Badaude

The love bus

I'm on my way home from Rome. The number 64 is the bus to Roma Terminale from which I can catch the train to Fiumincino airport.

It's the morning rush hour and the bus is crammed with commuters. As we travel along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, the number of commuters declines and the number of tourists returning to the central station increases. Like Paris buses, there are few seats and lots of standing room. Travellers sit on their cases which go into occasional freefall around a sharp corner.

The bus remains crammed. Standing room only. I notice a woman who is very obviously a tourist. she's in her fifties. Unglamourous. She is wearing clothes which she clearly only wears on holiday. She has a bright red 'fun' vacationer's suitcase. She is alone.

An Italian man stands behind her. He's much younger. Around 30. He leans close behind her. She doesn't speak Italian. He speaks to her in English.

Is this your first time in Rome? he asks.

Did you go to see the Forum? The Pantheon? Did you think they were beautiful? Where are you from? Did you visit the Bernini fountain? Would you like to return to Rome?

As the bus rounds a corner, he leans closer, right against her. She must be able to feel his stubble against her cheek. He is almost whispering in her ear.

Why is he doing this? Is he trying to pick her pocket? Does he have a thing about older women? Or is he a genuine ambassador of the city, eager to leave the woman with a favourable impression?

At this very moment, I notice a light pressure against my thigh. I look behind me. There's an old, not un-handsome Italian guy in a checked shirt with a grey pointed moustache which he is obviously proud enough to care for. He is not looking at me. His eyes are focussed on a distant point as can only be the eyes of someone who is deliverately trying to avoid your gaze.

The pressure on my leg is light. A butterfly-like tapping. It moves up. It begins to move down again. The bus swings in the opposite direction. It doesn't go away. It must be deliberate.

I wonder what I should do. Should I shout? Should I move away? Should I turn to him and hiss, testa di cazzo!*, a phrase a friend taught me to deal with just such a situation. I examine my feelings. Am I annoyed? No, not really. Is he doing any harm? Would I harm him more by a public telling off? Or would I end up looking ridiculous? Would I diminish a pleasure which is costing me very little? Above all, would I sacrifice my storyteller's desire to know what happens next?

By the time I have thought about this for some time, we are approaching Terminale and such reactions come to seem a little ungenerous. I don't think the hand is going anywhere else and the butterfly tappings are so light as to seem politely tentative. If that's what gets him his kicks, why not?

We reach the stop for the station.

I look accross at the other tourist and her toy boy. They are still aimiably discussing the beauty of Romes sites. I am still worried that he is going to rob her.

Nothing has happened. Maybe nothing has happened to her either. Maybe she's the winner in this sitaution. Maybe everything is just as it seems.

Maybe there is no story.

I get off and drag my suitcase toward the station. I don't see either of the men leave the bus. A fresh group of tourists exist the station and pile onto the bus.

I wonder whether they will be making the return journey.

...

*dickhead. For more great Italian swear words, see here.

Italians

at the Bar della Pace, last night...

Rates of exchange

I have never been so short-changed as I have here in Rome. Shop assistants charge me double; waiters add and subtract dishes from my bill seemingly at random; at the market, the first delicious fragoline (tiny wood strawberries) of the season cost 5 euros at one stall, 2 euros at another.

In the supermarket on the Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle, wine is cheap; milk is expensive.

I am carrying back from the supermarket, a six-pack of litre bottles of water; a litre of milk, a bottle of red wine and a jar of Nutella, along with less substantial groceries. The supermarket bag handles are starting to cut into my palms. How does everyone else manage? I don't see Romans hauling the sacs a roulettes I see in Paris. Do they have it all delivered? Do they just not eat?

When I reach the Piazza Navona, I have to sit down. I don't want to sit in the Piazza at this time of day. I love the Piazza in the morning when the sun has hardly risen and the square is a deep shadow-gulley with only the whirr of the cleaning truck and the clank of waiters putting out the endless rows of cafe chairs. But later in the day, the portrait artists arrive;the tour groups, the school trips, the men selling battery-powered toys, sunglasses, cheap jewellery.

The famous Bernini fountain is under wraps for restoration. It's plasticized outline fills the whole of the square. Nevertheless, Navona is crammed with people who stand and turn on the spot and try and try to see. They peer through the windows in the plastic that shrouds the sculptures, sometimes catching the angle of an elbow, a knee.

