasolini's haunts? Things Fellini found quirky and off-beat?"

We don't know too much about Fellini's off-beat tastes, but we do know something about the poet, novelist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his way of being in Rome is a good place to start. Pasolini was into the "other"--the people of Rome who were different from him and from other, middle-class Romans--and for Pasolini (and anyone else with the same goals) that meant exploring the society and culture of Rome's poor--what Marx called the "lumpen proletariat." He found them, as one would find them today, on the outskirts of the city, in Rome's far-flung neighborhoods, which now are middle class and don't seem so far out: Monte Sacro was one, Monteverde Nuovo another, and a third an area called Mandrione, a triangle of land formed by via Tuscolana, via del Mandrione, and via Porta Furba. He found them, too, in and around the public housing projects that had been built under Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s; his Ragazzi di Vita is about teenage young men who lived in or near one of those high-rise projects, the one (still) located in Piazza Donna Olimpia, in Monteverde Nuovo, where Pasolini would go to talk with the boys and kick a soccer ball around. And Pasolini found them on the banks of Rome's rivers--on the Aniene near Monte Sacro, and on the Tevere--where boys without much money went to swim and cavort.

It's not that hard to locate landmarks of Pasolini's life in Rome, and through them to see and experience something of what he felt. You can read Pasolini's books--especially Ragazzi di Vita (1955) and the realistic novel, A Violent Life. You can also visit some of the places where he spent time, including Mandrione (there's a small booklet on the area and its history, in Italian). Itinerary 9 in Rome the Second Time takes you into Monte Sacro and down along the banks of the Aniene, along riverside paths used almost entirely by locals, complete with private (and probably illegal) gardens and, here and there, a rogue tent (at left). We also describe our attempt to reach the confluence of the Aniene and Tevere Rivers, an effort that ended when we encountered a village of (no doubt illegal immigrant) squatters and were warned to turn back.

At least in Rome, the banks of the Tevere, with their huge 19th-century and early 20th-century flood walls, are more open and less intimidating than those of the Aniene, but long walks along Rome's major river will undoubtedly take you, now and then, by Rome's homeless, getting along under one bridge or another.

We also had a wonderfully interesting walk (not in Rome the Second Time) along the right bank of the Tevere. We found the path just beyond Piazza Meucci at the south end of the Marconi district, paralleling (for a while) via della Magliana, then along Lungotevere di. Magliana: warehouses, horses, gardens, makeshift homes. Poor people with homes dug out of hillsides or built into narrow valleys can be found in many places in Rome. We describe one such encounter in Itinerary 9, "Monte Mario," and another in Itinerary 11, "Parco del Pineto," where we were kindly escorted through the the narrow walkways of an immigrant squatters' village in the center of the park by one of the residents, who sensed we needed the help.

Mussolini's public housing projects (case popolari) are accessible, too, and with some imagination one can get a sense of the world Pasolini found there in 1955 or 1960. There's one on the Monte Sacro/Aniene itinerary mentioned above; another, extensive and quite evocative (not mentioned in Rome the Second Time), in the Flaminio district at Piazza Melozzo da Forli, which is along viale del Vignola; a lovely, thoroughly gentrified project on Itinerary 7 (Piazza Bologna); and the towering, sculpted, and somewhat decayed buildings on Piazza di Donna Olimpia, noted above.

Had Pasolini been alive when the massive public housing project known as Corviale was finished in the early 1980s, he would surely have been attracted by the kilometer-long building with its 1202 apartments. Located southwest of the Rome's center near via Portuense, it's fascinating but also somewhat intimidating. We looked around a bit and took some pictures, but with due circumspection. Still, it's a phenomenon--one of the world's most famous public housing projects, like modernist, crime-ridden Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis (1954/55, demolished 1970s).

