I was curious to see in the mail on Wednesday an ominous-looking envelope from the Parking Violations Bureau, Red Light Violation Monitoring Program. Dum da dum dum. On the drive out to Rockaway on Saturday, I had, in my impatience, not been able to bear to stop at the umpteenth light that turned red at my approach. My passenger, the delightful and generous (if stubborn) MQ, had said, “Red light!” Enough red lights, already, I’d thought, and barrelled through; I’ll stop for every other one. (I may have been spending too much time in Italy.)
The document inside the envelope was a first in my experience. It showed three photographs: one, from the rear, of my car entering a crosswalk in the split second after the light had changed; another, taken 1.15 seconds later, of said car proceeding through the intersection under the red light; and, lest there be any doubt that it was my car (I recognized the lineup of fishing permits on the right rear bumper), there, in damning closeup, was my license plate. Ouch.
On closer examination (I’m used to examining these things closely, in case there’s some mistake that would be grounds for dismissal), I realized, first, that this light, on Cross Bay Boulevard at Liberty Avenue, seemed to be the first one I blew through, which MQ didn’t comment on. (The second was farther south, on the other side of Howard Beach.) And then, noticing that it was kind of dark in the photos, I saw that the so-called Notice of Liability documented a violation not on last Saturday afternoon but on the evening of Sunday, April 22nd, at 19:36:31, when I was northbound on Cross Bay Boulevard, returning to the city, alone, with no cats in the back seat and no restraining influence in the passenger seat.
I had been alarmed at the city’s efficiency, so in a way it was a relief to realize that the violation was a month old. Then again chances are pretty good that I’ll be hearing from the Red Light Camera Monitoring Program again.
I don’t have to go directly to jail, and I will not receive points on my driver’s license, but I do have to forfeit fifty dollars. And mend my ways.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Hot Water
The summer travel season is under way, as the Times puts it, which means that the winter parking season is over, and it’s cat-chauffeuring time. I moved out to the beach last Saturday, luring one reluctant cat into her box with a sprinkling of Kitty Kaviar, while the other, the Amazing Norbert, was eager to go wherever the cat food was going. I gave a ride to my friend MQ, who lets me park my car (formerly her car) in her driveway, and who lent a hand with the cats. They were quiet in the back seat, and I got them all the way to the door of the bungalow before three helicopters roared over, flying low, probably on their way back from the air show at Jones Beach, setting off every dog and car alarm on the peninsula, and incidentally terrorizing two newly arrived cats. It reminded me of the Concorde.
I had turned the water on in Rockaway earlier in the month, surprising myself with my studliness. Now it was time for the hot-water heater. Usually, my neighbor T. fires up the hot-water heater for me—a fireman’s daughter, I am a little afraid of explosions—but he and his wife, also T., were getting ready for a party, so I thought I’d try to do it myself. I got out my notes. Step 1: “Turn cock in pipe.” That’s easy enough: just take a small wrench and turn the valve on the gas pipe from horizontal to vertical, permitting the gas to get to the heater. Then, “Press down red button (2 min.).” T. has always had to fooster (my mother’s word) with this red button for quite a while before enough gas comes through for him to light the pilot. “Set top dial to Pilot”; “Set temp to off (vacation)”; “Light pilot”; “Turn up knob slowly”—“That’s so it don’t blow up in your face,” T. said.
I must have known, despite my good intentions, that I was going to end up asking T. to come over and help, because before I did anything else I cleaned up the area around the hot-water heater. It was all furry with dust. While cleaning, I noticed a phalanx of ants on maneuvers in the direction of the cat-food bowls. I attacked the ants with Windex, which is my improvement on my grandmother’s method, which was to pour boiling water on them. (I mean that it is an improvement not in the Buddhist sense of being less cruel but in the housecleaning sense of being faster and more convenient: it takes long minutes for the water to come to a boil as the ants come marching, and then your kitchen floor is awash with the corpses of parboiled ants.) Every summer there is a plague of ants, but this year, catching them early, on their way past their first redoubt at the hot-water heater, before they summitted the sink and the kitchen counters and turned the corner into the living room, I tracked them to their source: the chinks and gaps in the bathroom floor. Since you can’t spray Windex on every individual ant in creation, I set out ant traps and later bought a gel dispensed like caulking from a pump . . . but I digress.
