First week in Rome
My semester in Rome got off to a rocky start – literally.
Christian was able to join me for the first week. Since we were leaving from Lyon, we bought train tickets rather than flying. The train is a more sustainable transportation method and is less expensive once you add in the cost of suitcases – especially when packing for a four month stay. It’s also surprisingly similar in terms of the time it takes: seven hours of train travel vs. a one and a half hour flight, but once you include having to leave three hours ahead of time for the airport, waiting for luggage, and transport to the center of Rome, the difference is only about an hour.
We were scheduled to leave on a Monday morning, arriving half a day before my 21 students. Luckily, I’m not French, and I do check my email outside of work hours. Looking at it before going to sleep, I found a message sent twelve hours before our scheduled departure from Trenitalia: “Your train has been cancelled due to an obstruction on the track.”
My first thought was that they still had eleven hours to move whatever was blocking the track… But the train was cancelled regardless, so we quickly bought expensive last-minute plane tickets for the next morning. We found out later that there had been an avalanche in the Alps, and the “obstruction” on the track was actually 700 cubic meters of rockfall. The track was closed for weeks.
It was nice to be back in Rome. I was first here twelve years ago with my daughters and a student assistant, leading a study abroad program with the same partner organization, CEA. Four of main staff members from 12 years ago are still here, but the headquarters have moved from suburban Rome to Prati, a chic neighborhood right next to Vatican City. The students and I are very lucky to have the chance to spend four months here. I wish that my daughters could be here this time too, but at 22 and 24 they have their own lives and probably wouldn’t choose to live with their mom again for an entire semester, even in Rome.
The week was busy, with orientation sessions for the students and I, two guided tours arranged by CEA, and finishing my class preparations. Christian and I found time to visit the Galleria Borghese on our first full day. The paintings and sculptures include some amazing works, especially statues by Bernini, but the building itself is also a work of art.
If you go to Rome and want to see it, book your tickets several weeks in advance.
The next day we went to Bonci Pizzarium for lunch, a place that I had read about. I knew it was highly rated, but had no idea of the crowd that would gather for takeaway pizza, most of us eating it warm, standing on the sidewalk. I will write a whole post about Bonci soon, but here is our first order:
On the left, zucchini, mortadella, stracchiatella, and pistachio; on the right, oven roasted tomatoes and chicory. Both were delicious.
Later the same afternoon, CEA gave the students and I a guided food tour. I naively thought that a food tour would involve small samples, but in this case it was more than enough food for a meal. I had to forego most of the offerings having already stuffed myself with Bonci pizza.
The first stop was the Forno Campo de’ Fiori (in the piazza Campo dei Fiori with the market pictured above) for the simplest classics: pizza bianco and pizza rosso. Pizza bianco to an American seems like just the crust – a thinner form of focaccia – but made with high quality ingredients and freshly baked. Pizza rossa (pictured below) is the same thing with tomato sauce, but again, not just any tomato sauce: house made, using local tomatoes that have soaked up a summer’s worth of the Italian sun. It was delicious.
Our next stop was yet more pizza, and this is where I threw in the towel. The students each chose three different squares at Alice, the chain that Romans consider the best place for fast, affordable pizza. I tried it later in the week with Christian. It’s good, very good for the price, but I prefer others.
The final stop was Giolitti, a Roman classic for gelato. I wasn’t hungry, but ordered a small pomegranate sorbet out of curiosity. I couldn’t eat it – seriously, I threw it away. Not because I was too full, but because it had red food coloring, an additive that I have always been able to taste. I guess I’m a gelato snob: I like the places that don’t use flavorings or colorings at all, just the real ingredients. For me, lemon sorbet should be made with actual lemon, pistachio gelato should get its flavor and color from ground pistachios, and so on. There are several places in Rome that do it that way, and one chain in Italy that does: Grom, founded in Turin where the Slow Food movement began.
My students loved Giolitti (you can see part of their signature green lettering in the background) and have been back since. They have a huge choice of flavors, probably about one hundred, and they serve larger than average scoops.
The next morning, this sign appeared less than 50 feet from my apartment building, on the same block:
Uh-oh. I do love Grom, but having one open that close to home is probably a bad idea, both for my wallet and my waistline.
We had a guided tour of the historical center the next afternoon, after orientation sessions in the morning. I enjoyed seeing the familiar monuments and walking the well worn tourist path from the Trevi fountain to the Pantheon and then Piazza Navona. But I had the feeling that there were A LOT more tourists than I remember from 2012 – an impression that was confirmed by every Roman I’ve asked since. The historical center feels as crowded as Venice, and that’s saying something.
Crowds at the Trevi Fountain. A month later they closed off the area where most of the people in this photo are, closest to the fountain. An Australian tourist stripped down to his Speedo, swam across the fountain, and posted it on TikTok. He paid a 450 euro fine, but that didn’t stop several copycat filmings over the next two weeks, and now you can’t get close to the water.
I was able to spend most of the weekend with Christian before he left on Monday. We went to mass at St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday with ten students, and walked around the Roman Forum and Colosseum areas without going in – tickets were sold out.
We won’t see each other again for almost two months, but that’s a normal semester for us.
Up next: Italian Pizza 101.