Today, Pasolini would be seeking contact with Rome's new immigrants, some legal and some illegal, many from North Africa and Eastern Europe, some living in official immigrant camps, some in informal ones. It would be fascinating to walk around these camps, but also quite dangerous, we think, and we don't advise it. The closest we've come to one of the informal camps was while walking along a wide asphalt path (via del Ratardo) that ambles along the left (east) bank of the Tevere north of the city. We got access to the path at Ponte Flaminio (that's what we remember, anyway) and had walked a ways, passing by all manner of athletic facilities (the banks of the Tevere are dotted with soccer fields), when we saw the immigrant camp down and on the right. Another place to find immigrant communities (and some drug addicts) is on the city's night buses. After midnight, when the restaurants close in Trastevere and the #8 tram inexplicably stops operating, the area's dishwashers and other low-level workers pile on the buses going up viale di Trastevere. You can join them on the bus. Be prepared to be squished.

The young have their own weird places to go and be, and we're neither young nor fans of rock music nor into drugs, so the mysteries of youth, and the often-seedy locales where they do their thing, are mostly beyond us. Still, over the years we've found some of these spaces and recommend them to the adventurous. Among the better known is Monte Testaccio, home to dozens of late-night clubs and bars dug into the mountain. The area in back--a road and a large parking lot--is known for drug deals, and we wouldn't circle the mountain after dark. Another club area is located in a warehouse district between via Ostiense and the Metro line, just past Circonvallazione Ostiense, in Garbatella (as we recall); it's got a certain dark, clandestine feel to it. The district of San Lorenzo is better lit and better policed, and it still has some of the raunchy, sometimes pathetic clubs and general messiness that Jack Kerouac would have seen as "authentic." The Pigneto zone is at the cusp of gentrification, but it's full of immigrants (as well as Italians) and young people and funky attractions, and after dark the narrow, tree-lined side streets have a film-noirish aura unmatched elsewhere in Rome. Pasolini spent a lot of time there many years ago, and, despite changes, he probably still would today. See our "An Evening in Pigneto" in Rome the Second Time.

Because Rome is a center of government and tourism, it can be difficult to observe Romans doing what writer Paul Goodman referred to in Growing Up Absurd as "real man's work." Watching the barrista make your latte doesn't qualify. We have three suggestions. To get a feel for an older industrial and warehouse area, try the "alternate route" for Itinerary 4 (see map), which begins at the Pyramid and circles a part of Ostiense. Second, along the left bank of the Tevere, down a gravel road called via di Riva Ostiense (entered from via del Porto Fluviale, at the river), you'll find the Factory Occupata--assuming it still exists, which it may not--an experimental art and cultural space created a couple of years ago when some young people, disturbed by the decline of the city's industrial buildings, occupied one of the area's unused factories. A poster for a Factory Occupata event, at left, features a gazometro, an iconic feature of the area's industrial landscape. The place is bizarre; if there's an event there when you're in town (we saw ex-Black Panther David Hilliard give a talk)--no matter what it is--go. Across the city, we recommend the streets just to the south of Piazzale del Verano,
where craftsmen cut the stones that adorn the adjacent Verano Cemetery (at right). Piazzale Verano is also well known as the site of a deadly and destructive allied bombing raid in World War II.



Of all the unusual Rome spaces we've come across, none is more "surreal" (to use Jason Creeley's term) than one inhabited almost exclusively by the young: Forte Prenestino, a real fort and, for some years now, a real alternative social center. We have written about the place in Rome the Second Time (pp. 192-93), and we fondly recall the shock and awe we experienced at walking its dark corridors and underground passageways (left)
for the first time. Da non perdere; not to be missed. Also high on that index is a walk through Rome--Rome the First Time: the Coliseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, Trastevere--between 4 a.m. and just after sunrise. Not the "wild side," but unforgettable. Maybe even surreal.

Bill

Roma Sogna: 4-6 a.m.