The groups in the middle of the square - teenagers and coach tours who cannot afford the cafes' prices, stand disconsolately or sit on the edges of the two smaller unwrapped fountains. They look at the people in the cafes. The people in the cafes, sitting in compariative and expensive comfort, look back.

As I pass the corner of Viccolo della Pace, the waiter from Tre Scalini says,

A table for lunch, Signora?

It's 10.30am

No, grazie.

A table, Signora? How many?

No. Grazie!

I hold out my hand in a basta gesture and walk away.

I have to sit down. There are no public benches in Rome. People sit on the walls of fountains, on steps. At the monument to King - built, with staggering arrogance, to dwarf the Imperial Forum on the Piazza Venezia, there is a notice requiring visitors not to sit on the steps as such lack of respect for this national monument would offend the Italian people. On chuches of far greater architectural and historical importance; on ancient Roman sites, there are no such notices. Romans, disrespectfully, have nicknamed. the interfereing monument the Big White Typewriter.

Like the teenaged and old-aged tour groups without the money the cafes, I sit on the edge one of the fountains where a group of ragazzi (boys) are noting with pleasure that one of the stone tritons is blowing water out through his nostrils.

As soon as I sit down, the street sellers arrive: a man selling Italia football shirts and lycra shorts decorated with a picture of the stone genitals of Michaelangelo's David; another with small magnets which buzz when tossed in the air. They offer me the magnets, the shorts.

No, grazie.

Signora?

No, grazie.

A man selling cheap metal and enamel jewellery takes my hand and folds it around a necklace.

I try to give it back but he backs away, hovvering at a safe distance.

Five Euro, Signora. Only five Euro!

He won't take it back.

You want to give it to me?

For you, two Euro, only two Euro.

If you want to give it to me, I'll take it. But I don't want to buy anything.

One Euro? Signora?

But I don't want it.

I lay the necklace on the fountain. He picks it up and leaves but as soon as he moves on, another moves in.

Rosa, Signora, Roses?

Please

One rosa; only two Euro!

don't try to sell me anything.

I am irrationally and suddenly angry.

I stand up.

I stand unecessarily close to him.

He's wearing a long, brown djebellah which smells strongly of sweat. I don't know whether it's brown from dirt and age, or whether this is it's natural colour.

I look directly into his eyes, which are very close to mine. There isn't any Piazza Navona any more. Just this man and me.

I say, quietly and as firmly as possible,

Go Away.

Signora?

Louder

Go. Away.

I'm not quite sure what I'm prepared to do at this point. Luckily, nor is he.

After a long moment:

Ok, Signora,

he says. I go away.

...

Round the corner, at Caffe della Pace, I drink prosecco. The waitress brings me unasked-for olives, peanuts and elaborately lumpy spicy-flavoured lumps.

I begin to feel bad about the man in Navona; about the bartenders, the shopkeepers; the market stallholders. After all, it works the other way too: grocers put extra oranges in my bag after I've paid; waiters forget to charge me for dessert; this morning, a flowerseller ran up to gave me a perfect canna lily, the stalk broken too short to use in his display.

I think all transactions in Italy are just less fixed; more open to negotiation which offends my firmly entrenched, Anglo-Saxon sense of fixed value. Italians are also more willing to enter casually into negotiation, and expect you to haggle even if you don't want what they're offering.

I finish my prosecco. Although this is one of the most fashionable cafes in the area, the bill is much small. Wine is cheap: milk is expensive. But I can't get the waitress's attention. I leave the money on the table, along with a generous tip to make up for what? For not asking for the bill? For the peanuts? For the flower-seller? I wonder whether the staff will think I've skipped without paying. I do not want another encounter of any kind.

I'm half-way down the street when the waitress catches up with me.

She touches my arm.

4 euros, please.

I look at her. She looks anxious. She is younger than me. She doesn't want to be asking this question.

It's ok - I left it on the table.

She believes me. It's funny. I laugh; she laughs. I have paid correctly the correct sum which has been correctly demanded of me. We are both relieved.

The wrong side of the river

Last Wedesday (9th) I crossed the river to go to The Vatican.

I don't like that side of the Tiber. The last time I was there, I dreamt of marble Popes pursuing me down corridors for nights afterwards. But I'm with a friend who wants to see the Saint Peters.

We walk over the Ponte Sant'Angelo with its tormented angels and up through a Calvary of wall-to-wall improvised stalls selling imitation designer bags (all the same model in various colours with the labels Prada, Fendi or D&G applied according to the seller's whim).

