Benvenuti a Roma!
The train pulled into Rome’s Termini station late afternoon on that hot, sticky August day. It was just after Ferragosto, the Virgin’s ascension day and the third most important Italian holiday. The arrival into Rome past the crumbling old city walls is not an inspiring one. The train tracks, overgrown with grass and littered with garbage, are lined with rundown apartment buildings, laundry hanging outside windows open against the heat, and scattered, desolate, overgrown ruins from the Roman Empire. Rome may be the eternal city, but time has not been kind in its decline and fall. German train stations are clean, orderly, and impressive while Italian ones are dirty, chaotic, and unimpressive. Compare Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof and Rome’s Stazioni Termini and you’ll see what I mean.
While stopped at the Brenner pass at 3 am for the changing of the guard, I’d started chatting with a young Italian woman seated across from me. Valentina, 28, a journalist with black hair and a bright wide smile, spoke a mixture of Italian and English and wrote about calcio, soccer, for a small Roman paper trying to compete with the pink pages of the national Gazetto dello Sport. It was half the price but had only one third the readership. She joked about working for the second largest sporting news in the capital and about her boyfriend, Ciccio, who was getting too fat to even consider sleeping with. When girls complain about their boyfriends, which they usually do, they’re either looking for confirmation that they’re still attractive to someone else, or they’re on the hunt for a new boyfriend. After a few more hours of chatting turned mild flirtation, since I didn’t have an Italian cell number yet, we exchanged email addresses when we arrived at Termini and said we’d get together for caffé and chiacchierata, more chitchat. But before even thinking about replacing Ciccio, I had to concentrate on finding a place to live.
Carrying two suitcases filled with my clothes and the collected works of Raymond Chandler, pushing through the crowds pushing their way across the crowded station (at that moment all roads did seem to lead to Rome), I saw Terry waiting for me outside the entrance to McDonald’s. Terry was the art history professor who had interviewed me at AUR. He was tall, thin, balding, with an Errol Flynn mustache and he was flamboyantly, extravagantly, Nathan Lane gay. Every sweeping gesture, every booming pronouncement, was made as if he were acting onstage in a Puccini opera. [For a visual, if you’ve seen The Big Lebowski, he looked and acted exactly like Knox Harrington, video artist] He smiled, sang “buon giorno!” and then kissed me first on the left and then on the right cheek, Euro-style. I felt his stubble chafe against mine. “Benvenuti a Roma!” Terry had been in Rome for fourteen years.
He lived a few blocks from Termini in Esquilino, a former working class neighborhood filled mainly with Chinese and African immigrants, in an apartment near Piazza Vittorio that he shared with his boyfriend, an Italian museum director from a well-to-do Roman family. I would be staying with them until I got settled somewhere. Getting settled was my first priority and I had two weeks to do so until the semester started. I had just over €900 in my pocket to get settled with. But I also had a full time job for the first time in five years. As I was about to discover, €900 was hardly enough to get settled in a city as expensive as Rome, and the full time job wouldn’t be much help at the time, either.
AUR is located on the Gianicolo, the second tallest hill in Rome but not counted as one of the famed Seven Hills of Rome because of its location west of the Tiber River, outside the original city limits. If the view from there of the domes, bell towers and the Vittorio Emanuele II monument below is spectacular, the school is not. Located in two small buildings of a former convent, AUR, like many so-called American Universities Of… around the world, has no connection to the American University in Washington, DC, and like many of these American-style universities it is not accredited in the United States—which means the classes and degrees they offer are not recognized by American institutions of higher education. Most of the faculty was MA level. It was an American university in name and curriculum style only. The school had 170 full time students, no endowment, and survived year to year on the 300 or so study abroad students that it hosted each semester from its connection to City College of New York, overcharging them for tuition and near slum-level accommodations scattered around the outskirts of Trastevere.
