Of bells and balls

I'm not one to go into a church but in a city with over 900 churches I have strayed. Though I might add, as I belong to no creed, I have never attended mass.

I've visited as tourists do the four papal basilicas: St. Peter's, St Mary Major (Santa Maria Maggiore), St. John the Lateran (San Giovanni in Laterano) and the one closest to my home, St Paul Outside the Walls (San Paolo fuori le mura). They are all temples of opulence and magnificence with many a splendid art work ensconsed within but I dislike them.

My favourite church in Rome must be The Pantheon, for its past as Hadrian's Mausoleum,  rather than its present as yet another Roman catholic place of worship. However, it is its conversion to the latter role that over the centuries has saved it from destruction.

My daily life is monitored by the tolling of the bells of my local parish church, a modern ode to architectural hideousness: Our Lady Of Lourdes ( Nostra Signora di Lourdes). The 7.15 bells act as a wake up call and if I'm still in bed by the time the 8.45 bells ring, it's time to quit dawdling and get up.

My alarm clock in Winter

More mournful are the daily tolls that signal the passing of a life. But this is the high point of the Catholic calendar. The Immaculate Conception will be celebrated on the 8th December followed by the Vigilia (Christmas Eve) on the 24th of December and closing with the Epiphany on the 6th of January.

Traditionally, the 8th of December is when families get together to decorate their homes in the timeless tacky glitz that marks the festive season around the globe. Why, even the Pope has a gigantic fir tree erected in his forecourt, a kind donation from a Scandinavian country. 

Families get out the dusty boxes of carefully - or not - stored away baubles and lights along with the Christmas crib. A nod to the fact that this is a Roman Catholic country. The festivity is all about celebrating the birth of a child long ago in a distant land, isn't it?.

Christmas cribs can be formidable elaborations - forget the pastoral delights of 'Away in a Manger' - and enter another dimension. A road in Naples is dedicated to providing the various pieces and figurines that make up a crib, these include politicians and actors alongside the three wise men and other more traditional figures of the nativity.

Every year on Piazza del Popolo in Rome an exhibition entitled '100 presepi' is dedicated to this art of excess and gaudiness. 

The approach of the festive season this year has made me somewhat perplexed. Ten days into November I observed a Father Christmas puppet dangling out of a neighbour's window. Surely, Father Christmas should be preparing for his multiple commercial centre appearances around the world at this point?

 Festive lights began to adorn balconies a week ago though the local discount supermarket got all dolled up a couple of weeks back. The supermarkets began stocking their mountains of panettone and pandoro around the middle of November. And something called 'Black Friday' made its debut.

Signs went up in shop windows 'Black Friday weekend' and 'Black Friday lasts till Sunday' which made me think that some retailers might not have understood that Friday is just a day. 

No use denying it, even in a traditional country like Italy, consumerism is winning.

  

La tenuta: the nature reserve

It's Sunday, house cleaning day and dog walking day, as in, we go for a really long walk. A decision has to be made: where shall we go for our walk? I'm spoilt for choice. 

The area we live in is surrounded by large parks : the Caffarella with its pasturing flock of sheep, the Appia Antica with its Roman ruins, catacombs and tombs, and a nature reserve called the 'Tenuta di Tor Marancia'. This rather grandly translates as the 'Estate' of Tor Marancia, and history suggests that once upon a long ago it may have been formidable.

The area derives its name from that of a freedman, one Amaranthus, who would have worked for the Numisii Proculi family in the 2nd century AD. The Numisii had their country home here which was run as an agricultural business by their slaves.

 Another origin story more prosaically states that the area was named after an edifice of unspecified use, off the Via delle Sette Chiese past the Catacombs of Domitilla.

In the end, and despite the heavy rain of the last few days, I go for the tenuta. I haven't been there in a while and am eager to see how the approaching Winter is changing the vegetation. Besides, it's a nice sunny afternoon, far too warm for the season.

 I walk down my road on which can be found one of the last of a series of medieval towers which were built as look-outs. It is called Tor Marancia but, originally and up until the 16th century, it  was called the Torre di San Tommaso (Tower of St Thomas). It is situated in the Park of Tor Marancia, a sad, fenced-off area near some plain, weather beaten buildings where childrens play things: swings, slides and a climbing frame, are enveloped in a carpet of weeds.