Once the floor was relatively clean, I got my kitchen matches and my needle-nosed pliers and prostrated myself before the hot-water heater. I positioned the dials and held the red button for a long, long time, finding a use for a Pilates move called the Swan as I managed to keep the pressure on the red button with the hand holding the matchbox, strike the match with the other hand, fit it into the pliers, and stick it inside the heater, in the general direction of the pilot light, though I couldn’t actually see where the pilot light was. I repeated this exercise about six times without success, then gave up and went and got T.
“Didja press down on the red button?” he asked.
“Oh, DOWN.” I looked back at my notes, and that is exactly what it said, but for some reason I had been pulling up on the red button. I must have primed it, though, because T. had the pilot lit almost instantly. “I don’t know how hot you want it,” he said, turning the temperature dial. There was a whoosh as the fire ran around the ring, and I was in business.
I bought T. a six-pack of Budweiser, and went down to the beach. You can do a lot with cold running water—drink it, clean with it, boil it and kill ants with it—but there is nothing like a hot shower after your first dip in the Atlantic Ocean on Memorial Day Weekend.
I had turned the water on in Rockaway earlier in the month, surprising myself with my studliness. Now it was time for the hot-water heater. Usually, my neighbor T. fires up the hot-water heater for me—a fireman’s daughter, I am a little afraid of explosions—but he and his wife, also T., were getting ready for a party, so I thought I’d try to do it myself. I got out my notes. Step 1: “Turn cock in pipe.” That’s easy enough: just take a small wrench and turn the valve on the gas pipe from horizontal to vertical, permitting the gas to get to the heater. Then, “Press down red button (2 min.).” T. has always had to fooster (my mother’s word) with this red button for quite a while before enough gas comes through for him to light the pilot. “Set top dial to Pilot”; “Set temp to off (vacation)”; “Light pilot”; “Turn up knob slowly”—“That’s so it don’t blow up in your face,” T. said.
I must have known, despite my good intentions, that I was going to end up asking T. to come over and help, because before I did anything else I cleaned up the area around the hot-water heater. It was all furry with dust. While cleaning, I noticed a phalanx of ants on maneuvers in the direction of the cat-food bowls. I attacked the ants with Windex, which is my improvement on my grandmother’s method, which was to pour boiling water on them. (I mean that it is an improvement not in the Buddhist sense of being less cruel but in the housecleaning sense of being faster and more convenient: it takes long minutes for the water to come to a boil as the ants come marching, and then your kitchen floor is awash with the corpses of parboiled ants.) Every summer there is a plague of ants, but this year, catching them early, on their way past their first redoubt at the hot-water heater, before they summitted the sink and the kitchen counters and turned the corner into the living room, I tracked them to their source: the chinks and gaps in the bathroom floor. Since you can’t spray Windex on every individual ant in creation, I set out ant traps and later bought a gel dispensed like caulking from a pump . . . but I digress.
Once the floor was relatively clean, I got my kitchen matches and my needle-nosed pliers and prostrated myself before the hot-water heater. I positioned the dials and held the red button for a long, long time, finding a use for a Pilates move called the Swan as I managed to keep the pressure on the red button with the hand holding the matchbox, strike the match with the other hand, fit it into the pliers, and stick it inside the heater, in the general direction of the pilot light, though I couldn’t actually see where the pilot light was. I repeated this exercise about six times without success, then gave up and went and got T.
“Didja press down on the red button?” he asked.
“Oh, DOWN.” I looked back at my notes, and that is exactly what it said, but for some reason I had been pulling up on the red button. I must have primed it, though, because T. had the pilot lit almost instantly. “I don’t know how hot you want it,” he said, turning the temperature dial. There was a whoosh as the fire ran around the ring, and I was in business.