The street sellers are only allowed to do business up to the beginning of the Via della Conciliazione approaching Vatican City where the Polizia keep a constant vigil up and down in their little blue cars.

There's a group of 3 African-Italians with braided hair, their arms threaded with designer knock-offs from wrist to shoulder. As we walk up the street, they scuttle, knees bent, from car to car, dodging the gaze of the Carbinieri, in a corageous bid to get up to the Vatican itself where tourists and pilgrims, weakened by religious experience, will presumably fall upon the merchandise.

When we reach Saint Peters, we find that the Pope is inconsiderately using the place for some kind of religious ceremony.

We cannot go in as I am incorrectly dressed on two counts, shorts being forbidden, along with women's clothing which does not reach the knee. Fortunately, as I am wearing skirt-like black flannel shorts with with thick black woolen tights, I do not look so much like a floozy as a nun whose habit has shrunk in the wash.

However, my shorts must have activated some kind of bad karma, which followed us for the rest of the day.

We sit a while and listen to the Pope. He is a small white blob in the distance between two red blobs of cardinals. They are sitting on a temporary wooden scaffold, rather like that erected in the Piazza del Cinque Lune for last week's political rallies and they are similarly rendered larger on two television screens. Despite the large number of foreign pilgrims, I can see no subtitles in any language.

Apparently they are is talking about the dignity of women.

Excluding those who wear shorts, of course.

We decide to walk to the Janiculum hill, a beautiful park by the Vatican. We know it is beautiful as, through the white stone-dust of St Peters Square, we can see a blue-shadowed hillside and marshmallow-on-a-stick Roman pines waving over the top of the highest buildings.

I read the map provided in the small edition of the Rough Guide to Rome. It seems to indicate that we follow the road accross the fold in the page round Saint Peters and towards the Via di Porta Cavaleggeri.

I find it refreshing how quickly Rome changes from Vatican purity to workaday apartment blocks, garages, cafes, supermarkets.

We cross under a metro flyover.

Are you sure this is the right way.

Look at the map. See that patch of green. That's what we're heading for. We turn left by the ugly modern church. It joins onto the Janiculum hill on the other side of the page, see?

Joanna.

What?

Those are two different maps.

I look. I look again. I hold the map at arms length. I peer closely at the join between the two pages. I turn the book upside down, then the right way up again. I begin to think he's right.

I think it better not to say anything. We retrace our steps at double speed back past the quick-stop garage's dismantled cars, the garbage collection point, and the green scrubby area with dumped shopping trolleys. We find a wall which is definitely the wall of the park. Through the traffic fumes, we can see the pines waving over the top.

The wall is about 20 feet high. We follow it up a steep hill, round a winding, deserted road. The height of the wall rises to 30 feet. Occasionally we see doors or gates leading into the back of the park. They are all locked.

After some time, by mutual consent, we walk back to Saint Peters where the Pope is still speaking. As a woman, I do not feel dignified.

On this side of the river, nothing can go right.

We cross to the correct side of the Tiber.

Later we try to get a bus which will take us directly to the Janiculum hill from the Piazza del Popolo, which is on the right side of the Tiber. We hope to sneak in by public transport thus avoiding our curse, and a lot of walking. We find we are at the wrong end of the Via del Corso for the bus stop we need. It doesn't look too far to the right end so we set off down the narrow pavement, cutting a wavering path between the encroaching traffic, Italian teenagers buying nylon lace leggings in fluo colours, and a mad, bearded man with a crutch who limps along at an alarming speed, laughing manically and engaging strangers in random arguments.

After about half an hour spent trying not to fall off the narrow pavement into the path of cars, we realise that Via del Corso is longer that we thought.

We reach Piazza Venezia and are dazzled by the range of bus stops and the difficulty of crossing the road from one to another. We turn for home.

We never get over to the other side of the river.

There's a little museum in Rome, just off the Campo dei Fiori; an old palazzo hidden down a side street which contains a special feature. The owner commissioned a corridor off the main interior courtyard which houses a very Roman kind of joke. You stand at the end of what seems to be a long, tiled passage, at the end of which is a classical statue. As you walk towards it, you feel yourself growing surreally taller and wider. Your head comes close to hitting the ceiling. When you reach the courtyard at the end, you have become a giant; the statue a baby's toy. The corridor is a mathematical joke. The architect is playing with your visual perceptions; what seems far away is in fact, close.

In Rome, a city which loves to dazzle you with views and dismay you with false perspectives, this can sometimes happen the other way round.