I head towards Piazza Lante. This is where official tours of the tenuta start, right next to the local eyesore: an electric power station. Over the years many attempts have been made to close it down, as more and more cases of cancer in children have appeared. But to no avail.

I climb the hill past the humming station and ignore the entrance to 'needle lane' (my moniker for it), so called because of the plethora of abandoned needles and other addict paraphernalia I came across on one early morning walk a couple of years ago. There also used to be an unofficial gypsy encampment at its far end beside the cactus grove. Over the years gypsies have come and gone, setting up camps in the caves or among the thick bushes of the park.

Up on a ridge there are views to the distant Castelli Romani. It was a prehistoric eruption of those distant Alban Hills that created the park with its distinct ridges, quarry, streams and fertile land.

Inside the tenuta, in an extensively quarried area, there is a 200-metre long and 20-metre high facade which shows the various strata of earth:  tufo (706 - 680,000 years old), red and black pozzolanic ash from 528,000 to 338,000 years ago and others. It is this ash which has been quarried creating numerous caves and galleries within the sediment. 

Quarry face with its various sediment strata

 Today's walk takes me past an enclave of rosemary bushes, some apple and pear trees, large bramble bushes which at the end of the summer yield crops of berries and down towards a larger path.

At its end is the old farm house, the Casale di Tor Carbone and the humid area of the park which is crossed by some water ways and where a few walks back I came across a fresh water crab. 

I cross over this path towards a large field. In the spring it is covered in wild flowers and thistles then it becomes churned up earth and mud, now it is a verdant expanse.

 Pigeons peck at the earth. At its far end are the remains of old constructions just cement bases and rocks and bricks. Climbing up past these I can see in the distance the mausoleum of Caecilia Metella and the Church of San Sebastiano on the Appia Antica.

From here there are two options: the lower path which leads past a ruined farm house or on the upper ridge of the quarry past a crop of bamboo rushes. I opt for the latter.

 I move onto a smaller path covered in grass, the bramble bushes are thick with spider webs and the rushes rustle in the breeze. I'm beyond the area most fellow dog walkers choose to go to and all I can hear are the bird calls mainly parrots and singing blackbirds with the odd raucous yell of a high-perched crow. 

The tenuta is known for its diverse fauna and flora: quail, kestrels, weasels, fox, brown kite, moorhen, red breasts,dragon flies, various amphibians and reptiles are all known to live in the reserve next to elms, ferns, willows, poplars, numerous clusters and bushes of herbs such as sage, rosemary, parsley, spear mint as well as apple and pear trees.

A late Spring bale of dried up grasses and weeds

Whatever the season, the tenuta is worth a visit.

ch...ch...ch...changes

"How much do you think you have been changed by living in Italy." I looked at my interlocutor, it was a deep question I wouldn't have expected from him. I sipped my tea.

"Well, " I paused, and looked across the table at a colleague who was fiddling about with the computer, "maybe I'm more tolerant of certain situations or less impatient. No point getting annoyed if people turn up late for appointments if it's a national trait." I shrugged.

"There's also waiting for ages in a bank, or the post office, just to have an elderly person cut  in front when it's your turn. I'm kinda used to that" piped up my colleague. 

"Or no change at the supermarket. The one at the foot of my building never has 2 cents."

I nodded, "Or we have to take it as read that it's perfectly normal to receive a bill the day before its deadline, if not actually after." We all nodded sagely. We all knew about the last minute rush to the post office to pay a bill that should have been paid yesterday. Even more stressful when the bill in question was a tax bill.

"Or that we usually wait over forty minutes for a bus that is supposed to pass every 15 minutes" said the original interlocutor.

"Or there's accepting that even the most basic discussion will last three times the time it would anywhere else, due to the national tendancy not to get to the point."We had all suffered that one.

We looked at each other. How wise and tolerant we had become.  

A few days after this conversation, I was leafing through a recently purchased cook book by a famous British chef I greatly admire. There were, as ever,  lots of mouth watering pictures of food beside their recipes. I was deciding which I'd attempt first bearing in mind that some ingredients are difficult to get here.