The alarm goes off at 3:50, but it’s sticky humid, and by the time we shower and get our act together, it’s 4:15, and we’re coasting down the deliciously curving via Falconieri, seemingly motionless, Nanni Moretti style, toward via di Donna Olimpia. Unlike our early April 4 a.m. venture, the main streets, especially, have some vehicles, many of them white delivery trucks making their rounds. Night buses (n-plus the # - the ones that never come when you wait for them) are on the streets. Vans, buses, the few cars, scooters: whatever is out there is going fast; drivers seem to enjoy not just the possibilities of speed, but the thrill of blasting through the flashing yellow lights that replace the stop lights operating during the day

An all-night flower stand is the only enterprise we see open – near Porta San Pancrazio.

Past the porta, we drop down to Acqua Paola: a couple embracing at the fountain’s rim; four young people talking, in Italian, across from the fountain, where we are; two people barely visible around the corner. And that’s it.

A quick turn and up in the darkness—a sliver of a moon tonight and here, no street lights—to the top of the Gianicolo: where there would have been couples a few hours ago, there are now mostly men, talking and sipping beer, the spectacular view of the city, with the Colli Albani towns sparkling up in the distance, no longer relevant. A food truck, concentrated fluorescent energy, provides all the light we need.

Snaking down the north end of the Giancolo, coasting again in virtual silence, we cross the Tevere, turn left up the east bank, cruising sweetly, comfortably, in cool morning freedom. A food van, selling shaved ice and other delectables, is open, shining its neon on the pavement (photo, below).

Right at Piazza del Popolo, through the marble barriers, onto via del Corso.
Nobody around but many of the stores are lit up (more than in April), cars parked here and there--perhaps the vehicles of the workers dismantling the ACEA light show in the Piazza from the night before. Again, we’re enjoying driving on a street that’s reserved for pedestrians, though not in these wee hours, when there are delightfully none.

Left on via del Tritone, past a POLIZIA car on the right, I’m wondering if this is the moment we’ll get pulled over, however unlikely it seems. A brief pause for a red light at the corner where the blue "Il Messaggero" (one of the main daily papers) sign dominates above; we realize it’s the strong blue light we’ve observed before—though not tonight—from the Gianicolo.

Up via Veneto--we’re grateful there’s not much going on—and out the porta (gotta go right to go left here), and back through it, down the hill (you gotta go down to go up here) so we can get up above the Spanish steps. Some taxis at the top of the hill, waiting for morning fares at the expensive hotels. We pull over. The steps, and the street that runs into them, are completely deserted (photo above top). Sounds of singing and guitar playing from below, in that assertive Italian style (I think about going down and finding out who’s singing and where). A bicyclist comes into view, picks up his bike, puts it on his shoulder and starts up the steps, stopping about 1/3 of the way up, satisfied with his view.

Back on the bike, cruising past Villa Medici, around the hairpin turns above Piazza del Popolo, yellow no-parking tape everywhere, stopping above the piazza to watch 40 workmen take down the ACEA stuff.

Around the piazza, back on via del Corso, a right into Piazza Augusto Imperatore, the heart of Fascist monumental architecture. Ahead we see that a clothing store where we’d once seen Totti doing publicity has been closed. A right, then a left just before the Lungotevere . Another left (I hope you’re following on your maps) takes us into the end of Piazza Navona, curving around it to via Vittorio Emanuele II, during the day a bustling thoroughfare known for its traffic and palaces. We head for Campo dei Fiori, but turning right realize we’ve gone too far and retreat with a U-turn one couldn't make during the day, find where it’s tucked in, drive into the Campo—no other vehicles are moving there--and park. It’s getting light.

What looks like a family, with Mama in charge, is just starting to set up their fruit and vegetable stand; they’ve got the fruit and the stand’s coming together. But right now they’re the only ones, with the statue of the heretic Giordano Bruno glowering over them. At the northwest corner of the piazza we watch two bakers putting loaves of bread on metal sheets into an oven (photo below). A man emerges from a side street pulling a sled of frames for a fruit stand, as if he were a mule. We can’t quite believe that Palazzo Farnese is Palazzo Farnese, because there are no people around and the palace seems to lack the familiar reference points, but that’s what it is. The huge tub fountains (stolen from Roman baths), and the Palazzo, are flanked by metal barricades—maybe to keep the drunks out. A man—the only one in the Farnese piazza—yawns and stretches at a café table – where the tables and chairs have been left out, unchained, even though the café closed hours ago.