Yesterday the Pope was in the US and I was free to wear shorts in St Peter's Square again.

...

More from Rome next week, including sketches.

70 flavours

Whenever I visit Rome, they're voting.

I was last here two Easters ago, when Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party were fighting their last election campaign. In 2006 the billionaire mediocrat didn't win, despite his ownership of most of the TV channels. It must have been the effect of his unnaturally brylcreamed and orange perma-tanned portraits posted around the city; that and the competition from a Fox Channel Cable TV campaign which encouraged Romans to Vota Simpsons! and Vota Fonzie!

This time was different with the new Ilpopolodellaliberta - People of Freedom party (Forza Italia plus the National Alliance) winning the largest share of the vote for a single party at about 37.5% and defeating former mayor of Rome, Walter Ventroni of the left-wing Partito Democratico.

The campaigning was different too: not so much Forza  and no Berlusconi pics, but campaign literature featuring rainbows, roses and football teams.

The voting determined the leader of Italy's 63rd government since 1945.

Giolitti, Rome's most famous ice-cream parlour, sells 70 different flavours; just about one for every rainbow-flavoured government since WWII. As I can't think of 70 ice-cream flavours, I'm assuming they include, mud, rat and spaghetti bolognese. The Italian electorate were similarly jaded by too much political 'choice' offered too frequently. In Sorrento, voter Carlo Brunetti was charged with destroying election materials when he ate his ballot paper in protest, perhaps, at widespread accusations that ballot paper fraud provided Berlusconi with his narrow majority.

Do you want chocolate sprinkles with that?

Mr Brunetti is a manufacturer of Italy's famous Limoncello liqueur and might be thought to benefit from frequent election celebrations.

Last night it was impossible to get a table at any restaurant but somehow difficult to catch an actual victory celebration. In a trattoria on the Via della Pace, all the tables were set neatly, each with cutlery, napkins and two bottles of mineral water (at least here it's only a choice between con  and sin gas). It was empty but tutte riservati. The celebrations were, it seems, to be brief. Come back in an hour and a half; a waitress told me. They will all be gone!

This morning I walked accross the empty Piazza Navona. A wet, rose-emblazoned campaign flag was draped accross a the edge of the northernmost fountain of the Neptune. I showed the words, Libertà e Solidarietà, somewhat ironically the slogan of one of the most recently created parties, Rosa Bianca, which split from the UDC (Union of the Centre) early in 2008.

Despite the imagery of football teams, knots, roses and rainbows, can any of the alliances created to fight the election hold up, or are they already melting in the Spring sun? Are 70 flavours too many, even for the Italians?

...

By coincidence, my UK local election voting card was just forwarded to me. I have a feeling it's going to be a much less colourful affair.

Rome is a junkyard

The Via dei Coronari, where I'm staying, is an old narrow street in the centre of Rome, just off Piazza Navona. It's so narrow and old that, when I arrived, my taxi driver refused to drive up it (though, as he charged me a fare which bore no relation to what was flashing on the meter - È domenica!: It's Sunday! - this may not have been strictly necessary).

On Monday morning, I woke up to find the street lined almost exclusively with Antique shops. They open at odd times of day; some in the morning; some, like blossoms after the daily rain showers have cleared, in the evening. At other times of day, cafes bloom: a shop with all kinds of household and hair brushes; one selling Venetian glass beads. But in the evening it's the antique shops. Their suitably antique proprietors peer from each doorway, looking hopefully for the customers I have never seen inside.

Inside each shop is a jumble of old Rome. Marble horses' heads; tin cigarette ads; luminescent blown-glass balls; gilt mirrors, slightly foxed; indifferent (mock or real?) 18th century landscapes; intact baroque fireplaces. How long has Rome been a junkyard? Since the Middle Ages when builders chipped at the larger stones in the Imperial forum to make bricks for the new churches? Longer?

At the beginning of the 21st century Rome is a cannibal city, constantly dismantling and restoring itself with; pricing itself high and dispersing itself endlessly accross the globe.

How long can it keep on consuming itself? Can there be any end to it?

(Yes, I did notice those election thingies going on yesterday, but I need to catch my breath. I'll be posting about them tomorrow.)

How to be foreign...

I'm in Rome this week, away from my scanner and any chance of getting a drawing into my computer. I tried feeding my sketchbook into the DVD slot, pressing it against the screen, but nothing worked.

The idea of going to an Italian internet cafe is impossible; as I speak no Italian it took me the entire day yesterday to get a photocopy. So, this week, I'll be posting a daily 'naked' diary without illustrations. After all, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes three thousand times longer to download...

