roman holidays
a lot of roman food and some art
I spent a good third of this March in Rome, over two separate trips, which was wonderful but inevitably left me feeling that I’d failed in my ambitions. I had a long list of things to do and managed very few of them. You need months to do Rome. You need to live in Rome, something I’m seriously considering.
The first time I went to Rome, four years ago, I stayed in the only hotel room I could find—far out past the Esquiline Hill, somewhere in the bedraggled backstreets behind Roma Termini. I was there for one night. I walked 40,000 steps a day and saw as much as I could, traipsing between St Peter’s and Santa Maria Maggiore, the Lateran, the Capuchin crypt and Santa Maria in Trastevere. It was part of a longer Naples trip, which I wrote about here. But Rome was extraordinary and I’ve always wanted to go back.
Back then, I’d arrived at the Pantheon for the evening Mass and sat next to a woman who couldn’t receive communion because she was divorced. I couldn’t either as I was still an Anglican and I remember feeling such intense love and respect for her—to be a Catholic, the kind of Catholic who comes to Mass at the Pantheon, despite not being able to receive. I understood that this might be my lot if I converted, which I would do three months later, but I loved the religion even more for that. Not bending to the comfort of an individual but bringing them in anyway—allowing for the tension, bringing all the difficult cases indoors, where the sacraments might move the dial one millimetre from recalcitrance to grace.
After the Mass, some of us were picked out of the congregation and gathered to one side for an unknown purpose. We were led down a corridor behind the high altar to see the Hodegetria, the icon of the Virgin and Child gifted to the Pantheon by the Byzantine Ambassador when it was consecrated as a church on May 13th, 609AD. They are wearing royal purple, the most expensive pigment. Unusually, both Mary and her child Jesus are staring straight ahead. She isn’t directing your attention to her child, nor is he directing your attention to her. She is staring into you. The priest told us that we could pray the rosary here and said that whenever we came to the Pantheon, we should feel like we were coming home.
That was my only experience of Rome—I’ve never been back there as a Catholic. It’s been a running joke for almost a decade of my life that men offer to take me to Rome and never follow through. One of them was a historian of the papacy and said he would take me to the Vatican Archives, another would say we’d go to Rome to be married. This time, I had a man accompany me to Rome for the weekend—I was there for the Peter Thiel Antichrist lectures and I had an AirBnB booked and I said why not come along? Which I guess meant that it was me taking him to Rome, the subversion of my early twenties romantic fantasies. I will take the man to Rome myself…
Over March, I stayed in Trastevere for the first trip and Testaccio for the second. Under the paywall are some recommendations for museums, restaurants and gelatarias and bars, the odd church—mostly this was a time for sitting in piazzas drinking aperitivi, buying flowers and flirting in the vicinity of sculptures.