The ANNOTICO Report

Trastevere: Not easy to find, but confoundingly easy to get lost in, and
with each mistake repaid by a new vista, and then still realizing you were
missing most of it.

LIVING IN ROME
Boston Globe
By Stephen Heuser, Globe Staff
February 6, 2005

ROME -- On a warm Friday night last fall, the parking lots of Trastevere
began to fill, slowly and ineluctably, with scooters. Anyone who has
visited Italy knows that scooters are everywhere -- you start to wonder if
all Italian teenagers are solemnly granted scooters on their 16th birthdays
-- but on this one night, it felt extreme.

Scooters were cramming the edges of the sidewalks and spilling over into
the cobblestone alleys. They wedged themselves in narrow slots between cars
nearly as tiny as they were; they leaned colorfully and haphazardly against
cracked and graffiti-covered ancient plaster. They buzzed around me in the
tiny streets like horseflies.

The riders crammed themselves with equal vigor into the surrounding bars
and cafes. They were all young, and the whole district soon developed a
talky energy that made it feel somehow different from other places I had
visited. I wondered why.

Then a thought washed over me in a gratifying wave: I am hanging out where
actual Italian people hang out.

Every big city, it seems, has at least one neighborhood with a reputation
for ''authenticity," the sort of place where locals spend their nights,
heavy on lifestyle and light on monuments. In Boston, it might be the South
End, full of restaurants but well removed from the Paul Revere House and
Faneuil Hall. In Manhattan, it could be Chelsea or the Lower East Side.

The search for such a neighborhood in a European city famously overrun by
tourists is a sport in itself, especially if you are someone who might have
once, on his honeymoon, dragged his wife through eight blocks of dangerous
slum to discover the one bar in town with no other Americans in it.

I can't take credit for finding Trastevere (pronounced tra-STAY-ver-ay)
though: My wife was in Rome on a research fellowship, and she announced it
was where we were staying.

I had never heard of it. Friends who had spent more time than I in Italy
kept describing Trastevere as funky, or trendy, or on the rise, which all
struck me as diplomatic ways to say ''run down." As it turns out, there are
several things to understand about an ''authentic" neighborhood in Rome.
First, it has a McDonald's. Second, it has a movie theater playing
''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (whose Italian title translates to
''If You Leave Me, I Will Erase You"). Third, the population of the
neighborhood between noon and 3 p.m. is mostly American and French tourists
with Lonely Planet guidebooks and sensible brown walking shoes. The locals,
of course, are shuttered in their ancient houses lamenting the influx.

Still, by the standards of the rest of Rome, Trastevere is virtually
undiscovered. Though it's just across the Tiber River from the Forum, and a
quick walk from the Vatican, it feels like a place apart from the central
city's urban grandeur. That cuts both ways, of course. I arrived by train
(Trastevere has its own station, shrouded in scaffolding and plagued by
gypsies), and my introduction came as I took a tram along the main street,
the Viale Trastevere. Despite the elegant name, this was the sort of street
I had worried about when people used the word ''authentic" -- busy,
dangerous, dirty. Flickering neon signs and curled posters evoked the
shabby and depressed Italy of the 1940s and '50s. Later, I would come to
feel the main purpose of the Viale Trastevere was to divide two very
charming sets of side streets in as forbidding a manner as possible.

It was only when we got off the main drag and began to walk the curling
side streets that the dense, peeling charm of Trastevere began to unfold.
The neighborhood was mostly spared the garish hand of the Baroque popes and
aristocrats who erected their famous palazzos and churches around the city,
and the result is a tight neighborhood of 19th-century shops and tenements
-- though tenements no longer -- punctuated with remarkable Romanesque
churches. (This sense of distinctness apparently has ancient roots. The
neighborhood's first inhabitants were Etruscans, an earthy crowd that
stubbornly resisted mingling with the imperial Latins who erected monuments
to themselves across the river.) Guidebooks call the overall effect
''rustic," but that's not quite right: It's a bit of city that never lost
its soul to ceremony.

The heart of Trastevere is a 12th-century church, Santa Maria in
Trastevere, which anchors a neat public square with cafes around the edges
and a tiered fountain for a navel. In front of the church's 1,000-year-old
brick bell tower and 400-year-old marble portico, children kick soccer
balls around the paving stones during the day and couples promenade after
dark. One night, we saw a fire juggler entertaining a crowd. One cafe, much
frequented by tourists, specializes in tall tulip glasses of fresh orange
juice. Another, much frequented by Italian teenagers, specializes in female
servers wearing tight shirts. More important, I eventually realized, is the
total absence of the accordion players and woeful caricature artists who
infect the more famous piazzas across the river.

Like many Italian churches, Santa Maria is open in the morning, closed much
of the afternoon, and then open again well into the evening. I ducked
inside one day when our schedules coincided. The first thing I noticed was
the ceiling, a gilded canopy with a coffered surface of almost absurd
depth, leading to a brilliant gold mosaic circling the top of the apse.

