Roaming Rome

Andrea

1/24/12

Some days I hate Rome.  It takes forever to get around the city, you get squished (or spooned, as Kristin would prefer to say) on public transportation, and a large percentage of the time things simply don’t work.  For the most part this stems from the fact that we do not have internet in our apartment, in which case we need to trek to the nearest golden arches to mooch some free wifi.  Sounds simple enough, however, it seems that the beloved establishments do not always seem to have working signals.  It’s almost as if they flip the “internet off” switch when we walk through the door.  Anyway, enough about our internet woes.  Bottom line, Rome’s public transport system is an ever evolving beast and you never really know how long it will take you to get from point A to point B.  After one particularly unsatisfying morning jaunt to find a wifi signal (I visited three separate locations in an attempt to log onto the World Wide Web) I had had it with Rome.  I spent over two hours just trying to get to and from the city center and was ready to jump ship and move to Siena, where you can walk from one end of the city to the other in less than half an hour.  After a few hours of brooding I was nearly set to propose the plan to Kristin.  The thing about Rome, though, is that you can hate it one minute and love it the next.   The same day I did a walking tour of the city and as the sun set I began to remember why I love Rome.  The complex history, the modern city’s relationship with its ancient predecessor, the people, the food, the language – it all came back to me: I love it here.  Maybe it’s the stark transitions that drive me nuts sometimes (it’s like the movie My Life in Ruins with Nia Vardalos when she’s talking about how sometimes things in Athens go fast and sometimes things go slow – it’s almost never a happy medium) or maybe it’s that I can’t control the amount of time it takes me to get somewhere (if the bus or train even decides to show up, which they do, for the most part, yet occasionally the train that you’ve been waiting 20 minutes for simply disappears from the departures screen and never shows).  Either way, I have come to realize that there will be times that the city will kick me when I’m down, but will later pull me back up, and that a simple run in the Villa Pamphili or walk through the historic center at twilight can completely change my opinion of the Eternal City.