We head out on the scooter, along via Vittorio Emanuelle II, past the taxi stand at Piazza di Torre Argentina, to Piazza Venezia, where we stop at the only open cafe we’ve seen so far, on the west side of the monument. (We had expected all-night coffee bars, but this is the first bar we’ve seen open; a few others start to open as it approaches 6 a.m.) We order due caffe'Americani and due cornetti (Euro 4.20—an inflated “centro” price) and are amazed that there are other people around at 5:40: 3 Italian girls who haven’t yet slept, at least not in their own beds, in short shorts one rarely sees on Italians or Capri pants and clever shoes; several men, workers probably, including a skinny guy in a tight red shirt whose trim body I envy, enjoying his cornetto. Sometimes, Dianne observes, you can’t tell the people going to work from the people who’ve been up all night--until they order either a coffee or a beer. Outside, an American young man who’s been drinking the night away asks us where the Hotel Palatine is, and while we’re thinking (and guessing where it might be, and trying to figure out if he has any idea where the Coliseum is –he’s not exactly close), he breaks off the conversation: “I’ve got to catch up with my friends. Thanks.” A pink early morning sky.

It’s just 100 meters to Michelango’s gently-sloping stairs (the other set, to the left, is much older) to the Campidoglio, which we have to ourselves. It’s lovely up here. Dianne points out THE “She Wolf”—the most famous one in Rome, and I wish I had my own bit of knowledge to contribute. We note the place where, a few years ago, we saw the three-wheeled scooter introduced to much fanfare; a standard Italian metal sound stage from a concert the night before; huge piles of stacked chairs. Around back left to catch a look at the Forum, cool and, in its emptiness, fascinating. A car pulls up, a man dropping off his wife for work in the back building. We notice one wall of huge tufo blocks, another of stones cemented together, both ancient, marveling at what’s here, and how visible and compelling it is when there’s no human competition.

Below, in Piazza Venezia, the day buses are running their motors at the head of their lines, in anticipation of their 5:30 a.m. start. On the bike again, we pass Bocca della Verita' (a Roman-era sewer cover that’s now one of city’s major attractions) on the left, then right and upriver to cross the Tevere into the heart of Trastevere, pulling over and parking in the first piazza.

We walk north on via della Lungaretta, past a mumbling woman on the steps of a church, a nun walking quickly, broken bottles. Some garbage maintenance has been done here—full plastic bags line the streets--but there’s still much to do. At Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, a newsstand prepares to open, the fountain in the center is poignant with beer bottles and plastic cups; two homeless men sleep in their not-so-private corners. On the trek back to the moto we pass a deeply tanned, extremely thin, fragile older woman, probably a drug addict, taking tiny steps in an effort to stay on her feet. At vicolo Del Cinque, pigeons pull apart a piece of doughy pizza. A very black black man stops at a nasone to wash up. He has a full backpack, but I’m not sure whether he’s going or coming, or from where. Dianne sees the words FORNO carved in stone above what is now a bar (they’re all bars, and beer is the drink they serve; a once-distinguished wine bar is now a birreria). At Piazza Trilussa, a blue plastic tote bag has been left behind.

Back to the bike for the home stretch: up viale Trastevere, chased by a bus, right on viale Quattro Venti, left at the fork onto via di Donna Olimpia, left on via Revoltella, and up the long, curved street between rows of sleeping cars, to home. As we take our things from the scooter--it’s about 6:30--we see a familiar small dog, then our always-cheerful newspaperwoman (the dog's owner); they're headed for her place of business directly below our apartment. She says "buon giorno." Her working day will end at 8:00 in the evening. We stop and buy a paper. Bill (with Dianne)