Santa Maria has a focal point in that bright mosaic (and a revenue source,
since you have to plug increasingly costly one-euro coins into a machine to
illuminate the thing), but like a lot of Italian churches, it is intensely,
almost overwhelmingly decorated around the edges. One side chapel is home
to an intricate ''who's who" portrait of the Council of Trent, which
established the standard Latin Mass in the 1500s. The paired chapel on the
other side bears the coat of arms of England's Henry IX, who paid for its
remodeling centuries ago. (If you didn't know there was a Henry IX, well,
neither did England. He was the last Roman Catholic pretender of the Stuart
line, and just one of the many expatriates who spent his final days, and
cash, in Rome.)

Once outside the church, I headed down to the public market. About two days
after arriving, I had thought I understood Trastevere pretty well. There
was the main street, there was the piazza, and a long narrow lane of shops
connected them. It took me about five days to realize I was missing most of
it. The neighborhood was confoundingly easy to get lost in, but kept
repaying my mistakes with charming new vistas. One of these is the public
market at Piazza San Cosimato, nearly abandoned at night, but which every
morning erupts into a bustle of fruit and vegetable stands. (The piazza is
undergoing renovations this winter, with the vendors relocated to nearby
Piazza Mastai.) I stopped at a cheese seller's booth and the vendor cut me
one slice after another, a flurry of sheep's milk cheeses I had never seen
in the United States. Just off the market was a narrow street, boarded up
and silent at night, but a parade of specialty food shops -- one selling
only pasta, another sausages, another fish -- during the day.

The streets between the piazzas are filled with shops that afford quick
glimpses of the craftsmanship for which Trastevere is known: a woman who
glues and binds her own decorative books, two young artists who
painstakingly stamp out unique prints on an antique manual press.

The market is a three- or four-minute walk from the main piazza. A
three-minute walk the other way brought me to Santa Maria della Scala, a
quiet Baroque church whose dusky interior felt like the attic of a
chandelier shop. The silence was almost palpable, but the sense of muffled
piety was completely undermined by the side chapels decorated with a
carnival of garishly colored marble in purples, pinks, and oranges.

The name Santa Maria della Scala can be translated as ''Saint Mary of the
Staircase," which hints at another one of Trastevere's curious virtues: It
is a deeply aerobic experience. The neighborhood, bounded by the river on
one side, is nestled on the other against the Gianicolo, the ancient
Janiculum, by far the tallest hill in Rome. In a city with no skyscrapers,
the Gianicolo turned out to be an unparalleled place to gaze on the
cityscape. I climbed it every day I was there. Walking west from Santa
Maria, every back street turned sharply upward into a steep road or a
stairway, twisting through dripping rock faces into a series of little
plazas that mounted one after another, the tourists in their sensible shoes
panting for breath and the view of Rome getting better and better.

The hill is famous for its piazza and statue dedicated to Guiseppe
Garibaldi (1807-82), who commanded an army of poets and beatniks to noble
failure against the French artillery. (Romantic failure is a very Italian
thing to commemorate.) The hill is also home to a lavish Baroque fountain,
the best botanical garden in Rome, and a winding stairway in which you pass
bas-reliefs of the Stations of the Cross.

As with most of the gems here, however, the most famous thing on the
hillside is hidden. Attached to the church of San Pietro in Montorio, named
on the misunderstanding that St. Peter himself was martyred here, is a
precise little chapel by Donato Bramante: the ''Tempietto," or little
temple, an architecturally ideal circle of columns surmounted by a dome. I
tried to visit several times, but never managed to arrive when the church
was open. In fact, I never managed to figure out when it was supposed to be
open, so the perfect little temple stayed tantalizingly aloof behind an
iron gate.

This was the daytime Trastevere, a lockbox of hidden sights and unexpected
vistas. At night, the scene changed. Down slid the gates on the food shops;
up went the shutters on bars and restaurants. An abandoned-looking building
on one corner became a warm and inviting bar for a drink with friends;
across the street was Enoteca Ferrara, one of Rome's trendiest wine bars.
There are no grand temples of gastronomy in Trastevere, but there are some
great places to eat: Pizzeria Ivo draws people from across the river to
sample its perfect, one-person Roman pizzas (not just tomato and cheese,
but gorgonzola-apple and a host of other combinations). There is also
Ristorante da Paris, which, despite the name, specializes in the classic
dishes of Rome: fried artichokes, pasta and chickpea soup, and a rich
oxtail stew.

The night of the scooters was a Friday. Trastevere's shopping streets
filled up that evening, the daytime bustle of the stores overlapping with
the nighttime buzz of cafes and restaurants. All at the same time you could
get a handbag, a pizza, a pair of trendy sneakers, and an after-dinner
drink, and you could do it among hundreds of young Romans flocking to the
neighborhood.

It did not matter that I had missed the Tempietto, and broken a sweat on
the hill every day, and spent an entire week in the Eternal City without
ever laying eyes on St. Peter's. Tonight, amid the noise of the Vespas, it
felt as if we were truly living in Rome.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser@globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/travel/articles/
2005/02/06/living_in_rome/

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