A comforting chill glides over my skin. Comforting, not because of the sensation of stabbing night air on the back of a scooter, but because I am riding through the city that I have made home for the last three years. Stars scintillate in the sky like pinpricked light through a dark cloth, giving everything this chimerical cloak.
Honestly, I don’t even know if there are stars in the sky, but being a romantic, I assume that a night this unforgettable should have a shimmering stage backdrop. I know it’s late from the drunken tiredness that makes every street light hazy. As we ride across the city, it feels like I am visiting not a city, but a childhood friend. Rather, more that friend who you met through a chance encounter in a coffee shop or a staff meeting; You can’t explain what sutures your worlds together, but you know that the bond is threaded tight. You see, in a few days I will have to say a temporary goodbye to this dear friend, Rome, and I am clinging to every moment to make sure no little detail is forgotten.
Rome is the city that tourists see as a beautiful woman and are easily seduced by her striking physiognomy. She is, after all, bold and has left me gasping in awe. At night, sluiced by a softer moonlight, she is elegant.
The night started with a seemingly routine aperitivo. I mean, I am making it sound like a painful beauty treatment, but the last few weeks have been a carousel of drinks with all the people I love in Rome before I fly out. The agreement had been to slot ourselves into a random bar and have a couple of glasses of Prosecco. The wonderful thing about Rome as a city, however, is that I have found people with whom I have a similar tie. Conversations slither between one topic and the next; it can be as deep as life or literature, or as petty as gossip.
After this innocuous yet calorifically gluttonous aperitivo, I agree to get a lift home. At this point, the ever-spinning city is jarringly halted with a bar blocking its spokes, and there is no way I am catching public night buses. My aperitivo confidante agrees to give me a “strappo” or lift, which one generally envisions as being a humanly calculated path from A to B; a linear trajectory that would see me turning the keys to my condominium in the shortest space of time possible. We disappear into the cobblestone side-streets and clay colours, turning sharply through the small blocks in the city centre when we reach Via dei Condotti, which opens up on the pearly Spanish Steps, almost skeletal without people. As I look up right up towards the obelisk perched at the top, I trace its outline with my eyes, knowing that no photo will delineate her ghostly beauty. Every deep memory I hold in my imagination always comes from those moments where your eyes imbibe the view for themselves.
The chill is wrapping itself around me, my silk skirt a flimsy buffer against the elements, yet we accelerate again. Asked if I want to go home, I reply that “I’m fine” so that I know that we won’t. I can’t go home. My congealed limbs are silenced by my excitement to see the city by night. As we wind our way in the direction of my neighbourhood, we stop at the unexpectedly open entrance to Villa Borghese, one of the largest of Rome.
While my obedient inner-child gasps that a scooter should probably not be inside the park, we zip away from the gate and plunge into its dark core. The pitch darkness, framed by inky silhouettes of stone pines, is broken by occasional street lamps throbbing like hovering orbs at a disjointed Mad Hatter’s evening soiree. We weave through the park, which we both know very well as a reading spot, to head towards the Pincio, the terrace viewpoint that overlooks Piazza del Popolo.
Teenagers vulture around bottles of peasant prosecco and meals in tin-foil trays perched precariously on the ledge of the viewing platform. They have come to toast a birthday; maybe a graduation. Wait, they can’t be teenagers then. They are just old enough to remind me I am in my 30s and probably too old to be out at this hour. We sit a respectable enough distance away from those making merriment who will wake up with not a skerrick of hangover left on their faces and gaze upon the city. The obelisk plunges upwards. The oval square – yes an odd translation that seems almost oxymoronic – iridescent with its lion fountains, while the dome of St Peter reigns from afar. At this point, I feel like the spontaneity of the evening merits a soundtrack from some romanticised travel film. Nothing. Crickets dance around my brain. It will come to me.
What does merit our attention, at this point, is our ‘congelation’ telling us that the adventure needs to come to an end and we need to go home. The dilemma? Defrosting rigid limbs can only be achieved through a heater and cosy caffeinated beverage. Reminder: it is nudging 3am. How selfish! The city has succumbed to the night and there is nothing open. Except for one grubby neon light. A cornetteria. Steamy croissants are the Italian epitome of post-clubbing calories and sugar. When was the last time I went clubbing? Why aren’t they cold? Why do you care so much? After all, you’re freezing your proverbial tits off and just need a coffee to warm up.
Stepping down into the basement of fragrant calories is like entering a pirate ship with a pinging nonno at the helm. Club music evokes faded memories of the final songs and your shoes sticking to the dance-floor. Teenagers – no, they are not teenagers. Or are they? So hard to tell with this generation of contouring girls – line up for the calorific choc and cream cornetti that my declining metabolism would no longer allow me to eat at this time. The owner, a stubby little elderly Italian man who seems to be an amalgamation of Benny Benassi and Danny DeVito, seems to have larger pupils than normal. His bakery is lined with an odd juxtaposition of photos of him with his beaming chubby-limbed grandchildren and others with his groping hands around the waists of plastic-breasted women. He seems coherent enough to take our order and soon we are sipping on deliciously substandard cappuccinos. Facing away from the youths with the swift metabolisms, we chuckle at the bizarre course the evening is taking. Just how?
Bodies sufficiently microwaved, the last kilometres to my apartment are bearable and soon we swing around the corner into the gated cark park. Gracelessly dismounting from the scooter, I have this sinking feeling that the night is receding into a memory as my feet hit the ground. I would love to make some cliched reference to time and how I never want this night in Rome to end; even enrich that cliche further by saying all memories are special because of the fleeting nature of human life. I won’t.
I will say that Rome by night is always where I am when I close my eyes. It is the refuge of my imagination.
Un bacio x
Skye
The Adopted Italian 