The Real Rome

The Real Rome

Kim booked us for a tour of the working side of Rome. I can only assume that I have done a good job of showing her all of the regular tourist stuff that constitutes the bulk of the Trip Advisor tours she can find on the internet. What she did instead of that was find a woman who proposed a tour of the Testaccio and Ostiense areas of the city, areas that are truly not on the beaten tourism path. When you go to Paris and want to go slumming, you go to the Rive Gauche or Left Bank for a walk on the wild side. Generally, when you come to Rome and want to do that, you go to Trastevere, which is where we are going tomorrow night for a cooking tour of the district (don’t ask me how I agreed to that). But Testaccio and Ostiense rarely come up.

The tour was booked for two hours on the theory that this was a short time to spend doing something we couldn’t really understand or envision. Kim had agreed to meet her in the afternoon at a place called Mercato Testaccio. For all my time in Rome, I have to admit that I had never heard of the place. I’ve been many time to the flea market at Porta Portese, but that is in Trastevere. The Mercato Testaccio is more like a souk you might find in the Middle East. It is a collection of stores in what is probably a municipal building set up to house the daily market that operates out of there. We went in since we were early for our assignation. The first place we passed was selling housewares and it attracted Melisa’s attention for some reason. It seems she has been using a Sicilian fiber cloth for cleaning her kitchen for many years and she is in need of a new one. We looked through what they had on offer that seemed to match the description and finally found two products that came close. Melisa was unsure so I bought the two for a total of 3 Euros, just in case they did the job for her. We then wandered around the market a bit more until the tour guide came up and met us as agreed. Her name was Sylvia and I could tell right away that her English was excellent.

Sylvia started her tour with taking us to the food stall area of the Mercato where we had a choice of homemade pizza, paninis with your choice of stuffing and a placed that specialized in suppli (the famous arancini or rice-balls I remember from my youth in Rome). While Mike and Melisa got a panini with veal that they very much enjoyed, I wallowed in a modest-sized but delicious traditional cacio e pepe suppli that tasted like the arancini I remember from Rome fifty years ago. Throw in a Fanta orange drink and I was transported back to high school in EUR.

We spent our initial lunch break getting Sylvia’s take on the state of the Italian economy and societal ills. I was deeply impressed by her awareness of the current state of affairs and her ability to verbalize her views without giving us any clue about whether she was very liberal or very conservative. Many of her comments could take the listener in either direction, which made me all the more impressed by her intelligence and perceptiveness about the general societal conditions that Italy faces. She is a native Roman who lived abroad and then married a Frenchman and returned to Rome because his ability to immigrate was far easier than hers to immigrate to France. In fact, something I hadn’t realized was the ease with which one can immigrate to Italy in general. Now that Italy is aging faster than any other country in the world, such immigration policies would seem to be quite wise, but from her description of economic and industrial/infrastructure policy, it is not clear that there is enough of an economic base to support the necessary levels of immigration.

We then started our walking tour beyond the Mercato. Just behind the place she pointed out Testaccio Hill, a place I had visited on my own within the first few weeks after I arrived in Rome. I was fourteen years old at the time and still had a few weeks until school started. I had been told about Testaccio Hill by a woman who worked with my mother and had been an Army Colonel (somewhat of a rarity in those days). She knew I was interested in archeology and thought I might find it interesting. I remember going there to dig up pieces of amphorae shards, but my memory beyond that was still pretty vague. Now, as Sylvia explained the formation of the hill and the composition of its pottery-packed soil, I suddenly realized the uniqueness and the scale of the place. This is no small hill, as I had somehow remembered it, but rather a very large hill of perhaps 200 feet in height and several city blocks in scale. Rome is built on the famous seven hills (Aventine, Palatine, Capitoline, Caelian, Esquiline, Viminal and Quirinal), all of which are within the walls of the ancient city. The Aventine is the one furthest to the south and closest to the Tiber River. It is on this hill that the Testaccio Hill sits, so it is actually a hill on a hill and I now think of it as the eight hill of Ancient Rome.

At the entrance to the hill, which is now behind a locked gate that declares it an archeological site under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture (something that happened the year after I made my visit in 1968), there was a particularly interesting feature. This was because the terraced steps were made from stacks of amphorae pottery shards, thereby highlighting the very composition of the hill that makes it so special. What we were looking at was, in essence, one large trash heap of ancient manmade pottery that was all destroyed on this site to suit the sanitary regulations of the ancient Roman civilization that was supported by trade through the Roman Empire. Sylvia spent a moment or two explaining her views on the burdens of empire building, which was another great lesson in both history and societal reality. It you want to have an empire and you want to be enlightened, as the Romans did eventually, you have to enfranchise all of your conquered peoples. When you make them all citizens, the burden you assume is that you must also agree to provide for them in the ways that are most necessary in those times, whether that’s food or shelter or roads. When you do that and you start moving around the goods and services needed to accomplish all of that, you create unintended consequences like the symbolic trash heap of Testaccio. Interesting stuff.

Sylvia then took us past the walls into the Ostiense area where street art has become an important part of the local color. Art is at the top of Maslow’s self-actualization hierarchy and thus constitutes a sort of higher plane of existence of mankind, right? We looked at block after block of buildings that had been adorned by local artists, all with decidedly political commentary imbedded in them. Strangely enough, like Sylvia herself, that street art had a blend of liberal and conservative leaning. What it showed was that life is harsh and beautiful all at once. It also showed that preservation, sustainability and progress are all natural human forces that fight for airtime and dominance and in some ways cancel each other out at times. My guess is that this is a story that could be told in almost any city of the world, but few with as many years of history on display simultaneously as Rome has. It was all a great lesson in two hours of the real Rome and perhaps even more so, the reality of human existence that is the human condition.