I knew nothing of this at the time. At dinner the night before, Terry had dominated the conversation, but the conversation had not been about the school, school politics, or even school gossip. He told me about his sex life, how he slept with lots of Italian men who weren’t gay, but who would indulge because, culturally, Italians didn’t consider gay sex to be sex. I reminded him that I wasn’t Italian. He laughed and then told me all about how Italian men worshipped transvestites and saw them as another way to avoid “cheating” on their wives or girlfriends. There seemed to be a lot of cheating going on in Italian culture, whether on the tax code or on emotional commitments. All I knew for sure was that Terry wouldn’t be cheating on his boyfriend with me.
So after pizza, birra, and an uncomfortable night at Terry’s apartment, the next morning I attended my first meeting with the provost, who informed me that I had been hired, along with a new president and five other Ph.D.s, to get the school accredited. Hmm, this had not been mentioned in the job description, the job interview, or the job offer. So in addition to teaching my three classes a semester and building writing program from the ground up, I would also have a full time administrative position as well; the accreditation report was due to Middle States in one year. And I would have to get legal in Italy, something I had failed to do before, but this time I was assured the process would only take a few weeks, or a month at the most. There was only one problem: until I was legal, AUR couldn’t pay me.
There was another problem as well. I spent the rest of the morning looking through Porta Portese, a Roman classified ads newspaper, only to discover that there was no way I could afford an apartment in Rome, not even a small studio in the noisy student neighborhood of San Lorenzo. Unlike my stint working lavoro nero with Keith, I would actually have to pay Italian taxes, roughly 30% of my salary. The average apartment in Rome ran €1000-1500 a month, plus utilities. So much for that romantic Keatsian studio by the Spanish Steps or the bohemian artist’s garret in Trastevere. Terry told me that his first four years in Rome he’d rented a room while saving money to get his own place. Four years? In a room? Then he’d met the museum director and that plan became irrelevant. “So you’d better start looking for a room to rent—or a well-to-do boyfriend!” I started looking for a room to rent.
One room in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Monti district, near the Coliseum, sounded promising, so we called but it had already been rented. The woman said a friend of hers down the street was looking for a roommate, so we took the number, called her, and set up an appointment for later that afternoon. After lunch, we took the Metropolitana to the Cavour stop, walked down the stairs to Via dei Serpenti, past the faded and streaked grime of the San Martino di Monti church, turned right past the fountain and walked up to Piazza degli Zingari, Plaza of the Gypsies. The apartment was located there on the fourth floor, overlooking the Piazza and the casino and rumeroso, the chaos and noise of day-to-day Italian life.
We rang the buzzer and the door popped open, then climbed four flights of stairs and met Cecilia standing in the doorway. She was an unemployed Italian filmmaker in her fifties who needed help making the rent. She didn’t speak a word of English. The apartment was large by European standards, 3 bedrooms, 120 square meters. The apartment was run-down by American standards, the room for rent tiny, with a small bed, hard mattress, a chest of drawers and a scratched up desk and chair. Terry translated as Cecilia told us about the rooftop terrace that was ours, the broken Roman columns in the basement, and the illegal brothel run by Russians on the ground floor. “Charming,” Terry sang, “We’ll take it!” So “we” did.
Cecilia wanted €500 a month, plus two months’ deposit. After discussing my financial situation with her, she decided to allow me to pay the deposit over a period of four months, which left me with €250 to survive on until I became legal and AUR started paying me. Even though I had thought my down and out days were behind me, all that scrounging and struggling on the mean streets of Munich would still come in handy. Cecilia also said she would practice Italian with me, which meant that if AUR didn’t pay me, at least at some point I could search for a café that needed its menu translated. So Terry and I went back to his apartment, picked up my two suitcases, and I moved in that night. I was settled in Rome—temporarily, or at least for the next three years of my contract.
