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\nAnita Ekberg\u2019s Trevi Fountain nighttime scene from Federico Fellini\u2019s 1960 movie
\nLa Dolce Vita (like Marcello Mastroianni\u2019s heroic character said, \u201cWe got it all wrong.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s Note: We were thinking about using little Romulus, Michigan, in the alphabet cities series, but Marlow has a better idea this morning. Some of us wound up in Rome frequently during the Balkan crisis- well, an older Balkan crisis- and the grim business to the East of a city that once ruled it all. We usually stayed at a nice hotel on the Via Veneto that once housed German occupiers. The absence of modern Gauls made us salute the life of the Eternal City\u2026<\/p>\n
– Vic<\/p>\n
Author\u2019s Note: One of the places I travelled to during my overseas university years was the Eternal City. Given the armed-to-the-teeth, Slavic-speaking barbarians at the world\u2019s gates half a world away, I want to share this 50+ year old remembrance.<\/p>\n
– Marlow<\/p>\n
Roma<\/p>\n
\nAnita Ekberg\u2019s Trevi Fountain nighttime scene from Federico Fellini\u2019s 1960 movie
\nLa Dolce Vita (like Marcello Mastroianni\u2019s heroic character said, \u201cWe got it all wrong.\u201d)<\/p>\n
I never felt completely comfortable with Roma and its haphazardness. Beyond any slipshod that ancient Greece\u2019s ruins and build-overs could offer in competition for affects and effects, false ungorgeous fronts, tawdry and worn\/defaced stones that posed for tourist photo backdrops, Roma took the cake. All that was missing back in my times were today\u2019s American big city buskers and photo posers — people walking around in famous movie actor role costumes or cartoon characters. That crap still makes me wanna put my foot through my car\u2019s windshield.<\/p>\n
I remember asking myself back then \u201cwhat the hell\u201d regarding all those $100 salon-coiffed Afghan dogs on lizard skin leashes. I liked huge entrances and promenades, but its fur-coated, big sunglasses faced, bleached-blondes of too much make-up and radiance, ablaze with cheap cut real and paste-diamonds, darling-ing admirers in various tongues was barf-inducing. Roma at times was a ghastly distillation of Hollywood for me. I knew it would be, since La Dolce Vita was just Hollywood, mordantly rendered Italian-style. Thanks anyway, Maestro Fellini, for the beauty, the ghastly and the dreams.<\/p>\n
Its splash and splendor may have equally been flashy and dazzling, but at its core it was just transitory trashy.<\/p>\n
Plus, what was the deal with the one of the world\u2019s major religion\u2019s HQ being built on the graveyard of one of its founders who died on that same hill, upside down on a cross?<\/p>\n
Not a fun way or exemplar spiritual life here.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t born for a life nailed to the cross. Despite what the habited penguins said, I was born with a feeling that I wasn\u2019t lost. I was born with the gift of gab, grab and go. This all-roads-lead-to-Roma town was bad-trippin’ on a dead man\u2019s buried-city-cemetery cloak. Yet, his high priests and priestesses separated themselves from us believers with their sunlight shrouds, shaman duds, high walls, and Hollywood costumed Vatican Swiss Guards.<\/p>\n
Despite being raised devout in this Church as a solo singer at services and funerals, I was probably 12 or 13 when I realized there was a whole, huge, unexplored, and exciting world of adventure that with a modicum of talent I could walk about and connect with while there was still time. I also remember understanding that this tasty chocolate burnt-almond ice-cream cone in my right hand was not going to cut it as an object of my desires.<\/p>\n
Moving on, out, and up — no time or space for small dreams or a broken heart.<\/p>\n
Besides, even I, at 19 from the midwestern US, could sense that something was the matter with Roma, though at that time I didn\u2019t see how it could have been terminal. And its stylish folks and their Jaguars and Italian hot rods we all now drool over as we\u2019ve finally gotten old enough to attain them just crumbled upon closer inspection.<\/p>\n
This is not some whiner\u2019s whine. Roma turbo\u2019d my roaming in search of the real and, yes, the sinful. There was plenty of both there and elsewhere that I had the good fortune to find.<\/p>\n
In spite of il Maestro\u2019s efforts capturing the city\u2019s era essentials, Roma in the mid-late 60s was a peculiarly charmless place and time to visit. It wasn\u2019t cleaned or tarted up for Disneyworld-visitor audiences until many decades later. Still…<\/p>\n
That old slapdash Roma doesn\u2019t exist anymore. But it did exist with its fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of a vast empire of self-believing enchanters which was once, briefly, more devastating than today\u2019s Armageddon-arsenaled super-powers.<\/p>\n
Well . . . here we are . . . back in the present . . . at the corner of WALK-DON\u2019T-WALK, my fellow American Romans and Country men-and-women.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2022 My Aisle Seat
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Editor\u2019s Note: We were thinking about using little Romulus, Michigan, in the alphabet cities series, but Marlow has a better idea this morning. Some of us wound up in Rome frequently during the Balkan crisis- well, an older Balkan crisis- and the grim business to the East of a city that once ruled it all. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-island-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23085"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23089,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23085\/revisions\/23089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}