Life on a Balcony

It is a crime to get used to a city, especially if that city is Rome. Any great city almost overwhelms the first-time visitor with her mind-bogglingly infinite variety, the cafe around the next bend, the grubby forgotten baroque facade, or even the newly-discovered flavor of gelato in the ice-cream parlor, but the trick is to not neglect finding new friends to complement these old memories. And it's not too difficult. Even looking out over one's figurative backyard can be a surprisingly gripping adventure.

The studio where I spend much of my day is about a minute's walk from the traffic-choked intersection and asphalt piazza in front of the pocked travertine facade of Sant' Andrea della Valle. It's bare and unfriendly in appearance, but still there is much to hold the eye beyond the church, like the out-of-place John Bull Pub with its trippy advertising showing a three-faced Van Gough peddling some sort of wanna-be Absinthe. Or the Argentine steak place with its miraculous empanadas or the glass-fronted salon and wig shop next to the (gasp) McDonalds, with its display case looking like the collected trophies of the Barbie Headhunter Tribe.

Despite looking intimidating, there's plenty of friendly faces on the square, such as Stefano, the gentle Mussolini-look-alike who is landlord of the big Fascist-style apartment building on the square. He's always willing to chat with you in garbled Anglo-Italian, and then some. I once ran into him with some friends, one of whom was Spanish--and she discovered one of his chatting buddies not only knew English but castellano, in one of those weird synchronistic urban events that could only happen in Rome.

You need your hip waders to get through the amount of history here. Even though the Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle, that much-maligned pseudo-Parisian gash on the Roman urban fabric, is only about a hundred years old, a walk from our quarters at the pleasantly spare hotel on Piazza Paradiso takes us sights more venerable than the oldest memories of the United States. We walk past two famous palazzi by Peruzzi and Raphael, and our path down these urban canyons even gives us a Morse-code glimpse or two of that wondrous meershaum-colored proto-Salvador Dali lighthouse that Borromini stuck atop the stepped dome of Sant' Ivo della Sapienza.

Sant' Ivo is possibly one of the most extraordinary buildings ever built, and perhaps the most successful cupola in history. If you define successful as being easily noticed, and I would, at least some of the time. When you look at it walking past studio to the Pantheon, the drum seems to strain against its encircling pilasters, on the verge of some weird holy explosion. Far from expressing timeless knowledge, it seems to pulsate with the unruly life of the students that would have populated the old Sapienza, now entombed as the Roman State Archives.

Beyond that, it remains inscrutable, one part beehive, one part papal tiara, one part flaming theological crown, one part ziggurat-cum-Solomonic temple. It's a sin to get used to looking at that.

But even the mundane is exciting, in a certain way. I've said it a dozen times, but it's true. You can get lost in Rome, utterly, completely lost to the point of hopeless disorientation only a few yards from home. I took a wrong turn once on the way back from San Luigi and found myself in a parallel dimension. The inexplicable street sign for Largo Teatro della Valle made sense--there was actually a whole theater crammed back on a side-street, a grand facade that would have made a normal American town the ornament of ten counties. And then there was an Italian Baptist church with a restrained Counterreformation facade. Huh.

Even from the windows of our studio there's a whole little world to enjoy. I think I've seen everything from that balcony facing down on Via dei Redentoristi. There's the perpetual grind and boombox-piped hits of the restorers reworking the Capranica escucheons and anonymous plasterwork of the apartment lobby downstairs. There's the little old man who always passes by at seven and turns right instead of left, or the young man in the window straight across the way chattering on a cell-phone. Cynthia, one of my arkie friends, informs me the next window over, a little shuttered square set into the pink stucco is a high traffic bathroom, and sometimes there's a disadantage to having a studio desk that overlooks that view.

There's also a lingerie shop on the corner, which I imagine comes in handy.

And there's more noble memories. Like the marble plaque recalling the flood of December 28, 1870 with a Plimsol line at around eye-level. And if you raise your eyes, you have a wall-shrine of the Sorrowful Madonna serenely watching over the whole scene in luminous blue.

The Virgin sees everything here, especially what we get up to. We give back plenty to the little street. Yesterday the balcony was an outdoor barber-shop for half the day as one of the boys buzzed away at willing guinea-pigs with too much hair and not enough money for the two pierced bald guys who clip and mousse away at your scalp over on Via Monterone. And then there's the more mundane but equally gripping calls back home as students strain to get the rinky-dink signals of their telefonini up and out over the rooftops to the nearest transmitter. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's a slice of life.

Best of all, there's the fact that we have our own private perspective on the ongoing soap opera at No. 20, the big closed-up arch on the lowest floor of that enormous salmon-colored wall. It's next to an inexplicable bent piece of iron gridwork. The sharp-tongued, sharply-dressed blonde young lady who parks her tiny car inside every evening will descend into operatic screaming-fits whenever the inevitable happens and someone blocks her access to the garage. Last time she threatened to call the police, and then came back for a screeching encore of retribution. At least it helps me practice my Italian.

The funniest thing was as we enjoyed this domestic spat as the sun went down, I'd noticed all the other windows were starting to open, golden light within. Two women across the way were eagerly drinking in the drama, while the young man with the phone, now phoneless, had joined the party. We simply sat there and watched from above, from our urban skybox, and nobody seemed to mind. We had box seats at the opera, and free ones at that. Call me a gossip, but it's very difficult to complain about that sort of arrangement.