A quiet Sunday near home
Sunday, 24 June 2007
Today we treated a lot like vacation, with longs spells just playing and doing laundry at home. Our house has an efficient clothes washer. Now that we’ve figured out where to dry things in a space protected from the overhead gulls and swifts, the Roman afternoon is actually as fast as our gas drier at home.
Although a lot of things are closed on Sundays, like the street markets, a lot is open, too. I’m not sure there is really a system to it -- some of the bakers are open Sundays, many of the restaurants are, supermarkets typically are, the churches all are -- and plenty of them were hosting weddings this weekend.
In the Piazza di Campitelli, about 6 pm. Rome’s manhole covers are fairly diverse, but they seem almost all to be marked as having been made in Rome. At home, our covers come from Oakland and from India, at least if I judge from the ones that are marked.
At 6 pm in the Ghetto, a little above shin-height, this marker warns us that we might get our plimsoles wet if we take the time machine back to the winter of 1870.
We played a lot at home, including a stint with the Italian bingo game that Alaina originally made for a two-week introduction-to-Italy class at Peninsula school. The bingo boards are all pictures, and the clues are just single words in Italian. Many of them are simple English cognates, but there are few like orologio that are intended to challenge.
The play structure in the piazza San Cosimato has withstood constant attention for nearly two years and there are only a couple of tatty pieces. It genuinely appeals to kids from about 18 months to 10 years old. Felix and his cohort climb here, they enjoy it, and they are on the structure at the same time as toddlers. 7:30 pm.
After lunch we walked across the Tiber and through the Ghetto, the appealing and quiet part of Rome between the Teatro di Marcello and the big transportation hub at Largo Argentina. The fountains are delightful.
The railings surrounding fountains I find mysterious. This one, in the Piazza della Bocca della Verità, has the obvious purpose of keeping the horses from drinking from the fountain. But it’s hard to know exactly what the railings are for in some places, and the most famous fountain of all, Trevi, has no railing whatsoever.
Dinner tonight really pleased me. We’re going through a series of the most modest restaurants in Trastevere to see which ones we like best. This place, just half a block from p.za S. Cosimato, is a pizzeria and spaghetteria. Felix had a simple Roman pizza with cheese; Alaina had spaghetti alla carbonara; I had spaghetti with garlic, tomatoes, a little red pepper, and rucola. Carbonara -- ‘coal miner’s sauce’ -- is one of the lush sauces that justifies its fame. We sat by the street, our waiter was willing to express a preference for carbonara over all’Amatriciana, and we were wholly sated. Felix cut his pizza deftly, holding his knife and fork in the correct configuration, and even avoiding the grating sound of knife against fork.
I’m not sure when I decided that I didn’t like restaurants, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t. Rome is pretty good for people who don’t like restaurants, because prepared food is available almost anywhere -- a corner grocery will put together a sandwich for you, and the bakery around the corner also happens to make pizza in five different configurations. Moreover, the simple osterie (including pizzerie and spaghetterie) like where we ate tonight are almost not restaurants at all. They have table service, but the consciously casual atmosphere is closer to what we would call a coffeehouse or diner in California.
The new market stalls in the Piazza San Cosimato. Once the vegetables are arrayed underneath, it’s hard to appreciate the stalls’ elegance -- they start to look like the cheap white tarps on aluminium poles that sprout through markets citywide.
But I think they are pretty. This is looking east at 7:30 pm on a Sunday. The florist, just out of the frame to the left, is still open. Presumably bringing flowers to dinner is a good idea on Sundays.
