The promised heatwave has arrived and delivered. It's the end of June and as hot as at the end of July so nothing Romans can't handle. Well, it would be so if it weren't for the mountains of refuse that clutter the streets.
From denial to acknowledging the obvious, the Mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, of the M5S party, has ordered a survey of the situation. Why can't she just send out the trucks and get the job done? For months readers of the city paper 'Roma Today' have been sending in photos of overflowing skips alongside pictures of holes in the road and gulls feasting on rats or pigeons.
Unsurprisingly, as the clean up job slowly gets underway emptying the skips has revealed shocking larval life in their depths. Putrefying, decaying mountains of waste cooked at over 30°C have produced the expected. By the time the trucks have cleared one road already the bins are filling up again. Citizens who have stashed their rubbish rather than dump it on the kerbside rush out to get rid of it. The skips'll be overflowing again in no time.
In other countries such as France where such high temperatures are less usual special provisions have been taken to try and assist people through the heatwave and to avoid a repeat of the14,000 or more deaths of the 2003 heatwave. For example, in Paris swimming-pools are being kept open later and bottles of water given out in the larger cities. In Rome, the price of bottled water goes up on the hottest days, especially in the mini-markets that are scattered all over the city.
But to be fair, with this early heatwave, the civil protection unit has been giving out bottles of water to tourists outside the main historic sites. Anyone visiting the Imperial Fori in the summer knows how dusty and shade free the archaeological park is. The Palatine hill is cooler with its umbrella pines.
The Mayor doesn't issue special advice on dealing with the potentially life threatening heat. However, she has issued a series of rules to maintain the decorum of the city and aimed mostly at so-called uncivil tourists.
1) Taking a dip in the fountains has long been forbidden. Inspired by Anita Ekberg's midnight stroll in the Trevi Fountain in Fellini's La Dolce Vita every year tourists and a few attention seeking minor actresses have tried to mimic the star, and not only in the Trevi Fountain. The Barcaccia at the foot of the Spanish Steps, the various fountains on Piazza Navona as well as the large basins at the base of the Altar to the Nation have all hosted some impromptu bathers, most of whom were then greeted by the municipal police and fined (450 euros).
2) All over the city there are small drinking fountains with a spout, these are known as nasoni (big noses after their distinctive curved spouts). There are in fact 2,500 of them, 280 of which are situated within the city walls. Romans, tourists and animals can all drink from them though last year due to the low water level of Lake Bracciano which supplies Rome with much of its drinking water a third of them were switched off. Etiquette dictates that to drink you place your hand on the spout so that water gushes up and out through a hole in the top of the spout and makes it easy to drink, or cup your hand below the flow to direct the water into your mouth. Putting ones head below the spout or even worse on the spout is considered rude (and unhygienic) and thanks to the new rules could result in a fine.
3) Wheeled suitcases cannot be dragged down steps such as the Spanish steps lest they damage the expensively refurbished (by Bulgari) monument. The rule also applies to prams. And all historic steps around the city.
4) The Spanish steps are also no longer to be considered a picnic site, no messy dripping ice creams can be eaten while seated on them and enjoying that classic pastime of people watching. Even less tolerated are the wedges of pizza with their staining dollops of tomato and oil. The messy eating rule applies to all historic monuments and sites.
5) On hot days men cannot walk around bare chested, and do not even think of dressing up as a centurion. The centurions that plied their trade (getting photographed by tourists) near the colosseum and the imperial fori have also been outlawed.
6) Other recent bans include no busking on public transport, no organised pub crawls, no public drunkenness, no illegal street trading and ticket touting and for the Romans who hang their clothes outside their windows, no clothes lines hanging between buildings.
And, in a rare moment of logical thinking and organisation, the town hall has said that tourists will be able to pay the fines directly via their bank cards and digital payment systems. They know only too well how difficult it is to get tourists to pay fines once they have returned to their home countries!
But for the majority of people these rules are just common sense. So resist the urge to throw yourselves into the cold waters of the fountains and grab an ice-cream, preferably seated in the 'gelateria' or on its terrace, and relax. No the 'vigili urbani' (street police aka traffic wardens) aren't looking at you.