(First entry later today)

Youpi!

I have just been honoured at the Webbys!

Green shoots, green roots...

I'm walking accross the Place Bastille, my hair blowing across my face in the sharp March wind. There's a girl getting out of a taxi by the bus ranks. She's dressed in that Bastille chic style - leggings; obviously expensive check lumberjack coat; many layers of natural fabrics; satchel straps and scarves decorating her shoulders. Her long hair looks like black sheep's wool: ringletty and lanolined. Uncombed and unwashed. It looks fantastic.

Mine doesn't. Several lolipop layers of misguided colour. A little grey at the roots. A generally  fade (faded) appearance. I have to do something about it.

I have my hair dyed once a year. Every Spring when the days start to lighten and I notice the remains of the last bad dye job and the little strands of bleached-out grey. Every year it gets worse. Every year I say I won't do it again. Every year I am suckered. This year is no exception.

The salon I've chosen is called 'Nature'. It is run by a French hairdresser named, somehow ludicrously, George Bacon (No, Bah-coh, not Bay-conne, insists a Francophone friend).

I look at the brochure. The salon offers a solution for women who wish to avoid chemical agressions, keep a safe hair, and who don't want to be trapped by apparent roots.  I don't want to be trapped by my roots. In the face of such threats, who wouldn't go in?

The woman who booked my appointment on phone directs me to the waiting area.

(Ah! Sho-an-nah! La-bas, Sho-an-nah!)

Where my hairdresser looks carefully through my hair and brandishes a lock under my nose.

Look at it! It's vert - green!

I have to agree.

Ok - I say. I have rehearsed this very carefully - I'd like a teinture permenante, chatain cendre. Pas trop fonce, et pas de rouge. (permenant dye, ash chestnut. Not too dark and not at all red).

Ah Oui - she agrees - for your colouring - pas de roux - pas de jaune. Un chatain - pas trop fonce, pas trop clair. Ok?

OK.

I love bossy French women. Here are two of them. I am relaxed. It makes me feel so secure that someone knows she is right.

The treatment is quick. I am dyed and haloed with cotton wool. I am put underneath a machine which steams my head gently. I read magazines. I see hair I like. I point to a photo.

My hair will look like that, won't it?

Bien sur, Madame!

I don't look at what's happening to my hair. J'ai confiance.

Sho-an-nah! Venez ici, Sho-an-NAH!

The salon manager takes over for the 'brushing'. How do I want it?

I show her an ad from one of the magazines.

No, that is a sechage naturel - It is maybe three days since it was washed. I am doing a brossing.

So you can't do that?

No. I will do you a brossing. Do you want it straight? No? Then I will give you - and she wiggles from her head down the length of her body to demonstrate - a little bit of... movement!

She pulls my hair back and forth, achieving impressive volume, and odd flicky bits at the bottom, like Barbie.

She's finished. She smiles broadly as she shows me my hair in the mirror.

It's red.

Which is not what I asked for.

To be fair, it's dark too. Dark like cafe noir. Too dark. The red only shows under electric lights in a halo-like blur.

I have a moment of complete panic. Then kind of panic possible only in this sort of situation; when something extremely trivial looks for an instant as though it might seriously ruin your life. How should I react. Should I say something? Should I complain? Should I explode with anger? The hairdresser seems genuinely pleased with my new colour. I don'tthink she thinks it's as red as I do.

I don't want to spoil her mood so I try to share it. I search for something to lighten the situation. Maybe it's meant to be too dark at first. Maybe the intense colour will lighten after a couple of washes. Maybe my hair just takes in red. Maybe there is a limited amount you can do with my kind of hair and artificial dye.

Then I look at all the other Frenchwomen in the salon with dyed hair. And I remember women I have seen in the street - women who are surely too old for their colour to be natural - and I realise that most of them have hair that is, for my Anglo-Saxon tastes, a little too red and a little too dark. That woman at the cafe outside; that one going by on the bike; the picture in the magazine of Nathalie Rykiel (though it's probably a style thing with her).

Maybe it's what a French hairdresser thinks is not too dark, and not at all red.

I have paid a lot of money to have my hair dyed red. It is no-one's fault. I am full of shame.

...

A week later I put another dye through my hair. It's called blonde cendre. It tones down the red and lightens the darkness.

I look at the end of one of my locks. It has a khaki-ish tinge.

My hair is green. And what's more, I like it that way.

g