Gibbon on the A Train

Parking occupies me for only a few minutes a week these days, though last Sunday, when a whole lot of DFDs (that’s people Down For the Day) drove out to Rockaway, I had to go around the block twice before a van pulled out and left a space big enough for two of me. I’d have parked farther away, but I’d just done a big grocery shopping and bought a lot of beer substitutes (fake beer, root beer, lemonade, diet Dr Pepper—oh, all right, one six-pack of Carlsberg), and besides, in this case “farther away” meant “closer to the beach,” where I was even less likely to find a spot.

So I’m back on the A train again, commuting to midtown, and this year it doesn’t seem as charming as it has in the past. I aim for a window seat in the morning, and gaze out over the bay and the houses on stilts. I’ve seen egrets, swans, geese, cormorants, red-winged blackbirds, and gulls gulls gulls, including some baby seagulls—puffy gray chicks about the size of softballs—on the island the train goes over, which is basically a seagull hatchery. Some days Jamaica Bay has the aspect of a mirage, with an airport instead of palm trees. When the train goes underground, about a third of the way into the hour-and-a-quarter trip, I open a book.

The three-volume Modern Library edition of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has been sitting on my shelf for something like twenty years. I don’t know what I was waiting for—a period of convalescence following a bunionectomy, I suppose—but I finally decided to crack it. Volume I has 956 pages, and I’d need a baby scale to weigh it. I’m on page 78 (Commodus, in 180 A.D.—the beginning of the end). Already the cover flap has split along the folds—it’s a rugged commute—so I removed it and left it at home.

For years I have been hearing about Gibbon’s prose style, his mastery of the periodic sentence. Yes, the sentences are clear and balanced—I find myself reading them twice—but the punctuation is killing me. It must have been the fashion in Gibbon’s day (he was a contemporary of Samuel Johnson, writing in the second half of the eighteenth century) to poke in a comma whenever one ran short of breath, even if it separated the subject from the verb. For instance: “The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin, of Athens and Sparta.” And: “Happily for the repose of mankind, the moderate system recommended by the wisdom of Augustus, was adopted by the fears and vices of his immediate successors.” And just one more (among thousands), also about Augustus: “A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside.”

I am also frustrated by the footnotes. Chapter I has ninety-six of them, waving like seaweed at the bottom of the page. I tried skimming them in advance to determine whether there was anything down there worth interrupting myself for. Many of them are simply Gibbon crediting his sources, but others add sly little notes in a voice reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock (M. de Voltaire, "unsupported by either fact or probability, has generously bestowed the Canary Islands on the Roman empire”; “Mr. Pope, without perceiving it, has improved the theology of Homer”). Others, in brackets and signed O.S., take issue with the author (“Gibbon’s account of the military system of the Romans contains several errors that must be corrected”; “Gibbon’s remark here is wholly incorrect”). At first, these uppity editorial comments made me grit my teeth, but I softened when I found out, from a modest note on the copyright page, that the initials O.S. stand for Oliphant Smeaton. Yet other footnotes are entirely in Latin, a language in which I am, unfortunately, illiterate. I find myself wishing these footnotes had footnotes.

I am not sure if I'm going to persist with Gibbon, but I'm already superstitious about lugging him around: the day I give up and leave him at home, my train will get stuck between stations and I'll need something interminable. Yesterday on the train I was disturbed by murmuring behind me: a woman was reading aloud, in Spanish, from a prayer book with oversize type ("del Señor ... oramos ... Ave Maria"). Another woman was holding up a volume about the same size as mine, labelled “Holy Bible.” On the way home, I squeezed into a window seat next to a guy who was playing a handheld video boxing game. I opened my Gibbon; he changed seats.

Parking, Italian Style

Via della Farnesina, Rome (left to right): A spina, a spina, a fila, doppia a fila, a fila, motorino (on sidewalk), a spina (Smart car).


Streetsweeper at an exhibition.


State of the Art Police Lamborghini in the Piazza del Popolo.