It was serious I had been summoned. My landlady had to speak to me. I was a little worried. My Italian wasn't brilliant and my landlady spoke fast in between puffs on her cigarette. I entered her office. She and her husband owned a shop which was furnished with a small desk and a large TV. In the corner was a pile of, what to my untrained eye, was scrap metal and some tank-shaped objects.
If you had a problem with a gas boiler her husband could fix it, that much I knew. The shop was above my basement flat, (this was my second flat in Rome, my first alone) which meant that I could never avoid either her or her husband at any given time of the day as walking to the flat from the bus stop involved walking in front of the large glass window and usually open door. If her husband was there he could be found reclining in his chair, feet up on the table, watching some kind of talk show or soap, hidden in his natural breathing atmosphere of a thick cloud of smoke. The wife was sterner, more rigid and was usually at the desk on the phone puffing away as if she were a contestant in some kind of smokers' Olympics. Most of the time I dealt with her husband.
I walked up the steps into the office. She told me to shut the door. I did. I wondered if she was going to tell me I had to move out, or try to up the rent again.
"I need to talk to you about those people who were in your flat whilst you were on holiday. We do not want those kind of people in the building," were her greeting words as I sat in the chair opposite her. I was trying to follow her words, concentrating. Too slow in my answer, she continued, "they made too much noise, had loud parties and left a mess in the courtyard. The neighbours don't want people like that near their homes."
People like that? I protested, "What? My brother and his girlfriend!? They were animal sitting for me." It had been a convenient arrangement, I'd gone on holiday to Spain with a friend and they had come down from the cold North for a Roman holiday.
Besides, what was she talking about? Parties? My brother didn't know anyone in Rome.
She continued, "my husband had to come out at night, at night! ... to see what they were doing... he managed to convince the neighbours not to call the police..."
I was gobsmacked, not so much by the news that my neighbour was at the origin of the complaint, but at my landlady's attitude: "those people?", "all those foreigners?" My continued silence, I really didn't know what to say, prompted her final salvo: "never let people like that into the flat again." A wave of her hand followed with a final "you can go now." Her gaze turned towards the TV in the corner as she reached for the remote control.
The crux of the problem, in this case, was my neighbour. She had disliked me on sight. Her first words as I had come across her in the stairwell were: "Don't let the dog into the courtyard." Before I could answer, even introduce myself, she'd disappeared into her flat.
Later, she took to shaking her tablecloth over my terrace, often over my just-washed clothes that were drying there. And there was also her little habit of going to my landlady with whom she had a cordial relationship, and make up stories about what I was doing. Her dislike stemmed from the fact that I was a foreigner (and I had a dog).
Moving to another country, of course, meant adapting to different ways of doing things. For the most part they were little things such as shop opening times (small shops mean big lunch breaks), queueing rules (or not), food habits (absolutely no cappucino after 11am, and most certainly not after lunch or dinner).
It also meant getting used to the people, fellow Europeans so surely not that different, and how they communicated. Hand gestures, here, constituted a whole new and fun language to learn. Eventually I too started punctuating my words with demonstrative hand gestures. I'd cracked it, I'd gone native. Well, almost.
After a few years I began to think of Italy and Rome as my home. A sense of relief accompanied the moment the plane touched down. The background sound of people chatting was now as comprehensible as my native languages.
So it always came as a slap in the face when every now and again the words: "lei é straniera," were shot back at me as conclusive proof that I couldn't understand, whatever the issue might be. No amount of protesting, no amount of years, 10, 12, 15.... years, could ever erase the fact that in their eyes I was forever a foreigner. "No, veramente. Lei non puo capire." (no, really you can't get it).
What I couldn't understand ranged from the fairly trivial such as the above cappuccino rule (there actually is a logical explanation for it), to the amazement at the content of some TV programs, to pasta rules (I'll explain some other time), to the illogical, often incomprehensible bureaucracy, to the tortuous Byzantine legal system..... If I didn't understand, it was because I was a foreigner.
I wasn't the only one who experienced this continued feeling of dismay. I have a colleague who has been married to a Sicilian for over thirty years every time she goes to see her relatives in Sicily they call her 'la straniera' and in family conversations her husband is referred to as the one who married 'la straniera.'
Another friend lamented on a social networking site: Will I ever not be a 'straniera?' Yet another likes to think of it as almost a term of endearment as she makes her rounds of her local market. "It's rather sweet really."
After all, who could dispute the facts we were not born here.