I bought T. a six-pack of Budweiser, and went down to the beach. You can do a lot with cold running water—drink it, clean with it, boil it and kill ants with it—but there is nothing like a hot shower after your first dip in the Atlantic Ocean on Memorial Day Weekend.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Rite of Passage
I have always made fun of people who clean for the cleaning lady, but yesterday morning there I was. A friend had advised, “Go around in front of her, picking things up. The idea is to have her clean actual surfaces.” I started in the kitchen, doing the dishes and trying to find places to put things away. My apartment is like a Rubik’s cube: to find a place for one thing, you have to move a whole series of other things. The oven is for storage. Unfortunately, so is the dishwasher, which has never been hooked up, because the building's plumbing will not support it. Did I mention that it's a galley kitchen?
She arrived early, before 8 A.M. She's Polish. When she came in, she changed into bedroom slippers. She made two requests: small rags, which I provided, and, when she saw how low I was on cleanser, Soft Scrub, which I ran to the store and bought. She started in the kitchen (my instincts were good), then tackled the bathroom, the bedroom and the hallway, and finally the living room. Meanwhile, I did the laundry, put away clothes, cleared the desk, and paid my car-insurance bill (it went up). She charged me a hundred dollars for this one time. If I asked her to come regularly—say, once every two weeks—it would be seventy dollars (eighty with laundry). I didn’t even ask if she does windows.
She cleaned with incredible enthusiasm, finishing in three hours, and vacuuming twice. I paid her willingly, thanked her and praised her effusively. I said it would have taken me all weekend, because I’d have dragged around—I am an extremely reluctant housecleaner. “Is my profession,” she said proudly.
I thought I would feel guilty for having a cleaning lady. My mother didn’t have a cleaning lady until she was in her seventies. My grandmother WAS a cleaning lady. I looked around after my new Polish cleaning lady had left: O.K., she’d pitched my spare bottle of dishwashing detergent (what the British call “washing-up liquid”; I love that); I kept a small amount of diluted detergent in it for rinsing my eyeglasses (a household tip, ladies). And she all but ruined the cat-dancers—those wire things with sprigs of cardboard on the ends that the cats chase for exercise—by bending them severely, rather than coiling them gently, to get them out of the way (they’re hell on vacuum cleaners). And I believe she cleaned my bong, which was totally unnecessary. But I felt the opposite of guilt: a burden had been lifted from me—everything was clean.
She arrived early, before 8 A.M. She's Polish. When she came in, she changed into bedroom slippers. She made two requests: small rags, which I provided, and, when she saw how low I was on cleanser, Soft Scrub, which I ran to the store and bought. She started in the kitchen (my instincts were good), then tackled the bathroom, the bedroom and the hallway, and finally the living room. Meanwhile, I did the laundry, put away clothes, cleared the desk, and paid my car-insurance bill (it went up). She charged me a hundred dollars for this one time. If I asked her to come regularly—say, once every two weeks—it would be seventy dollars (eighty with laundry). I didn’t even ask if she does windows.
She cleaned with incredible enthusiasm, finishing in three hours, and vacuuming twice. I paid her willingly, thanked her and praised her effusively. I said it would have taken me all weekend, because I’d have dragged around—I am an extremely reluctant housecleaner. “Is my profession,” she said proudly.