When in Rome

In the Eternal City, parking, like everything else, is an art. It calls for creativity. Not that I’m doing it myself—God, no. I have been lucky enough to get chauffeured around a little. For a party in the historic center on Saturday night, a friend whom I’ve been staying with in Campagnano, which is about twenty miles north of Rome, drove in early and found a spot “a spina” on a little street just a few blocks from the Tevere. I kept picturing him having to leave the party to feed the meter, but he put six euros in one of those boxes on the street and got a little slip of paper to lay on the dashboard that made the car legal till the following morning. “A spina” means “like fish bones”: you park aslant of the curb, like fish bones sticking out of the spine. The alternative is to park “a fila,” in a straight line, or parallel to the curb.

A make of car that is very popular here is the Smart car. Smart cars are so short that they can be parked “a spina” in a spot designated for parallel parking. They are about the size of a Roman dumpster, and are often seen parked among dumpsters. They remind me of nothing so much as Bump’em cars, or Dodg’ems, as we used to call them. They’re just big enough for two (in fact, they say “fortwo” on the back, which must sound funny in Italian), and they look like normal small cars but are truncated: there is no back seat. They take up about the same amount of space as two motorcycles, side by side. And they look like fun to drive—maybe too much fun, like Bump’em cars.

Romans create parking spaces where there are none. On a street designated for parking a spina, if all the spots are taken, you add a space for yourself at the end of a row. If you have to block a pedestrian zone, well, you gotta do what you gotta do. If you have to park in a pedestrian zone on a street designated for parking a fila, it’s a good idea not to make too good a job of it—leave it looking studiedly haphazard, sticking out into the street a little, so it’s clear you were in a hurry and you will be in a hurry to get out, too. Where two roads merge and form a wedge, generally painted in white stripes, cars are parked there. Also the medians are just wide enough to park a small car. Double parking is also a possibility, as is double parking a fila along a line of cars parked a spina.

While commuting from Campagnano to Rome to sightsee, I spent quite a lot of time on public transportation. There were two routes: a shuttle bus to a commuter train at Cesano to the Metropolitana at Aurelia (or all the way to Ostiense, the end of the line); and a regular bus to a different commuter train (Roma Nord), at Saxa Rubra, to the Metropolitana at Flaminio. For a few days, I moved from Campagnano to the Via della Farnesina, in what turns out to be sort of the Roman equivalent of the Upper East Side (but not really). I took the shuttle bus to the train to the Metropolitana to a tram, and walked: two hours, door to door. Later, I met a friend in Trastevere: tram again, Metropolitana again, with a change at Termini (Grand Central Station) to the other line of the Metropolitana, and then the airport train for one stop. Fortunately, I had bought a ticket that was good all day (four euros). At the end of the day, I took the Metropolitana from a stop called Piramide, near where Shelley is buried, to the Colosseum, then walked up to the Piazza del Popolo (where there is a big exhibition glorifying the 155th anniversary of the state police), and then took the tram to Ponte Milvio. This bridge has been in the news because of a custom in which one writes one's beloved’s name on a padlock, locks it to a chain around one of the poles on the bridge, and throws the key in the river. Historically, this is the place where Constantine entered Rome. I have yet to find out why it’s called Milvio.

Today I will take the Roma Nord line back to Campagnano, switching to the bus at Saxa Rubra. We had passed Saxa Rubra on the ring road when we were coming to the party last Saturday. There is a big complex for RAI, the Italian TV and radio stations; the building is a recycled design for a penitentiary in South America. My friend pointed out to me the strange baffles above and alongside the roadway: they look like something erected to protect your car from falling rocks, but there are no mountains next to the road that rocks might fall off of. What is next to the road is a neighborhood of rich people who did not want the noise of the ring road. The baffles, and Plexiglas stenciled with seagull silhouettes, are to keep the noise down.

My friend also told me the significance of Saxa Rubra, or Red Rocks. Here in about 301 A.D. Constantine defeated Diocletian, having been converted to Christianity on the eve of battle: “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (“Under this sign [the cross] you win”). (The motto is on packs of Pall Mall cigarettes.) It was the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire: the rocks were red with blood. Now, of course, Saxa Rubra is a commuter parking lot. I thought I saw shantytowns along the tracks, and in the parking lot at Saxa Rubra there was a whole trailer village. It’s the ultimate parking spot: you live there and commute to Rome.