La Dolce Vita

See Rome and die. To which I say two things: firstly, it’s a misquotation, and secondly, let’s not get carried away. I liked Rome well enough but I have to say I was a bit underwhelmed by the city. It is possibly the least ‘Italian’ place I’ve ever been to in Italy. Quite a large proportion of the city that I saw could just as easily be in Barcelona, Paris, the Square Mile, even the Upper East side of New York. At first I thought it was because it was a large city compared to say Florence or Siena, but Milan is also a large city and every inch of Milan is Italian. This is undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that Milanese policewomen wear high-heeled shoes and the police smoke while on duty. If that’s not Italian, I don’t know what is. Milan must be a shoplifter/pickpocket’s paradise. What with the high-heels and incipient emphysema, a fleet-footed thief can show a clean pair of heels.

And yet, and yet. Suddenly we’d turn a corner and there would be the Colosseum or the Circus Maximus and Bam!, you’re transported back a couple of millennia. It didn’t help that I am reading St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans at the same time.I have only experienced that spatio-temporal dissonance in one other place – Jerusalem. You’d be tootling along and suddenly your mind would start screaming – The Mount of Olives! The Garden of Gethsemane! Calvary! Jesus walked here!. It was completely disconcerting – in a really good way. The Sea of Galilee and Capernaum totally freaked me out. I think it must be similar to Stendahl Syndrome – the mind going ‘can’t compute, can’t compute’; maybe I’ll start calling it the Palatine Syndrome.

I have to confess that I didn’t spend enough time in Rome so this is pure injustice on my part. I suspect Rome is probably purely Roman– entire of itself because of its antiquity, rather than Italian. Our trip wasn’t helped by the incompetence of Norwegian Airlines which encourages you to check in online and receive your boarding pass by SMS. Two wasted hours and much freaking out later, we found many angry online forums telling us this is not actually possible even though their idiotic website says it is. The actual airport check-in and flight were flawless. So, excellent staff, idiot management. Twas ever thus.

It was also a major disconnect to leave a city that was pretty much shut down because it was Sunday, and arrive in London to the Lord’s Prayer row. It’s gratifying for a Christian to be told that a mere recitation of the prayer is so powerful, children must be protected from its brainwashing capacity. Ultra-violent adverts for vicious video games, heavily-sexualised imagery being used to sell everything from popcorn to chocolate – perfect for 12 year olds, just what they need. The Lord’s prayer? Why, they will all leave the cinema immediately and congregate, holding hands and singing ‘Kumbayah’. Having just left a place where Christians were used as human torches and slaughtered in the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus for the entertainment of baying crowds, my mind truly boggled. A brave new world, that has such wonders in it, to misquote William S.

I can’t wait to go back and experience Rome properly, deo volenti. By the way, the picture above that looks like dots in the sky? That’s every bird in Rome fleeing south for the winter. Was it cold? Was it heck. It was taters, as we mockneys say. The city is so beautiful, it was still worth it!