Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [91]
It was cool inside. The walls were a blinding white, embedded with delicate traces of frescoes. I stood for a while, then moved to the altar and bowed my head. There, alone in the silent church, I whispered the names of those gone from me: Father. Mother. Grandmother. Jean. Marion. Ducky. Max. David.
In my life, I loved them all.
14
SPANISH STEPS
Dear Alice,
I have remained a stranger in Rome. Which is why I send you this happy reminder of a city I love: Venice. Rome and I are not lovers. We are not even friends. I can only hope that Camus was right when he wrote that “what gives value to travel is fear.” I suppose it’s possible that a little dash of fear gives value to more than just travel. For one thing, it can teach us to be brave.
Love, Alice
Three days after arriving in Rome I had my first real brush with danger. Until then I’d encountered only the routine mini-scares faced by most tourists. Yes, there was the evening in Paris when I was window-shopping along a quiet street near St. Sulpice and a burly man approached me, demanding I give him money. He took off, however, when several people emerged from the door of a nearby café. And there was that Sunday in London when two menacing young men circled me while I waited to change trains in an out-of-the-way Underground station. But then the train came and I jumped on, leaving them behind.
The incident in Rome was different. For one thing, I already had negative feelings about the city. Although I knew it to be a premature and unfair judgment, Rome struck me as frenetic and indifferent, a place where everyone seemed unfriendly, hassled, and in a hurry. Where was that warm, laid-back attitude that prevailed in the other Italian cities I’d visited? Not here.
Here, I seldom walked along a street without someone bumping into me or rudely pushing their way ahead of me. Here, I walked in a tense, alert state, always on the lookout for the noisy, polluting motorbikes whose drivers seemed to extract pleasure from terrorizing pedestrians.
Noisy, polluted, indifferent, crowded: this was my impression of Rome.
I knew it was a superficial one; I knew that if I dived deeper into the real city beneath the tourist attractions, my view of Rome would change. But I had no desire to ingratiate myself with the city, as I had done in the past with Paris or Milan or Venice. I had made a feeble attempt the day before, crossing over the Tiber River to visit the old Trastevere district where, despite rampant gentrification, the authentic Rome was said to reside still. And it was true.
In Trastevere I wandered through a maze of narrow streets and alleys, walking occasionally beneath a canopy of wash hung out between buildings to dry. Although I’d been told to look out for purse-snatchers in Trastevere, I was quite at ease walking by myself through the area. This was a real neighborhood, one where mothers walked with children to and from the market and shopkeepers stood at their doors calling out to passers-by. At times I had an eerie feeling that somehow I’d wandered onto the set of a Sophia Loren movie.
Of course, it had its beauty spots, too. I was particularly drawn to the lovely Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere, which I wandered into quite by chance. With its elegant raised fountain and charming sidewalk cafés, the square was an oasis of pleasant neighborhood bustle—minus the motor scooters. I had an iced coffee, and then headed across the piazza to the twelfth-century church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. I was unprepared for the majesty of the church’s interior: its enormous, glowing nave and gigantic columns were as beautiful as any I’d seen.
Still, as pleasant as my visit to Trastevere was, it was not enough to change my mind about Rome. I remained a stranger, wandering through a city as indifferent to me as I was