Winter home

Well, here we are in our winter home – by the skin of our teeth as it happened.  We’d been told by a number of other cruisers we met in the summer that the recently built marina here was a good over-wintering spot and that there was loads of space.  Consequently we didn’t actually enquire about a berth until late September, to be told by the office “sorry, we have no space”.  Having friends who were already here we got them to make enquiries and then put a bit of a spurt on and arrived ourselves on Sunday 12^th October.  We kept our heads down on Sunday night and decided to check into the marina office on Monday morning.  The place is pretty full and that night we got depressed by stories of other cruisers who were already here and having to hassle for a winter berth and pay more than the marina’s published prices.  Next day we went to the office prepared for a non-committal answer “we are very full ... maybe there will be a cancellation ... perhaps in a few days” ... etc, etc.  Instead we were treated as if we had always been expected and were booked straight into a berth for the next six months with a 10% discount on the published rates.  So we have power, water and smart new toilet and shower blocks with washing machines for the princely sum of £30 per week.

Porto di Roma is actually a massive new marina development with berths for around 800 yachts sandwiched between the mouth of the River Tiber and the outskirts of Ostia, Rome’s seaside suburb about fifteen miles from the City centre.  The marina is about a mile long with a pedestrian walkway next to the yacht berths which is the width and length of a small aircraft runway.  This is quite appropriate as Rome’s main airport is only about three miles away and occasionally the flight path is routed right overhead, so the place reverberates to jumbo jets only a couple of hundred feet above us as they scream skywards.  On the other side of the walkway is a more less continuous strip of low rise buildings containing car parks, toilet and shower blocks every couple of hundred metres and fronted by shop units and cafes.  We arrived on a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon and were amazed at the hustle and bustle.  The walkway was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Romans strolling up and down and mooching in the shops on their Sunday passagiata.  It was like nowhere else we have been this season, new concrete buildings, designer shops, city folk in their suits and designer casuals and roller bladers and kids on bikes and scooters weaving their way in and out of the throng.  Subsequently, we found that this was only at weekends, during the week the place is virtually empty and some of the shops don’t even bother to open.

The surrounding area is interesting if you like flat semi-urban wasteland.  Up by the mouth of the Tiber and along its banks is a shantytown with poverty like nowhere else we’ve yet seen in Italy.  At the rivers edge is a row of shacks which have large umbrella-like fishing nets outside.  These are attached to small cranes which raise and lower the nets into the grey waters of the Tiber.  The roads in the shanty are all unmade and the place is as quiet as the grave, apart from the many unkempt and surly looking mongrels that loiter suspiciously.  On the Ostia side of the marina are rows of 1960s and 70s apartment blocks in varying stages of decay which have the reek of local government corruption.  There is graffiti and waste everywhere and the social projects that go with depressed urban communities – a theatre here and a youth centre there.  It’s like a bit of Hackney has decided to go for a Mediterranean beach holiday.  Further towards its centre Ostia morphs into a more respectable suburb, more like Sidcup-on-sea.  A few days ago we made our first trip into Rome itself.  This takes about an hour and costs only about £1 return.  The trip is very like that into central London from one of the outer suburbs, finishing with an underground ride.  En route we had parties of school kids, bored straphanging commuters, buskers and drunks stinking of booze.  Yup, we really feel at home here. 

Like all big cities Rome is on a first visit quite bewildering.  We wandered around fairly aimlessly, suddenly coming across famous monuments like Trajan’s Column and the Spanish steps.  My over-riding first impression was of the sheer age of the City and its historical continuity all the way back to the Roman Republic.  Unlike London, where the ancient City is buried under layers of successive development and only tiny fragments of the Roman City are visible, in Rome ancient buildings survive cheek by jowl with the medieval, renaissance, counter-reformation and modern cities.  Round one corner we found the remains of the Emperor Augustus’ mausoleum, a huge brick ruin that looks more like a bombed out bunker than a Roman relic.  In Rome two thousand years no longer seems such a long time and the influence of Roman culture on modern society is much more palpable.  This brings me back to a feeling I’ve had often in Italy – that unlike Britain the Romans never left this country, they are not foreigners whose galleys disappeared over the horizon, they are still here and one can see it in the sharp eyed hook-nosed faces all around one in the cafes and on the underground.