Monday 25 July 2016

Tour Di Italia 3. Pisa & Rome




“This is how it started in Taken,” Kelly says.

“As in Liam Neeson?”

She nods and we stare at the glasses of champagne we’ve been given, looking for signs of drugs at the bottom of it.

We’re in a dingy back room of a nail parlour somewhere in Rome with no windows, champagne in hand and people coming in and out given us sparrow-like started looks. They’ve clearly mistaken us for someone else, fussing over us with drinks and appetisers, the beauticians asking to take pictures of us and insisting we add her on Instagram, while the other one disappears and returns wearing full make up and sticky lipgloss. I’m a bit worried about all the whispering and the never ending bubbly, but it’s free and more importantly there’s wifi, so I play along until I finish the bottle, leaving Kelly to her fate and her pedicure as I escape to wander the Roman roads in the evening warmth.

**

Whoever the mad Roman women thought we were, we survive to tell the tale without being kidnapped, having travelled from Florence through Pisa to the Capital, stopping to take the obligatory Pisa poses in the gorgeous sun and lounging the shade of the tower, befriending a guy travelling from Miami as we sunbathe and eat ice creams on the grass. He is the chosen one today for two important reasons; A. he has a GoPro and B. he can help us with our bags. Pisa is a wonderful illustration of the unaffected Italian attitude. With the first brick laid in the 12th century, they stopped and started construction for 200 years unable to correct the famous tilt until it was officially completed, the foundations in soft sand & soil meaning it only officially stopped moving in 2008.

Pisa is an easy one hour and 8 Euro journey from Florence, spending the day in the pretty town before taking the evening train onto Rome. The sunset train is a must see; comfortable, cool and an unforgettable sight from the window, watching the sky turn the ocean into a fiery orange horizon, the light disappearing as we arrive in a city I have waited so long to see, Roma! Mi Roma!



**


How do you describe Rome? It’s like living two lives, the old and the new so intricately intertwined you’re on the flipside of a coin. This other life is so clearly visible it feels you are almost intruding on the Roman’s; every corner you turn there are jaw dropping ruins and remains, cars and vespers winding around the screaming roads that have popped up around the columns and marble, the Italians living in perfect synchronicity alongside their ancestors. What is so enticing about this city is how life has built itself around its past, new buildings using the groves and spaces between ancient columns, reclaiming it the way a jungle reclaims a once inhabited land. Life pushes forward no matter what the fall, and here the scars of time are beautiful and exposed.

I’ve been drinking the fountain water, which I thought was a perfectly good money saving idea as I’ve seen the locals do it, but the dogs drink from it too so maybe it wasn’t so smart, especially as I find I can’t eat anything from Florence all the way to Rome and it takes a few days for my appetite for buffalo mozzarella and beef tomatoes to return.

We haven’t got the coffee thing quite right either, and this is upsetting me. Italy is the coffee Mecca, but I’m used to London craft coffee, double shot super strong and smooth; here I ask for latte and get a large cup of hot milk.

We try a new tactic. “Un latte e un espresso,” I say, while Kelly orders one macchiato and one Americano. The barman looks at our table us but it’s just us two, and stares wide eyed as I pour the espresso into the latte, Kelly shotting the macchiato after the Americano. We’re buzzing off our faces as we leave, and everything looks bright and loud on the walk back to the apartment. Nope, we haven’t got the coffee thing quite right yet.



**

Travstevere. This is the area you want to stay in Rome. This is where the Italians are -the streets are warm and inviting, music playing, al fresco tables, Italian menus and little churches covered in green ivy. We buy 5 euro local pizzas which melts in your mouth and sit outside in the piazza where the locals have set up an outdoor cinema. The cab drivers are slightly mental, this fiery Roman temperament present in the blood of the locals sending us spinning as he gives us a guided tour with one hand on the wheel, stopping in the middle of duel carriage way to point out monuments and having a full on road-rage moment with the car behind as I try and retrieve my change on arrival. “Scuzi, I need 5 euro from that,” I say to the handful of cash in his hand, but he is busy debating with the gentleman in the car behind whether to have a full on fist-fight so my pleas fall on deaf ears.



**



We explore Roman Rome in the sun, finishing boldly by climbing the 521 steps to the very top of St Peters Basillica, but going round and round the endless steps I make a new discovery about myself- I am terrified of heights. Very inconvenient. Actually it’s not me that’s afraid of heights, it’s my knees, they are suddenly made of jelly and have the odd desire to crouch down low and hold on to my flip flops, trying to regain a centre of gravity. Kelly is patient but firm, and moves me away from the baffled security guard who I am trying to convince to let me go back down the opposite way.

4 cities in 6 days, walking on average 5 miles a day, we are a pair of nutters. By the time we reach the Vatican on day 7 I’ve hit a slight wall, and of all the places in all the cities, this is not the place to hit a wall.

Churches have always been a place of comfort to me having brought up a catholic; the smell of incense reminds me of childhood, Sunday’s and the promise of sweets for good behaviour. But I can’t get a sense of the Vatican, the power & austerity are lost in the herding and charging of tourists along crowded hot corridors. I want to be left in peace to explore, to sit in the Sistine chapel, but under of the roof of the world famous art a guard shouts over a microphone ‘SILENCE’ and the moment is lost.

Art and beauty are meant for sharing, but you can’t force the experience. Sometime we can’t put parameters around it, a price, a trampled path. I leave exhausted, and the waiter serving me my recovery diet coke thinks the solution is to hide one of our shoes in an attempt to make us laugh. It works.

We collapse a nap for an hour, watching episodes of Ab Fab, the Patsy and Eddie of the hopeless, hapless travelling world asleep with the air con to soothe our aching selves. After a shower and another coffee, we go out and dance with the Romans until the early hours of the morning, and in a haze of hangover and heat, make out way to Naples the next afternoon…


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