I turned the page. And recoiled. Surely not? I risked a glimpse. The horror... There in front of my eyes was a platter of tomato spaghetti with chunks of chicken atop and aspargus laid in a fetching criss cross pattern. Carbs, protein and veg. What was the problem? Had it been rice or mashed potatoes I wouldn't have blinked.  But spaghetti rosso? No. It was a melding of an Italian primo with a secondo and the contorno heaped on top. "Ca ne se fait pas," as my mother would say to explain just about anything when I was growing up. It just isn't done.

the 'shocking' dish

It brought me back in time to the infamous 'Pizza Hawai': a doughey concoction heaped with chunks of pineapple, pieces of chicken and grated emmental melted on top. On days when my mother didn't feel like cooking we would go to the local mini-market and there sat the monstrosity ensconsced between a goat cheese and ham pizza, and a Margherita that bore little resemblance to the Italian original as this one had parsley in the place of basil and grated emmental (always a favourite in Northern Europe) in lieu of mozarella with large slices of watery beef tomatoes.

 Yet at the time, I ate it with relish, in fact all these pizzas struck me as pretty good. Now I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. 

Equally alarming was the Norman pizza which I found myself eating one summer. In my defence there was nothing else to eat. 

I had given instructions relayed via a third party over the phone: pizza bianca with tuna. 
The take away person asked : "anything else?"
 "Slices of onion."
 "That's all." 
"Yes," as I walked away I heard my bother-in-law whispering into the phone, "I know. but she lives in Italy."

Half an hour later, the pizzas arrived. Mine was bianca (without tomato sauce) with tuna and onions and  a large dollop of Norman double cream slap bang in the centre festively adorned in basil, parsley and oregano. I regarded it, shook my head and bit the bullet (it tasted fine.) I noted that the other pizzas at table had cream on them. It seems Normans put cream on everything.

This may seem a tad fussy, after all food is food. Tastes vary from place to place and nation to nation. However Italians take their food and associated traditions very seriously. A famous Italian chef, a Masterchef judge, once revealed his secret ingredient for the dish of 'Bucatini all'amatriciana'. It was an unpeeled clove of garlic added to the sauce.

The furore that ensued was epic. The mayor of Amatrice invited the starred chef to Amatrice to try the real deal. There was no mucking around with such a traditional dish, food stars or no food stars . 

For the record, according to tradition, the Amatriciana sauce is made with guanciale (cheek lard), pecorino cheese, white wine, San Marzano tomatoes, pepper and peperoncino (Italian red chili peppers). Sadly, today the mayor of Amatrice has more pressing problems to deal with as a large proportion of his town was shaken to the ground this summer, just days before the annual pasta fair.

So has living in Italy changed me?  As regards my attitude to food, if it's a pasta dish, most certainly. I've never paid much attention to the cappucino rule - never after 11am or lunch as the milk prevents digestion - I don't like cappucino. I tend to ignore bathing rules: just after eating or else you have to wait 2 hours. Again, digestion has something to do with it. Italians have quite a few digestion-related hang ups.

 I rarely scare at the 'colpo d'aria' - literally 'hit by the wind' aka a draught - which seems to worry a lot of people and provoke the risk of catching all kinds of nasty illnesses.

 I thought I'd become more tolerant and less impatient but a recent flare up with, of all people, an Italian boss, may indicate that like the Vesuvius, my impatience tends to be dormant and can still erupt unpredictably. 

Bellissimo cavolo nero. An Autumn prince.

 

 

Testaccio - food and contrasts

The first time I visited Testaccio was for a celebration. It was at the end of my first month in Italy, a boiling July. The gathering was held in a fifth floor flat opposite the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria Liberatrice on the Piazza of the same name just metres away fom the famed pizzeria 'Da Remo'. 

I grasped a glass of prosecco and walked out onto the balcony. To my left rose the Aventine hill dominated by the priory of the Knights of Malta and to my right the road stretched out, lined by rows of identical buildings. Down below in a small park some children played watched over by their parents. The bell struck the hour and the flat vibrated. I retreated indoors to where a lively debate was in progress. Where were we going to eat?

