On the move again

I got back to Italy today. Boy, you might have thought this wasn’t a travel blog, but guess what? It is! I landed in Rome’s airport this morning after a restful several weeks at my cousin’s house in DC. This is the cousin who’s taking care of Xerxes; it was as good to see her and her family as it was to be reunited with Mr. Peepers.

Today I just walked, after I took a shower to clean the airplane stank off. I went up to the Villa Borghese Park on the north side of the historic center; the park has winding gravel lanes and trees pruned so that they have a tuft of leaves at the top of their long trunks: it was like walking in a kelp forest. The grass was under a carpet of little white flowers; couples were lying together in the early spring sun. These pair twisted their legs together so I couldn’t tell whose feet were whose; another lay on their backs side by side with their legs crossed exactly the same way.

I also saw the Spanish steps and the outside of the Pantheon (line? to go into a church? I think not…); they were covered over with tourists, so I felt right at home. But it felt like home to be in Italy again.

I’m surprised that I remember any Italian at all, but I do. It’s definitely shoddy and there’s large swaths of the language I don’t know how to use, but I know more Italian now than I did when I came here for the first time last fall, which is to say, I know more than one at all. I ordered dinner and bought face wash in Italian, so I’m getting there.

This dinner: I ate at Osteria dell’Arco, a small room tucked away in the back of town. On Sunday night, there was only one table besides me and only one waiter. But the food was delicious: I had Lonzino as an appetizer, which I couldn’t tell from any other thinkly sliced roast pork but I’m assured is a particular regional thing; as a first plate I had agnolini, little ravioli stuffed with meat, in a spiced cream sauce. It was so good I could have cried.

The secret to all this good food is that Italian people are completely non-pretentious: they know they have good food, and they love to share it. This lady was a professional waiter; this restaurant and its cuisine were her career. So when she saw that I was a well-intentioned, adventurously-palated tourist, she was happy to help. We did the whole conversation in Italian, so I missed some things and learned some things: asciutto means “dry” as in wine; its opposite is dolce, meaning “sweet”. Lampone are raspberries and semifreddo is a dense gelato. She was happy to help me learn, and I was eager to try whatever she had to offer, even if I didn’t know what it was when I ordered it.

So I’m very happy to be back in Italy—I missed being around a big, walkable city. Every time I thought I had seen some part of it, I turned a corner and caught a scorcio (“glimpse”, as when a doorway frames a perfect still life of the world outside) of some spectacular thing I had never even heard of. And I haven’t even made it to the Vatican yet!