Rome Watching

We didn’t want to tell the extremely helpful woman at our hotel what we did this morning, for fear she would think we wasted our last morning in Rome. But in fact it was a fantastic few hours.

A few nights ago, we got some sandwiches at a sidewalk snack bar on the busy street paralleling the Tiber River. We decided to sit on the rickety metal chairs straddling mature tree roots and found ourselves mesmerized by the traffic happening within feet of us. We were two car lengths from a stop light and we shook our heads as we watched tiny cars jostle and dart and maneuver on the race track masquerading as a thoroughfare. Our eyes were wide as we watched the drivers uniformly ignore the lines painted on the street supposedly indicating lanes. When the light turned red, more often than not there were three cars in the space of two lanes. And then the moped dance began, as they swerved around the idling cars to get to the head of the pack, ready to race ahead as soon as light turned green.

I’m not sure how long we sat there watching Italians drive. It might have been an hour or so. So this morning’s decision to sit on some shady marble steps in Piazza Navona and watch people for more than an hour wasn’t out of character for us. And while we could have used the time to walk to the Spanish Steps, we thoroughly enjoyed watching Rome instead.

We watched an international parade of tourists and their fashion styles. We saw a bike tour roll by. We heard a variety of languages. We watched a couple quickly learn the mistake of feeding the pigeons (the couple became far more popular than they bargained for). We heard and watched the church bells chime at precisely noon. And all of this was with the backdrop of a live quartet of musicians, including a bass and an accordion, playing their version of recognizable show tunes and Italian favorites.

My favorite part was when an older local man, snappily dressed in a suit and tie, wandered through the Piazza and decided to join the band for a song. His voice wasn’t strong but it was clear. And the joy he had in singing was almost matched by that of his audience. It made me smile with the realization of my place on the planet at that very moment, of being in Rome with my husband, of watching people simply enjoying being alive.

We are on the ship now, all our luggage unpacked, and our laptop finally recharging in a proper outlet (imagine our annoyance when we realized that our electricity converter doesn’t accommodate grounded plugs). The ship is small (about 600 passengers) but it feels quite roomy. We are sailing south about 200 miles tonight. Tomorrow starts early and we are excited because we get to spend it with some very special locals.