The next day I took the 75 bus down Via Cavour, around the Coliseum, across the Tiber, its brown murky water filled with floating trash, and up the Gianicolo for a meeting with Human Resources about starting the process of getting a permesso di soggiorno, my legal resident’s permit. As an American I could stay in Italy for up to six months, but I didn’t have the right to work. In order to get that right I had to get the permesso. And the first step in getting the permesso? The head of HR smiled, then shook her head. “First, you have to fly back to America, go to the Italian consulate in your home state, and obtain an entry visa so you can enter Italy as a resident and not a tourist.” WTF? I informed her that I hadn’t lived in the States in years, that technically I was a resident of Germany. Didn’t matter. I was getting on a plane tomorrow and flying back “home.” In order to start the process of getting legal in Italy, I first had to leave Italy.
I hadn’t lived in America for over six years, and I didn’t have a home there or a home state. Even though I was originally from California, I was technically a resident of Florida, but that was only because I had picked up a Florida driver’s license when I was teaching there for that one semester; I did that so I wouldn’t have to pay state tax on my meager income. I had no desire to go back to Florida, especially one day after settling down in Rome, but I was booked on the morning flight to Miami. She handed me a ticket. At least AUR was paying for my trip. I didn’t even have a credit card to charge a plane ticket with.
Italian bureaucracy is legendary for its labyrinthine processes, its unending paperwork, its indifference to pleading applicants, the incompetence of its staff, and its Catch 22 regulations. In case you’re planning on living in Italy someday, here’s what you’ll need as an American to get legal (and by the way, none of this is any guarantee you’ll become legal. Even with a work contract, you can be turned down for no reason whatsoever. They won’t even tell you why). An entry visa from the Italian consulate in your home state; an application for the permesso di soggiorno with a marco de bollo, or tax stamp; a nulla ostra, or letter of no objection from your local (Roman) police department; a police report from your local (American) police department showing no criminal record (if your local police department doesn’t have a police report on you, it only proves you’re hiding something. Fortunately, I had a friend who worked for LAPD and was able to get me one pronto); a codice fiscale, or tax card (I already had one from my first stay in Italy); a libretto di lavoro, or work card; and the patience of several of the major saints.
One of the other professors hanging around that day told me I was lucky to be going to the Miami consulate, because the New York and Chicago consulates were notorious for rejecting or not even processing applications for entry visas. He told me of having to wait in long lines in New York for two weeks just to get in the door to hand in the paperwork, since the consulate was only open two days a week for visas, and only three hours on those days. One of my other new colleagues had to spend six weeks in Chicago waiting for her entry visa, only to be rejected because the staple was in the wrong place. None of this had been mentioned in the job application, the job interview, or the job offer. The possibility of being stuck in surreal limbo in Miami with no money suddenly seemed all too real.
After a sleepless night on my hard mattress with the kitchen TV blaring Italian game shows into my room past midnight, and Italians from the piazza below blaring chiacchierata through my open window until 4 am, the next day I flew to Miami, seven hours of peace and quiet, hooked up with a friend, and then went to the Italian consulate the following morning. The consulate is located above a Ferrari dealership in Coral Gables. Since I got there early, I was able to gaze longingly at something else Italian I would probably never be able to get.
After thirty minutes of car dreaming, I took the elevator up to the lobby, expecting a scene of sheer madness. There was no one in line. In fact, there was no line. There was no one else there except a clerk, who took my application forms, told me the consulate rarely received requests for entry visas, and then said he would FedEx mine the following day. He did, and my first encounter with Italian bureaucracy became the stuff of local legend. When I got back to Rome, nobody could believe I’d gotten an entry visa that quickly and that easily. I must have bribed someone, or had a family member in the mob, vero? Yes, the Petermans of Calabria.
Next in the process, with all of this paperwork in hand, you have to go stand in line at your local questura, or police department, along with the hundreds of other local immigrants and their hoards of whining, crying children from Albania, China, Russia and Africa trying to get legal or refuge status as well. It’s best to get in line at around 4.30 or 5.00 in the morning, because even though the questura doesn’t open until 8.00, at around 7.15 they issue only a handful of numbers each day, and even having a number is no guarantee that you’ll actually get through the door and inside the questura to hand in your paperwork and begin the process. I had been told the process would take a couple of weeks, or a month at the most.
It took a year and half.
