Rome: Teasing The Veil

So much happens in Rome, even when just slipping around the corner to buy the morning bus ticket, that documenting every remarkable little moment would somehow begin to take more time than the trip itself. It is a phenomenon, but in a city where the tourists outnumber the cobblestones and the cats want no pats, you salve the confusion with another cup of gelato and buy yourself a flamboyant neckerchief you swear you’ll wear back at home in front of people who already knew you.

After my incident with the $6,700 jacket, we went to something called the Villa Boff Red Dougie, which is an amusing autocorrrct (why didn’t that autocorrect?) of Villa Borghese. Villa Borghese is a large random green shape on Google Maps, and there was allegedly a modern art museum somewhere in the randomness.

As we trudged up to the museum, with its V-shaped U’s and columns and friezes, I began to fear “modern” simply meant “within the last five hundred years,” and that we were going to see more giant paintings of absurdly overblown Christian moments. And more fucking statues. This made me mad, and I was terse and factual with Lauren about my feelings.

Eventually we discovered that the building was not just another mind-numbing religious reliquary, and enjoyed several hours of looking at Picassos, de Chiricos, and Afros (a new favorite) at our own separate paces. Then, as we exited, a young woman from a Vermeer came to life and asked us some insightful questions about our experience, for her thesis. Okay, it was actually a Danish PhD student, but her head was narrow in a neat way.

The rest of the day was a blur of pasta, walking, resting, and going out for pasta. I’m starting to realize that the pasta here is not appreciably better than, say, at least two different places within a five minute walk from my home in Portland. I happen to live one block from a restaurant with a decorated Roman chef, so that’s not entirely fair, but it sure beats the 10.7 miles we clocked on our pins that day. Especially since my walk doesn’t include constantly dodging emoji-size cars as they rattle down alleyways (“roads”) that can scarcely fit a couple of square-dancing raccoons. If an affordance is big enough for water to penetrate, an Italian will attempt to fit a car there.

Tomorrow: The Colosseum, and THE restaurant!