If you want a good beer.

Testaccio is the heartland of genuine Roman cuisine. Once know as 'the belly' or ' the slaughterhouse' of Rome and inhabited by 'vaccinari' or butchers, this is where the infamous 'fifth quarter' of Roman cuisine is dished up: the pigs' trotters, brains, genitals and other offal.

The trattorie that dot the grid of streets serve up traditional dishes such as pajata (intestines of milk-fed veal with rigatoni pasta), coda alla vaccinara (oxtail) or tripe in a rich tomato sauce, all of which are appreciated by the diehard fans of this cuisine.

But if offal isn't your thing, there are many other dishes you can try: carciofi alla Romana, abbacchio alla cacciatoria, fiori di zucca, pasta cacio pepe accompanied by a Castelli white or red wine are not to be missed.  

Or you may want to go food shopping. One of Rome's best grocery stores, Volpetti's, is on Via Marmorata. Just peering through the windows is a treat for the eyes whilst a glance inside is an assault on the olfactory senses. Not only does it have an extensive selection of Italian cheese and meat products as well as various pies and savoury pastries but this is also the place to come to for that hard to find slice of Stilton, or, as I did one Christmas, a smelly French vacherin. And just around the corner is Taverna Volpetti where you can sit down for a quick snack. 


 

Piazza Testaccio

Like all of the Roman rione (districts), Testaccio has its own fresh market. For many years, this had been situated on Piazza Testaccio.But in 2012, a new site on Via Galvani was inaugurated and the stalls moved there. Piazza Testaccio underwent a facelift and a fountain of amphorae from beside the Tiber was moved to the centre of the piazza.




Testaccio is  an area which got built around an ancient rubbish tip. In antiquity the area served as a port and cargo would be unloaded on the banks of the Tiber. In the 2nd century AD the state controlled reserves of olive oil were stored on the river banks.

 

Typical colours of this rione

Street art opposite the new market

The remains of broken amphorae, clay vessels (known as testae in Latin) were stacked alongside other detritus. Eventually they formed a hill which covers an area of 20,000 square metres and rises an estimated 35 metres in height. There are said to be the remains of about 53 million amphorae.




Today, Monte Testaccio or Monte dei Cocci is a site of archaeological importance and can only be visited with a guide. At the foot of the hill, in rundown looking shacks and houses are the discos and nightplaces (locali) to which young Romans and a few tourists flock at the weekends.

Next to Monte Testaccio is what remains of the slaughterhouse which gave the area its nickname. The mattatoio was a huge complex of pavilions built over 25,000 square metres. Each pavilion served different butchers and around the slaughterhouse buildings were erected in rows forming the distinctive grid that is Testaccio today.
  
The slaughterhouse closed down in 1975 and the various pavilions were converted into different facilities: a new wing of the Macro museum, the faculty of architecture for the Roma Tre university as well as the 'citta dell'altra economia'.... The various pavilions are still being transformed to date.

The frigorifero (fridge) of the old slaughterhouse.

Nowadays, Testaccio has completed the transition from a working class neighbourhood to a hip middle-class residential one. It is also ensconsed on the tourist route. Foodies are guided around the market and the food shops, some of which are losing their genuinity in the process. Tourists interested in the past can book a guided visit of Monte Testaccio or visit the cemetery where Byron and Shelley are laid.

the post office

Testaccio is where I like to wander through the grid of streets. I can stop off at my favourite shop 'Emporio delle spezie' to stock up on hard to find spices and teas. I may pause to look at the splendid array of cheeses at Volpetti's, but more likely I'll head straight down to the market and get a selection of fresh vegetables, a Sicilian cheese from the Sicilian stall and a snack before walking down past the cemetary and the pyramid. If I have time and if I'm there in the evening, I'll get a beer from 'L'Oasi della Birra' on Piazza Testaccio with a large platter of mixed cheeses and cold cuts.



And at least once every two months I'll go to the large post office, a great slab of Rationalist architecture from the 1930s, to pay the various bills that are the only thing my letter box gets.

