Editor’s 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…

– Vic

Author’s 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’s gates half a world away, I want to share this 50+ year old remembrance.

– Marlow

Roma

Anita Ekberg’s Trevi Fountain nighttime scene from Federico Fellini’s 1960 movie
La Dolce Vita (like Marcello Mastroianni’s heroic character said, “We got it all wrong.”)

I never felt completely comfortable with Roma and its haphazardness. Beyond any slipshod that ancient Greece’s 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’s 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’s windshield.

I remember asking myself back then “what the hell” 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.

Its splash and splendor may have equally been flashy and dazzling, but at its core it was just transitory trashy.

Plus, what was the deal with the one of the world’s major religion’s HQ being built on the graveyard of one of its founders who died on that same hill, upside down on a cross?

Not a fun way or exemplar spiritual life here.

I wasn’t born for a life nailed to the cross. Despite what the habited penguins said, I was born with a feeling that I wasn’t 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’s 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.

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.

Moving on, out, and up — no time or space for small dreams or a broken heart.

Besides, even I, at 19 from the midwestern US, could sense that something was the matter with Roma, though at that time I didn’t 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’ve finally gotten old enough to attain them just crumbled upon closer inspection.

This is not some whiner’s whine. Roma turbo’d 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.

In spite of il Maestro’s efforts capturing the city’s era essentials, Roma in the mid-late 60s was a peculiarly charmless place and time to visit. It wasn’t cleaned or tarted up for Disneyworld-visitor audiences until many decades later. Still…

That old slapdash Roma doesn’t 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’s Armageddon-arsenaled super-powers.

Well . . . here we are . . . back in the present . . . at the corner of WALK-DON’T-WALK, my fellow American Romans and Country men-and-women.

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