Broke my travel rule of never going to the same place by heading back to Cafe Sciascia for coffee and toasted prosciutto and mozzarella panini for the second day in a row because fuck the police. The streets that had been dead the day before on a Sunday were jumping 8.30am on a Monday with folks zipping on vespas to work, kids mouching to school and oldies shuffling out to do their shopping. I had that thought again that I always do when I am a tourist and it’s a week day ‘Wow. People actually live here. What would that be like. What would it be like if we lived here. Could I live her? Would I like to live here…?’
I went ‘overseas’ for the first time when I was 24. I grew up calling it going ‘overseas’. It’s such an Australian thing. People from other countries call it going abroad, travelling or visiting another country. But visiting another country when you are Australian means going over seas.
So I was 24. I had this boyfriend Alex who was a bit older and had some cash and on my 24th birthday he gave me a ridiculously big bunch of flowers that I didn’t have a vase big enough for so I had to use a bucket, a CD of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion that I couldn’t play because my CD player had been nicked and told me he’d take me overseas for my birthday anywhere in the world I wanted to go. I’d left uni and was a waiter just breaking into stand-up so I wasn’t cashed up at all so this was a generous and ostentatious gift. Ireland was my first choice. We only have ten days to travel so going to Europe was probably a bit too far he said. I then suggested New York, India, Paris… It turns out he wanted to go to Thailand and Vietnam so the ‘anywhere in the world’ was a bit of an overstatement. It was incredible experience, travel is the greatest gift, and it really hooked me on travel. Neither of my parents ever left Australia. I was always wide eyed and a little envious hearing people’s travel stories. After my first ‘overseas’ trip I felt as if I had joined some club, levelled up and finally arrived. Somewhere. I was a person with a passport and travel stories.
It was because of this boyfriend I ended up living in Tokyo for 18 months the next year. It’s a long story. I taught English there, earned enough money to put a deposit on the house I still own, did a bunch of other travel including the Trans Siberian Express where I feel in love with a posh english hedanist who was the inspiration for my book The Happiness Show. I can’t remember much about the relationship to be honest which is strange because it went for a few years but Alex and the travel I did with him and because of him really changed the course of my life.
He’d travelled to Tokyo for work (he was in publishing) just before he and I met. He raved about it and the people he hung out with who were all Australians teaching English. He kept saying ‘If I was your age I’d be living in Tokyo teaching English. You can make heaps of money and have a fucking ball. You are under 26 so you can get a working holiday visa’. A year later I did just that. We split up between me buying my ticket and leaving Australia.
Sitting on the slow cheap train from Narita to Tokyo wide eyed and head fucked I remember looking out the window at kids going to school stopped at the boom gates, girls in their sailor suits, boys in their uniforms inspired by the Prussian army lugging their back packs thinking ‘WOW. People actually live here…’
So after our coffee we headed back to Rex-Tours for another four hour bike ride this time with a 10am start. The weather was fucking glorious as it had been the day before and we were off to The Appian way. Our crew was smaller six this time not eight as Bear and I’s eldest sons both had other stuff to do. Our tour guide was Max, brother of Leo and co owner of the outfit. As we sorted our bikes (fun fact, you really have to have bikes with shockers when you are fanging around Rome because of the cobblestones) Max summed us up and quietly asked me if anyone was from Sydney. ‘No, we’re all from Melbourne’.
He let out a huge sigh of relief. ‘So no one from Sydney? Oh thank God. The people from Sydney their accent grates my brain.’
Then he did a high pitched nasal voice and said in one of those terrible Australian accents people do ‘Heeeelllloooo! Peeeerrrrfect.’
Sydney people have an accent? News to me but according to Max tour guide assured me they do.
The weather happened to be ‘peeeerrrrfect’. You can have fun travelling in all weather but beautiful weather truly does amplify your experience.
We took off though thought the back streets to the old Jewish ghetto over the road from the Portico of Octavia before stopping at the Baths of Caracalla.
For me Max, and our tour guide Arturo the night before had been a bit heavy on the info, but for others in the group they’d been a bit light on the info so they were probably just right. Peeerrrfffeeeect.
I have never been able to truly comprehend the centuries and millennia ancient buildings, statues and places have been around or, if truth be told, absorb their significance. It’s all impossible and incomprehensible to me. These ‘important places’ where ‘important things’ happened to ‘important people’ is too much to appreciate. Yes I can understand the words they are saying and yes I can count but after a certain point my brain reaches ‘peak important’ and all I can say is ‘Fucking amazing. Fucking does my head in.’
The most memorable ‘peak important’ moment was with Arturo the night before as he told us about the Colosseum and my brain was having a tantrum. The Colosseum has over 80 entrances and could accommodate about 50,000 spectators, there were bars, restaurants and it’s where the Romans invented the hamburger, at different times it had been a prison and a zoo, there were 36 trap doors in the arena allowing for elaborate special effects, Festivals as well as games could last up to 100 days, they would sometimes flood the Colosseum and have miniature ship naval battles inside for entertainment, 500,000 people lost their lives and over a million wild animals were killed throughout the duration of the people vs. beast games, the pope turned the fertile soil into a vineyard and made wine….
