Roma

Having been resistant to living in an English-speaking cultural bubble, that is exactly what we have been doing for the past three months. However, our Italian is progressing thanks to our lessons twice a week and to the three Italians in the port who also live on boats. However, Sue is progressing faster than me, especially with the dreaded Italian verbs. We don’t get into Rome as often as we hoped to, but we still manage it about once per week. We still haven’t made it to the Vatican Museum (which includes the Sistine Chapel), preferring just to wander around and soak up the atmosphere. In doing so the sheer scale of the ancient Roman city slowly begins to dawn on one. During the four centuries after the birth of Christ Rome had a population of one to one and half million inhabitants, making it by a multiple the largest city of the ancient world – no other city even came near this size until the industrial revolution.

We’ve also been doing more reading about Italian culture and history. Having been through a phase of seeing superficial differences and fundamental similarities between English and Italian culture, I’m now becoming more and more aware of the differences again. This really is a bewildering country with I now think a quite different system of values to that in the UK. For example, in Italy I think it is more important to be beautiful and to do beautiful things than to be good and to do good. It is, I suspect, the only country in the world with a verb “to suicide”, as in “Roberto Calvi was suicided under the Thames Embankment by persons unknown”. A few weeks ago Sue and I visited the Museum of Roman Civilisation. This is in the large modern suburb of Rome known as EUR, which was designed before the Second World War to house the 1942 Rome Worlds Fair, which was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. The museum was completed in 1939 in a style that might be called monumental fascist neoclassical. It has an enormous and very informative scale model of ancient Rome about thirty metres square, but what is even more interesting is that apart from taking down the odd bust of “Il Duce” and perhaps removing some of the more obvious parallels between the growth of the Roman empire and the invasion of Abyssinia, the place hasn’t been changed at all. It is a monument to Mussolini’s fascist state and even the curators look like the scowling sons and daughters of the originals. It does make one wonder what kind of society can leave this monstrous oddity in place without any sort of contextual commentary or seeming sense of irony.

As well as being wrapped in the comforting cocoon of expat life in Rome we have also done a little travelling. We spent a week at Christmas in Cologne with Thomas, Nicole and my Godson Joshi and we were, if it was possible, made to feel even more welcome than the Christmas before. Most of our time was spent eating, drinking, socialising and playing with Joshi, although I also served time as Assistant Cook to Thomas. Joshi is growing up fast and is now talking very well. At first this created a barrier as Joshi of course speaks German and we don’t, but he did a good job of teaching us some useful words which helped us overcome his initial frustration at the funny visitors who couldn’t speak properly.