I thought I would feel guilty for having a cleaning lady. My mother didn’t have a cleaning lady until she was in her seventies. My grandmother WAS a cleaning lady. I looked around after my new Polish cleaning lady had left: O.K., she’d pitched my spare bottle of dishwashing detergent (what the British call “washing-up liquid”; I love that); I kept a small amount of diluted detergent in it for rinsing my eyeglasses (a household tip, ladies). And she all but ruined the cat-dancers—those wire things with sprigs of cardboard on the ends that the cats chase for exercise—by bending them severely, rather than coiling them gently, to get them out of the way (they’re hell on vacuum cleaners). And I believe she cleaned my bong, which was totally unnecessary. But I felt the opposite of guilt: a burden had been lifted from me—everything was clean.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Sweet Spot
I found a spot on my usual parking block last Sunday, and sat in it for a half hour on Monday morning, in a completely civilized, non-anxiety-provoking alternate-side-parking session: the sweeper came at 7:45; the guy in back of me made room for me, and I made room for the woman in front of me. Because alternate-side is suspended on Wednesday and Thursday for Shavuot and on Monday for Memorial Day, I would be good till the end of the month, if I weren’t planning on observing Memorial Day in the time-honored fashion, by getting out of town.
Shavuot turns out to be interesting. On a Web site called Judaism 101, I learned that this Jewish holiday, called the Feast of the Weeks, is celebrated seven weeks after Passover (vaguely corresponding with Pentecost, which falls fifty days after Easter, but has nothing to do with it, nothing at all, and is not on the Alternate Side Parking Calendar, so just forget about it). It commemorates the giving of the Torah to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai. (One Web site features a still of Charlton Heston as Moses, receiving the Ten Commandments.) The Israelites overslept that day for their date with G-d, and so to make up for it, it is traditional to stay up all night the night before, reading the Torah. Shavuot is also a harvest festival (barley, first fruits), and one of the readings is the Book of Ruth, which is a lot about barley. Ruth, a convert to Judaism, was the great-grandmother of King David, and Shavuot also happens to be David’s birthday, as well as his death day. (It is the year 5767, by the way.) Finally, in observance of the dietary laws set forth in the Torah (or perhaps as an homage to the land of milk and honey), it is customary on this day to eat a dairy meal, preferably cheesecake, the apotheosis of dairy.
Of all the pastries associated with religious holidays—hot cross buns, jelly doughnuts, zeppole—this cheesecake of Moses is my favorite.
Shavuot turns out to be interesting. On a Web site called Judaism 101, I learned that this Jewish holiday, called the Feast of the Weeks, is celebrated seven weeks after Passover (vaguely corresponding with Pentecost, which falls fifty days after Easter, but has nothing to do with it, nothing at all, and is not on the Alternate Side Parking Calendar, so just forget about it). It commemorates the giving of the Torah to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai. (One Web site features a still of Charlton Heston as Moses, receiving the Ten Commandments.) The Israelites overslept that day for their date with G-d, and so to make up for it, it is traditional to stay up all night the night before, reading the Torah. Shavuot is also a harvest festival (barley, first fruits), and one of the readings is the Book of Ruth, which is a lot about barley. Ruth, a convert to Judaism, was the great-grandmother of King David, and Shavuot also happens to be David’s birthday, as well as his death day. (It is the year 5767, by the way.) Finally, in observance of the dietary laws set forth in the Torah (or perhaps as an homage to the land of milk and honey), it is customary on this day to eat a dairy meal, preferably cheesecake, the apotheosis of dairy.
Of all the pastries associated with religious holidays—hot cross buns, jelly doughnuts, zeppole—this cheesecake of Moses is my favorite.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Scarciofata!
My friend in Campagnano was ideally situated for the artichoke festival. This time, instead of our driving into Rome to find a parking place, the Romans drove to Campagnano and were directed by the police to park outside of town. We walked a couple of hundred yards down the Via Roma, which had been set up for a soapbox derby, to a big field, at the back of which men were stoking fires, made with piles of dried stalks from last year’s vines, preparing beds of glowing embers on enormous grills. It was a little like a county fair, except that the local wine arrived in big plastic tanks on the back of a pickup truck decorated with gorse, or broom, or some yellow-flowering vegetation, and was served free (“vino gratis”), by children. “Rosso o bianco?” they asked eagerly, before turning on the tap at the end of a pipe connected to the vat and filling a plastic cup to the brim.