I was desperate to jam all this info in to no avail. I just stood muttering ‘fucking hell, fucking amazing, does my head in’. How the fuck did they do the design, building, engineering and infrastructure without the experience and technology we have now? All the fuck the had were pencils, paper and slaves. Where the fuck did they get the vision from? What fuelled their imagination and what was their motivation?
Rome is the city I have the most trouble truly comprehending. The whole place is an outdoor museum. I am so grateful and amazed when I consider all the people over centuries that have fought for the ruins, monuments and churches not to be absorbed by practicality. Rome is a huge bustling city. Surely people over the ages have fought to ‘Fuck this old bullshit off and whack in some homes, schools, hospitals and shops’ but peoples stood their ground and said ‘No. This is our history and culture.’ Sure it’s tourism now but the people who saw the importance in preserving it would never have known it would be teaming with tourists and the proceeds would be an integral part of their economy.
So we pedalled off to Appian Way and the Aqueducts though the main streets and it’s amazing how fast we were in the sweet gentle countryside.
The streets in Rome are bonkers. Max and Arturo had both said ‘Just follow me and be rude’. Navigating the Rome traffic you have to take the attitude of being a starving person standing behind a truck where someone is throwing out bread. You just push forward and elbow people out of the way to get what you want. Road rules are a suggestion, markings and signs are optional and no one takes it personally.
Riding through the sweet gentle country side of Italy with it’s soft air and light was delicious. European countryside gives you the familiar hit of nature with an dreamy otherness quality. Different plants, trees and smells. We stopped and filled our water with glorious naturally fizzy volcanic mineral water shoulder to shoulder with the locals filling crates. The Aqueducts and the Appian Way were amazing, incredible, incomprehensible and all those other things. The Appian Way is nearly 500 km long, starting from Rome, along the Tyrrhenian coast, crossing the lands of Campania and Basilicata and ending in Puglia. It was built in 312 BC. Yep. Brain exploded.
For me the trip was about being in the countryside on the bike and enjoying understanding the geometry of the city. Max told us stuff on stops and he was fairly lose with the jokes prefacing everyone with ‘I know this joke but I probably shouldn’t say it because I might offend someone…’ so we’d all beg for his dodgy jokes which would have managed please everyone wanting to be offended.
At about 2pm we landed back at the office dusty, hot, hungry and grateful. There was a little Osteria around the corner and we ate there. You can’t go wrong with the food in Italy, you really really can’t. After a few weeks travelling I usually start craving ‘home food’. But not in Italy. All they serve is Italy is home food.
We all headed off home for a rest before dinner and 16yo Hugo wanted to check out a hoodie at the Nike store. Out of my three sons he is the one most born to travel and it was apparent from a very young age. It was a half an hour walk with a detour to shop I had no interest in but the chat was light and lovely.
Our last night in Rome and Anthony caught up with his son who was heading off to Sicily and the rest of us nailed a reservation at a place Marz’s partner had heard of. One of those mythical true cultural travel brag experiences.
It was a restaurant near the Vatican run by nuns with no menu. You paid a set price and got what you got. This is where it’s very handy to be travelling with Marz who can speak Italian. He had missed Hugo’s birthday a few weeks before because he’d been in Italy so bought a birthday cake and a couple of bottles of prosecco for a celebration. When he made the reservation he asked the nuns if we could bring the cake and bubbles and sure, no problemo. Speaking another language is a fucking superpower.
I wandered up on my own (how good is it having Google maps and data for travel) and found the place – Fraterna Domus. I was buzzed in and sat in austere waiting room with a marble floor that smelt of holy water, genuflecting and bleach. I was a little early so I stickybeaked for a while. It was apparent you could also stay there for those who’d like to sleep in monastic rooms with religious icons watching over you.
Marz, his partner and the boys arrived and we were taken downstairs to a simple room full of long wooden tables and chairs with white tablecloths. Despite being a basement room it was bright and buzzy. We had a delicious super tradition meal of soup, pasta and a meat dish with water and wine served by smiling nuns. The food looked nothing special but tasted extraordinary. Then they turned the lights off. WTF. Did we have to pray now? Is their surprise litugical dancing? No. It was a smiling nun starting a rousing chorus of happy birthday in Italian for Hugo and the whole room sang along. They had even managed to find the number 16 in candles for the cake.
We shared the cake with the others in the restaurant and the nuns. It was one of those very very special travel nights.
As we walked up the stairs to leave we got to the ground level and there was a door ajar. Inside a perfect and exquisite chapel that would sit 40 adorned in incredible art hundreds of years old. If only those walls could talk.
We walked home and said good-bye. The boys were off with Marz to head south for a couple of weeks and Bear and I hit the sack for our belated two week Love Party Honeymoon Adventure. Plane from Rome Airport leaving 7.45am. Up at 5am. In an Uber at 5.30 then dropped off at the ‘Kiss and Go’ zone.
