28DiVino Jazz Club Swings Again

We’re happy to report another jazz club has risen from the ashes. 28DiVino Jazz is under new management (now as a club with a tessera requirement) and has a full schedule of events.

We tried one of their relatively new Monday night jazz offerings – it’s a night that usually is fairly quiet around Rome. Here too, there was not exactly a crowd (at most, a dozen people), but we who were there were treated to a wonderfully intimate and accomplished set from the duo of Nicola Puglielli on guitar and Fabrizio Montemarano on bass. And the price per person is right, Euro 8 for the show AND a glass of wine plus Euro 2 for the tessera for the remainder of the season. Several people had dinner before the performance, upstairs at this atmospheric club.

Thrown into the mix was great conversation before the concert with the club manager/owner Marc Reynaud and one of the musicians, Nicola, who had studied at the Berklee School of Music and is the teacher of one of our favorite young jazz musicians around town. Puglielli teaches at the legendary and – until recently only offering classical music - Santa Cecilia Conservatory, which opened a jazz program just a year or two ago.

We're happy to see 28DiVino rise again, in part because Rome's jazz scene, while healthy, seem to be going the way of New York, with institutional spaces replacing the more inpiring clubs. Centrale Montemartini, even Cinema Farnese in Campo de' Fiori, are hosting jazz series. And, while these are wonderful new additions, sitting in an auditorium or straight-back chair is not the same as drinking and grooving in a dimly lit club (so say I).

We recommend 28DiVino Jazz and add it to Rome the Second Time’s jazz offerings. Via Mirandola, 21, near Stazione Tuscolana (San Giovanni). http://www.28divino.com/.

In the Update category, we note Be Bop Jazz Club is no longer active, although the website says they will reopen (but then so did La Palma’s website, and, several years later we’re still waiting). Pages 202-203.

Dianne

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

Scooters Down, Bill Forced into Role as Good Samaritan

As a scooter driver, I don't think I'm unusual in imagining what would happen if a car backed up into a tightly packed, domino-like row of scooters. Imagination is no longer required. Last Thursday the three of us--Dianne and I were touring with Judy, a new friend from Buffalo--had crossed Piazza del Popolo and headed up the short stairs on the piazza's east side to the road above when this Italian woman did just that: backed up into a bunch of scooters. I took a photo as the three of us walked by, thinking that was that. But she was upset (not very upset, to be honest, but she didn't want to leave the scooters on the ground), and she motioned me over to help her pick up the victims.
They're not easy to lift when they're down--the heaviest ones weigh about 500 pounds, and these perhaps 300--but this woman (now speaking broken English to me) and I managed the task, one at a time, as she called out lifting commands as we prepared to right each bike. Dianne didn't help, but she was there to take the second photo.

Bill

Italy's Millennial Walls, Robert Frost and us

“Good fences make good neighbors.” Robert Frost’s line came to mind as I was preparing this post.

I was thinking of appropriating and corrupting the line so it reads: “Good walls make good neighbors.”

But in finding and re-reading Frost’s poem, in which this line appears twice, my college English class came back to me. The poem is really about a wall that is a fence. The title of the poem is “Mending Wall,” and the first sentence, which is in the poet’s voice is: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The more famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” is actually said by his neighbor. So, Frost, the poet, does not like walls; it's his neighbor who does - and Frost is criticizing him in the poem.


The first 4 lines of the poem read:


Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The polygonal walls in central Italy seem to defy Frost’s notion that they will crumble and fall. There may be gaps, and spills in the upper boulders, but what’s astounding about these walls is how much of them still is standing, anywhere from 5,000 to 2,000 years later.

Some recent dating shows these walls – made of variously shaped (hence “polygonal”) stones and stacked with NO mortar – pre-date the Romans and even the Etruscans; they could be as old as the 3rd millennium before Christ, or 4,000-5,000 years-old.

We first noticed these walls in Segni, a small hill town about 1 hour outside of Rome where we (finally) had found a hotel after hiking all day (this story may sound familiar to some of you). Taking a walk through the town before dinner, we discovered these amazing walls surrounding a good portion of the city (photo above). We began reading a bit here and there and discovered for the first time the polygonal walls and how old they are.

Fortunately for us, at the same time in Rome there was a fascinating exhibit on the Lazio (Rome’s province) cities that have enormous stretches of these walls remaining. [Note the exhibit used "megalithic" - which refers to structures made of large stones and without mortar - tho' usually we see "polygonal" in references in English.]

We realized there are polygonal walls at the base of Circeo (which we’ve hiked), in Orbetello (where we’ve put our feet in the water), in Norba, and many other places. But, we were a little like the Stupids Go to Italy on this one… we had no idea what we were seeing. Sometimes we don’t read ahead, because we like to discover things for ourselves, but this time we were missing something because we were uneducated about these marvelous walls.

I’ve listed a few websites below that have a bit more information in English about the walls, as well as a link to all of Mending Wall and some analyses of the poem, one of which traces the poem’s activity of two neighbors mending their joining wall back to, guess who, the Romans! See also our earlier blog that includes Segni. Also, for you who need shelter and sustenance, we heartily recommend the hotel we found. Hotel La Pace, which caters to international business people from nearby towns and has a very good restaurant ("famous in the area," says scooter rental guy linked below).

Dianne

Websites:

Article by Giulio Magli, a mathematician in Milan, about the walls of four Italian cities. And lots of pictures in Rome Art Lover's website. And some nice photos and text from a scooter-rental guy whose home town is Segni.

May Day Irony

May Day, the 1st day of May, is rapidly approaching. Italians love their holidays, and May Day, which in its modern form celebrates work, labor, unions, and socialism, is one of their favorites.

The problem, we found out last year, is that it can be hard to get around on May Day, hard to attend the concerts and celebrations and marches, because, well, nobody's working. And "nobody," to our surprise, includes the people who operate Rome's public transport system.

We were living in Monteverde Nuovo, a couple of blocks from the Gianicolense and the tram that runs down to Trastevere and then across the river. We don't have a car, and the scooter was indisposed. So like many others in the neighborhood, we counted on the tram or buses to get us into the Centro.

Guess not! We arrived at the tram stop at Piazza San Giovanni di Dio at about 1 in the afternoon. An hour later we were still there. No tram, no buses.


Maybe we were just stupid foreigners. Maybe, but there were plenty of forlorn Italians waiting for Godot, exchanging local myths about what had happened to the tram and when the next bus would arrive. We took this photograph of those with whom we shared the afternoon.

Bill