***
There was an internet café up the stairs and just to the right on Via Cavour. After I returned from Miami, I went there to pick up an Italian SIM card for my German cell phone and to send Valentina a quick email suggesting coffee. She got back to me almost immediately, and we made a date to meet that evening at a caffé on Via dei Serpenti. She lived out near Ciampino, the smaller of Rome’s two airports, but she worked in the city center. She also had a car, and so she said she would drive over after work and meet me at 7.00.
The semester didn’t start for another week, so I had plenty of free time from work to explore Rome. It’s not like they were paying me. I’d been to Rome a few times before and was marginally familiar with the city, but even I was impressed by how most of the major attractions were just outside my doorstep. Walking down Serpenti I could see the Coliseum sitting squat and solid at the end of the street. The Roman Forum was just down the block, its ruined columns bleached white by over a millennia of sun, as was Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, on top of the Capitoline Hill. The Vittorio Emanuele II monument, nicknamed “the wedding cake” or “the typewriter” but known to most Romans as a meeting place and an eyesore on the slope of the Capitoline, was just past the Forum. The Trevi Fountain, The Pantheon, Campo dei Fiori, Piazza Navona, all the guidebook highlights were within easy walking distance. I could practically hear Anita Ekberg calling out “Marcello, Marcello!”
Since my room was basically a place to sleep, I started spending my days walking through these magical, mythical places, absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells of my new home. While I wasn’t quite a victim of Stendhal syndrome, I did look forward to my daily walks through all of this art, culture, and history, especially since no one really jogs in Rome. I missed my 10km runs along the Danube, but it was just too hot, humid, polluted and dangerous to run along the Tiber. The thought of taking a bus to the green paths of Villa Borghese, running 10km, and then taking a bus back through the noise and traffic of the city, dripping sweat, didn’t appeal to me either.
On that first day’s walk, standing just past the Vittorio Emanuele II monument, trying to cross the street through a seemingly endless flow of taxis, buses, cars and scooters, I watched as, horn blaring, a taxi collided with a Vespa, wiping out both scooter and driver. I’d had a scooter in the Colle (and sold it during my second stint in Germany for €1500; that kept me going from moment to moment for nearly three months) and thought about getting another one in Rome, but after witnessing some poor Italian commuter killed on my first day out, I decided never to even ride on one, let alone try to drive one through all this chaos and madness.
I was back in Monti by 6.00 and an hour later met up with Valentina at the Brasil Caffé. She was as pretty and flirty as I remembered, curvaceous with black hair and a wide, red mouth and her cheek lingered briefly next to mine after the required two kisses. It felt nice without Terry’s stubble. Over espresso, she told me about a feature she was writing for the paper about a Lazio star and I told her about my quick trip to Miami. She laughed, said something dismissive about Italian bureaucracy, and then asked me where I lived in the quartiere, the neighborhood. So we walked over to Piazza degli Zingari. She looked around, laughed again, and said “My psychiatrist lives on this same street.” This is not the kind of information you want to hear on a first date.
We walked back down the cramped side streets to the Roman Forum, walked across to the Campidoglio, climbed the steps, walked past Marcus Aurelius astride his horse, then around behind the Capitoline museum and stood looking down on the lighted ruins of ancient Rome. Japanese, German, and American tourists took flash pictures, and a few teenage couples leaned against the railings kissing. After a few minutes, Valentina said she had to be getting home for dinner with Cicco. This is also not the kind of information you want to hear on a first date. So I walked her back to the car, she said we’d get together again, bacio, bacio, kiss, kiss, buona notte, a presto, good night, see you soon, and that was that.
Back in Germany, the reason my breakup with Ms. Nokia had been so nasty was that four months into our relationship she told me that she still lived with her dentist boyfriend for the last five years. She claimed they no longer slept together, which might have been true because she spent three or four nights a week sleeping with me. Still, the basis of any relationship is supposed to be trust. Not that full disclosure on everything is necessary—everyone needs their little secrets—but withholding information like I live with someone, I’m married, or I’ve had a sex change operation is not conducive to building long term trust.
