A postcard from Rome
For this last visit in Rome, I stayed in a typical palazzina in Pigneto. Travertino-clad entrance leading to a narrow, elegant staircase. Heavy portones with a skeleton key that requires four turns. An open living space with a window that overlooks the early-morning street below with its rows of parked scooters and shuttered storefronts.
The window from the bedroom, however, frames a view of the cortile and the palazzine across the way, facades painted in honeyed shades of cream, yellow and orange, antennae of all heights rising into a sky that’s still pale blue as the sun edges its way up. A woman stands in a window almost exactly mirroring mine, her profile pointing south while mine points north, the both of us contemplating breakfast, what the day holds, the exquisite transparency of this morning light.
In the evening, the colours deepen at golden hour. The windows across the way now showing a table set for four, an apron darting by, a steaming black pot on a trivet. Children, presumably, being called to dinner. To the right, a dark-haired woman pins laundry on the clothesline, her hands efficient and white. And over there, a tiny girl does homework, her grandfather standing over her, instructing with a pointing finger. Just below, leonine shadows are picking over the garden wall as lights begin to switch on all around.
This feeling is part of why I am so enamoured of Rome, these homes built for humans, for the community, that make you feel like you belong.
How wonderful to be a witness to the lives of others and be witnessed in turn. To wonder about their joys and sorrows, and speculate on what stories they are telling about you. What a privilege to see the everyday items and rituals that punctuate the human experience unfolding around you. And oh, the tenderness I feel in watching a white tshirt slip off a clothesline and float down two floors to the bramble below. Wishing I could wave to the woman who was there just before, to enthusiastically point to where it fell, to see her grin in gratitude, perhaps raise a hand, and then bask in the warmth of that brief connection.
But her kitchen window is dark and I have a reservation for dinner.
I am hungry, but also thrilled at the prospect of what else might unfold out here when I return.
