On The Streets Of Rome

Rome is one of the cities that I know quite well, street by street, partly because I have visited so often since I first was there in 1962, and of course from having lived there with my family in two stints of fifteen months or more, in the late sixties and mid seventies, but mostly because whenever there I walked the streets incessantly, thereby gaining a visual and visceral sense of the city.  This visit was dramatically different, for me because I have severe problems with my balance, and for my husband, whose joints as well as the nerves in his legs make extensive walking very painful. Walking Roman streets is a challenge since the brick construction of so much of the pavements makes everything uneven, especially in a city hardly known for its repair.  Even with my cane I was fearful, even with Richard ever ready, ever helpful.  So we took taxis everywhere, and went on only one excursion a day.  Since we knew the "tourist sites" so well we only revisited one, the Villa Julia, for some reason my husband's curiosity about the Etruscans was especially keen at the moment.  An odd choice I thought until when inside I realized that the objects on display were in some instance curiously unfamiliar to me and thus there was the pleasure of the shock of the new. and of course the tomb monument of the reclining husband and wife is also for the centuries a monument of connubial bliss.  As we sped through the streets in surprisingly inexpensive taxis, and for the most part more easily navigable than the Rome of my memory, I was terrified by the barrage of high speed motorcycles everywhere defying rule and rationale in their deathly passing on the left, on the right, cutting in front, always at top speed, zooming here and there, and I have to salute the taxi drivers who went through this mess with scarcely a complaint.  Moreover a majority of the taxi drivers left their seats to offer me a strong arm to use as support as I ascended into or alighted from their car, gentlemen one and all, and who did not expect tips.  We resolutely drove to locations for designated walks--in the Borghese Gardens, for instance, or the banks of the Tiber where a paved bike and running track has been built down below the Lungo Tevere street near the Ponte Sisto. a pedestrian bridge where on can stand to gaze down at the water or north or south at its passage. Every day we journeyed out for a two hour walk, laboriously achieved, always rewarding, with brilliant autumn weather, and the casual sights as thrilling in their own way as the so called "sites."  One reason for this is the incredible physical beauty of the average Roman, beautiful in youth beautiful in old age and very few disfigured by the commonplace obesity that marks the average sampling of population here in America.  And this must surely be tied in with the surprising dish of pasta which is the course served before a meat or fish course (the second plate so designated on the menu).  It always surprises me every time I am back in Rome.  Just enough for maybe ten bites, a taste, not a gluttonous major blob of food as in a so called Italian restaurant in the States, but don't get me started . . . . .