As someone whose LTRs have often been LDRs, I’ve had to focus on issues of trust more than most. LDRs involve a lot of trust issues, with suspicion and jealousy intruding and infecting many a midnight thought or morning suspicion. An LDR requires an incredible leap of faith in the other person and their trustworthiness, even though eventually you realize that everyone withholds information, everyone lies, everyone deceives. Relationships are based more on selective perception and self-deception than trust. This is not pessimism on my part, but a premise that can be supported with facts and evidence from just about everyone’s experiences, including yours and mine. Either that or I just attract my unfair share of the world’s unfaithful and untrustworthy partners.
When I came home in the evenings from my walks through Rome, the Russian prostitutes from the illegal brothel downstairs would flirt and proposition me. I told them over and over that I lived in the building, but they never seemed to believe me. Once or twice a week there was a police car parked outside the building and I wouldn’t have to go through the slutty sirens’ lure to get upstairs. Given the prevalence of bribery in Italy, I’ll let you draw your own conclusion as to what the police were doing there.
So the semester started and I fell into a routine of teaching, exploring Rome, reading Raymond Chandler and practicing Italian with Cecilia at night, and standing in line at the questura two mornings a week. It took nearly a month of standing in the dark with my fellow frustrated immigrants just to get through the door to hand in my paperwork to the scowling police clerk. It only took Valentina two weeks to contact me again. Cicco was now out of the picture. She invited me to take a drive with her that night up to the Knights of Malta palazzo, where Saint Peter’s cathedral could be seen framed perfectly through the main gate keyhole. Sure, why not.
We met at the fountain next to the Monti church, then drove in her blue Fiat Panda up Via Condotti on the Aventine Hill to the palazzo. We parked next to a dozen or so other Fiats and Alfas and walked over to stand in line in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta to see Saint Peter’s in miniature. Living in Rome involves standing in a lot of lines. Afterwards, we went back to her car. It was now dark and as I looked around I realized that the couples in the other cars were all engaged in various stages of sexual activity. Valentina reached over, kissed me, and then explained that since most Italian celibe, singles, lived with their parents, the only place they could have sex was in their cars. As she kissed my neck and started unzipping my jeans, I stopped her and reminded her that I wasn’t Italian and didn’t live with my parents. She smiled, then started the car, and I hoped that Cecilia wasn’t home.
She wasn’t. And for the next two weeks I became involved with a ragazza, a young girl who sang out “che bello, che bello!” louder and louder every time we were in bed. At first I found this funny, but soon her predictable response came to have a rehearsed, staged quality about it, as if it didn’t matter who was touching her. Even Cicco probably got the same reaction out of her. The piazza was noisy enough from scooters and cars racing across the cobblestones all hours and the bickering Italians below, not to mention the mother who lived in the apartment above me and stuck her out the window to scream at her daughter, who lived in the apartment below me and stuck her out the window to scream back. Why couldn’t they fight with each other over the phone like Americans?
Then there was the constant barrage of text messages, fifteen or twenty a day. Are you thinking of me? I’m thinking of you. Uh, no, I’m reading The Long Goodbye. When I didn’t respond, she’d squillo me. When Italians want you to know they’re thinking of you, they squillo your cell phone—let it ring once, then hang up. Imagine this ten times a day. After being ignored for a couple of days, she finally called me and so I explained that I had not answered because I had run out of credit on my phone (not strictly true, but I was close to running out). Ten minutes later I received another message informing me that she’d charged €50 of credit to my number. Then another message: No excuses now! Basta, I thought, enough of this, Cecilia’s Italian lessons seeping into my everyday vocabulary. Even though I was nearly broke, I threw the recharged SIM card out and bought another one with less credit and a different number.
I didn’t hear from her again. The next time a girl tells me her psychiatrist lives on the same street as I do, I’ll take the hint and run. Or at least that’s what I told myself at the time. It seems even our relationship with our self is based on selective perception and self-deception.