 

Versione Originale

This week on 13th October, the 11th edition of Rome's Film Festival opened. Rome doesn't need a film festival but the Mayor in 2005, Walter Veltroni, felt that as Venice, Cannes and Berlin had their own film festivals, it was high-time Rome had one too. He was trying to leave his mark on the city.

 Mr Veltroni's task would have been more appreciated by the Roman tax payers had he turned his attention to the pot-holed streets, crazy-paved pavements and the over-flowing rubbish skips.

All problems which have not been solved by successive mayors either. 

When I came to Rome in 1998, other than the serious worries: would I find a job, what kind of contract would I get;  I was  concerned about whether I would be able to keep up my weekly film going habit. I reasoned that as a big international city Rome would have films showing in original version just as other big cities ( I was thinking Paris and Brussels) did and still do. 

I soon realised that this wasn't the case. There were two cinemas that showed films in original version: the 'Pasquino', in Trastevere which had two screens, and the 'Quirinetta', a converted theatre which had only one projection room. The pickings were slim indeed. I was  reduced to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Thus I saw 'The Gladiator' in the 'Pasquino's' largest room squeezed into a tight seat, squashed against my neighbour's coat while trying to share the armrest.

 The 'Quirinetta', site of a couple of 'Harry Potter's' and 'Star Wars: The phantom Menace', was more comfortable. The seats were of  the old-fashioned puffed up cushion variety on a wood and metal frame, and the screen was revealed as two old and now frayed burgundy velvet curtains parted. The room was vaulted and there was a slight echo. Once, in its hey-day. circa the fifties it would have been an elegant theatre. 

 In the early 2000s they closed down. The first to go was the 'Pasquino'. In a desperate attempt to buck up numbers the owners had opened a small bar, but had omitted to get a proper license. The bar was closed down by the authorities and shortly afterwards the 'Pasquino' closed forever. In 2015, a protest sit-in on the premises was staged in an attempt to get the cinema re-opened. It failed.

The 'Quirinetta' followed suit soon after. Too much competition from out of town cineplexes and not enough custom were the reasons.

 The situation now appeared desperate for regular followers of versione originale films.

Then hope appeared, a large four screen cinema decided to project films in their original version. This was a cinema with a fully operative sound system, good quality screens and small snack bar attached where one could drink a glass of wine while waiting for a viewing.

 In fact, it was such an important venue, that it was chosen to show case some of the films in Rome's first film festival.

This was the 'Metropolitan' at the end of Via del Corso, slap bang in the center with easy access from the nearby metro station on piazzale Flaminio. Then a smaller cinema stopped projecting in Italian and started to show original films too. This was the 'Nuovo Olimpia', off Via del Corso, near the Chamber of Deputies, and right next to an important bus terminus on Piazza San Silvestro. Not only could we see films in their original English, but in French, German, Turkish, Chinese....

Of course, it couldn't last. The landlord of the 'Metropolitan' hiked up the rent. The cinema closed after petitions and protests failed. The Golden Age of foreign language films was over. The Dark Ages were upon us.

Valliantly, despite threats that it might close the 'Nuovo Olimpia' has soldiered on, and is still open to date. The nearby Piazza San Silvestro has had a massive makeover and is no longer a bus terminus. 

Other cinemas sometimes show a film in original, usually a potentially high-grossing film, look up the 'Barberini' or the 'Lux' in local papers or online at 'Wanted in Rome' or 'Trovacinema'.

The 'Fiamma', near Rome's Central station, Termini. from time to time will show original versions in all of its three rooms. Every now and again something will go wrong and the projection will be interrupted: the picture may be blurred, the sound may be out of synch with the picture... It's always an adventure going to the 'Fiamma'. 

Over time, my appetite for films has declined a combination of little free time and too much of a hassle getting to the cinema. After all, with the rise of DVDs and BluRays, and improved home viewing equipment, staying at home to see a film only six months after its original release is just as fun, and usually more comfortable.

Another possibility is to see the films in their dubbed versions. I remember once complaining to an Italian acquaintance about the dearth of choice in original version film, he exclaimed, "but why don't you see the films in Italian. Italian dubbing artists are the best in the world." I was dubious. he warmed to his theme, "indeed, they are so good their performances are even better than the original."