Campagnano is famous for its artichokes, grown in the Valle del Baccano, and destined mostly for the market in Paris. I had bought two artichokes on my first day: beautiful firm purple-green globes with long, long stems, laid crosswise in a crate, for fifty cents apiece (euro cents). Roy trimmed them and stuffed them with garlic, wild mint, and pepper, and boiled them for fifteen minutes. He used the artichoke water to cook the pasta while he scraped the flesh off the leaves and chopped the stems and the hearts to make a sauce with olive oil, garlic (a clove), and cream: pasta ai carciofi campagnanesi. I used to think there was something magical about white wine with artichokes, but when they’re cooked with garlic and olive oil, instead of dipped in butter and lemon, red wine is fine. We finished up with an amaro from the Abruzzi.
At the scarciofata—which is Campagnano dialect for "artichoke feast," or “scarf carciofi”—the artichokes, trimmed and dressed with oil, garlic, and mint, are grilled in the field. They’re served with bread (3 euros) or with bread and sausage (5 euros). I started with one sausage and two artichokes. The scarciofata would not be so much fun to attend alone, so I will describe the company. Our host was Roy, an American living in Campagnano. First to arrive was Pietro, a Roman visiting from Brazil. Then Paige and Grant, a music teacher from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and an English graphic designer. Then Guido, a Roman who is on Italian radio, with his daughter Carlotta (at an age when her smile reveals gaps of missing teeth) and his friend Gianni and their friend Rosie (a Venetian). And finally Tony, an Irishman who came to Italy to become Pope Patrick I (but something went wrong between him and the Vatican), and his Irish-Italian son Enda, currently of Toronto. It rained on and off, and we lifted up our picnic table and squeezed it in between two others under a tarp. Smoke billowed from the grills, where men used pairs of special pointed sticks to set the artichokes in the embers and pluck them out when they were done. The two local rival bands played (one Communist, one Catholic), and there were majorettes and rock bands and other regional entertainments: dancers; huge hoops and a boat powered by men pumping pedals; cymbals and wooden clappers on the ends of gigantic, garishly painted upright wooden tongs; clowns in inflatable suits toppling into the crowd, like those punching bags that you can’t knock over. I got back in line for three more artichokes. I ate one, gave one to Guido, and took the last one home. (I ate it later, cold, with a glass of Cynar, the artichoke aperitif. The outermost leaves were caramelized.) “I like artichokes,” I said, digging the choke out to get to the heart. “We noticed,” Guido said.
When it was over, when the last of Roy’s guests had hiked to their cars and gone back to Rome or on to Umbria or over to Lake Bracciano, I went out for a look around the town as it disassembled itself on a Sunday night. There were still a few artichokes on the grills at the picnic grounds; a man plucked one out, brushed the burnt leaves off, and sucked the heart out from the bottom. Farther into town, someone was loading crates of artichokes into a truck. “How much?” I asked, holding out a five-euro bill. I went back to Roy’s with a crate of two dozen artichokes on my shoulder.
We did our best to eat all those artichokes, Roy stewing them up with garlic and breadcrumbs. In the end, I was forced to trim some to fit a size-8 shoe, bag them in plastic, and smuggle them in my luggage to England (where they were eaten California style, with sparkling white wine). We ate out a few times in Campagnano. Once I had risotto ai carciofi, and on my last night, at a restaurant called Benigni (it has prosecco on tap: the Italians have some really good ideas), I had ravioli ai carciofi, which was sublime, the platonic ideal of an artichoke-and-pasta dish. I learned to rotate my right hand in small clockwise circles to indicate pleasure beyond belief. I was wearing what I think of as my artichoke outfit: brown pants and a loose mint-green shirt with splashes of red wine.
Is there such a thing as artichoke poisoning? It seemed to me, on the plane home, when I licked my lips that I had something in my system, strong as an antibiotic. I was pickled with red wine and artichokes.
(With thanks to Mr. Zimmerman.)
Thursday, May 17, 2007
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.
Friday, May 11, 2007
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.
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.
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