Rome, Rome, Rome, Rome

"Always and forevermore, I call to say I'm on the way, two thousand years remain in a trash can that burned a cigarette somewhere," or so goes the Phoenix song.

There’s a game that gets played at every expatriate party I go to in Rome: “How long have you lived here and how has Rome hurt you today?”

You can gauge your crowd by the response your answer gets. Now that I’ve lived here for two years, that’s either followed by a gasp—What must living here for that long be like?—or a chuckle: “That’s almost nothing.” If I’m surrounded by young women in their early twenties who have moved to Rome on a lark, to live with a family and study Italian and enjoy the city until they no longer can, the response is inevitably the first one. But if I’m in a room full of long-time expatriates who can often only conjure up how long they’ve lived here after an extended period of thinking, my answer usually engenders the latter.

The long-timers, despite any affection they may have for this city, often come armed with a litany of complaints. They generally go something like this: the public transit doesn’t work, the city is dirty and covered in trash, though this has improved in recent years, the bureaucracy takes forever, Romans can be closed-off in their groups of friends from high school and it’s impossible to find an apartment. I, of course, have my own complaints to add to this list, but there is something else buried beneath this feeling: a profound, almost earnest love for this city, quite possibly the only place I have ever wanted to live. I am defensive of Rome, a place that has given me so much autonomy, confidence and joy—without making any of it easy, of course. The long-timers can perhaps sense my unspoken retort, and so they laugh knowingly: “Just wait until you live here long enough,” they tell me. “I was just like you when I arrived.”

And maybe this is a version of Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That (yes, I will quote Joan forever, even if she is cliché, I do not care, I love her), that it is “distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair,” that: “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” Maybe there is a version of this heroine—out comes the narcissism inherent in any writing about yourself, especially as a woman (she sees herself as the heroine, gasp!)—that will look back on this essay and think how little I knew then. That is the ignorance of youth, or whatever remains of mine.

But my love for Rome feels expansive—it feels pure, it feels right, it feels full of possibility, as if I could never know what each day might bring but that it might always bring something more. As I take my walks around this city, occasionally a peaceful thought (so rare for me!) makes its way into my mind: “You could stay here forever.” I have almost always been jumpy with longing for the next opportunity, the next goal, the next thing to check off the list, so this inner calm, this sense of tranquillity, has always felt, to me, significant. “How long will you stay there?,” my American friends ask. “Pensi di stabilirti qui?,” say my Italian friends. And while I always answer with some qualifiers, afraid to share the extent of my passion the way you might when someone asks about a new relationship, my inner self knows the truth. Even if I left, I’d always be seeking Rome.

Rome, Rome, Rome, Rome: it’s the steady voice that runs like a drumbeat in my mind. It’s not the longest relationship I’ve ever had, but sometimes it feels as if it could be, as if I’d like it to be. I’m endlessly anthropomorphizing Rome, a city with a beating heart, a person with whom I am in constant dialogue. Rome is a knowing glance, a shared community as much over what we hate as what we love. At times, Rome feels like the only thing I’ve ever wanted, ever-unattainable and yet, some days, I feel as if I might be on the precipice of obtaining it. What is it? That goes unexpressed, of course.

My love affair with Rome bloomed slowly, like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives (I’m sorry, I’ve been waiting so long to quote that, it’s been volleying around in my head without pause, even if the simile expresses the opposite of what I want it to). When I first arrived to my semester abroad, harried and sweaty from the plane ride, I remember pulling up to the place that I would call home for the next four months and thinking: This? But then, even at 20, I understood that European cities were not mere postcards, that there was a certain disappointment in seeing the real thing, only because it was crushing in its reality. It could no longer remain a dream, a fantasy.

But the reality of Rome was ultimately better than the fantasy, because it brought with it an implicit challenge: try to know me if you dare. The city was unknowable, its alleyways and crevices always seeming to yield a new result. I never knew what I might find.

And yet I was not immune to the challenges of the other expatriates. Rome was in a near-constant process of hurting me (hurting me!, because I’m the only person who lives here and this essay is about me!). I was yelled at by waiters when asking for another wine glass, screamed at for saying “secondo me” when asking for advice at a bureaucratic office (“secondo lei?!”), nearly cursed out by a woman from Naples who didn’t understand me when I said that the 3 bus had already passed by. (Finally, I had to explain to her that I was not a native speaker and apologized for my imperfect Italian, at which point she begged profusely for my forgiveness.) I sat next to vomit on the bus, almost burst into tears when I couldn’t get a cab and had to carry my suitcase and cat in a trasportino up four flights of stairs in the July heat, sputtered in disbelief when I asked for an earlier doctor’s appointment and was sternly reprimanded: “What? Do you think we sleep here?” Early on in my time here, I brought a blank bollettino slip up to the post office window and gently asked for instructions, just to be sure that I didn’t do it incorrectly. “Come si fa?,” the employee rolled her eyes, repeating my question back to me over and over mockingly, as if I had asked her what my own name was. My best friend and I found this story so representative of Italian culture that we would say “Come si fa?” to ourselves again and again until we dissolved into laughter, using it as a substitute for the general aggression that characterized our daily lives here. We were forever doing something wrong.

Maybe, in this sense, I had always been a masochist, always wanting love that was not freely given but earned. Rome was all too happy to meet this requirement—after all, it had no sweet nothings to whisper, and if you heard them, they were only meant to lead you off track. At times, it seemed that Rome had only pain to offer with brief moments of respite, of reprieve. Certain things were guaranteed: the bus would not come on time, if it would come at all, and if it rained, you were better off staying at home. If you had a to-do list of three items, you would have to content yourself completing only one—and even that was lucky.

But maybe love was seeing all of these defects and loving Rome despite it all, because of it all. Once, during an Italian lesson, our teacher asked us to define “italianità,” literally Italian-ness. Much like the expatriates at the parties I frequented, I rattled off a list of things that flummoxed me: Why did you have to spend the whole day together when you made plans with someone, why was there so much conflict, why were there so many rules? The teacher stared back at me with a frustrated expression. “Those are all negatives,” she said.

I felt she was willfully misunderstanding me. Criticizing was a form of love, I argued, because it was a form of seeing. I wanted to quote the famous “Lady Bird” line, which didn’t come to mind then but does now, with the help of Google: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?” I thought often of Henry James’ writing advice: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” He goes on to recount the story of “an English novelist, a woman of genius,” who was able to astutely retell “the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth” from one mere interaction: momentarily bypassing the open door of a pasteur while going up the stairs and listening to the lilting conversation of young Protestants gathered around the table. “She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality.”

I have, of course, had a much longer study of Italianness, and I hope to continue it. But my love of Rome is bigger than what the city offers me, what it has given me. Perhaps it is really about what it has let me see, let me witness. I feel often that the only way I can ever repay my debts here, insofar as I have any, is to observe, to start each day with a curiosity about the world around me, an inborn desire to take it all in.