The Passegiata

1/19/2012

Andrea

For the last few days I have been searching for the entrance to the Villa Pamphili, a beautiful park near my apartment that our Austrian landlord, Martin, (whom we adore!) keeps telling me about.  Somehow when he explains how to get there it seems easy, but it also involves running along streets with no sidewalks and cars whizzing by you.  No big deal – they’ll move, right?  Well, I chose to avoid that option and find another way in.  After days of running around semi-aimlessly and hitting a lot of dead ends, I FINALLY managed to discover the Bermuda Triangle that the park is located in (and I had to wait 10 minutes to cross the street to get to it!).  Once in the magical green wonderland, I quickly saw that Martin was not exaggerating its awesomeness.  It is expansive, green, and most importantly, has clean air and I don’t have to constantly be on the look out for mopeds or cars coming at me.  And there were Italians everywhere!  Everyone was out walking with their kids, spouses, dogs, grandmothers, and there were even a fair number of runners – and female runners at that!  There were trees everywhere, grass (oh, how I had almost forgotten how it felt to run on grass!), fountains, streams, lakes, and gorgeous buildings from the heyday of the Pamphili family.  After being surrounded by buildings, concrete, confused looks (not a lot of runners in Rome, especially female ones wearing shorts in January), and car exhaust, this park was more than I could have hoped for.