Trastevere after Dark

Words Exchanged with a Lady Scottish Book Merchant

I had a long walk in Trastevere this evening which lead me to The Almost Corner Bookshop in Via del Moro, a delightful little establishment crammed wall-to-wall, and then some, with an excellent selection of English-language books. I could have spent hours in that single, pleasantly cluttered room, running my eyes over the shapes of the letters, thumbing through the eternal piles of paperbacks neatly littering the floor, listening to the hum of revelling pedestrians in the growing darkness outside. It is, by far, one of the best small bookstores I have ever seen, with a marvelous selection of classics, history, art, architecture and fiction that is, in many respects, much more selective and far better than any Barnes and Noble. I spent a good thirty minutes standing by the fiction shelves, paging through translations from Portuguese and Spanish and Italian of authors I had never met before, wondering at the splendid plots their books contained, at future conquests for my library, at what I might like to read over dinner, as I had struck out on my own.

This tiny sliver of Rome has everything a bibliophile might want, and it was pure joy just being there amid those hundreds of volumes. Musty old paperbacks on everything from travelling the Sahara to old standards like Evelyn Waugh and classics like Virgil and Dante, glossy new hardback novels from the artsiest, most experimental European authors (no trashy Dan Brown in sight here), beautiful pocket guides to ancient Rome and Palladio's villas, vivid coffee-table volumes on Bernini, erudite scholarly works on Arab politics and the English Grand Tour of the eighteenth century. Finally, after long deliberation, I selected a book entitled Obscure Kingdoms and another about the travels of the mediaeval Sir John Mandeville (known for his numerous tall tales), and had a pleasant chat with the pleasant Scottish woman who owned the place. She said her home country was beautiful, though wet and cold. And I said, so was my adopted home of Notre Dame, Indiana. If a woman can find Scotland beautiful, so can a young man find serenity in the Midwest. And both can, despite these different perspectives, love their surrogate home of Rome. Then I thanked her for letting me potter about among her books, and she said that people had spent much longer times mulling over their purchases than I had. Understandable. A book purchase is never to be taken lightly.

And so I set off into the evening, amid the vibrant crowds and twisty lanes of Trastevere, and read of the bicycling hobbies of the overweight King of Tonga while enjoying a pleasant Milanese veal cutlet. And after I have finished both books (and perhaps discovered whether Sir John was a real adventurer or a fraud), I'll return and select another of her wares, and maybe ask her what it's like to be the semi-anonymous purveyor of small vernacular pleasures in a marvelous foreign metropolis.