You want to know the best way to do Rome? Don’t try. Rather than knock yourself out traversing a city that, from a map, seems so easy to traverse, the best thing, I have now found, is to light upon a patch you like and stick to that. And if that means you fail to make the Vatican or even glimpse the Tiber this time round, so be it. Rome wasn’t visited in a day.
The patch I’ve lit upon, and from which no extraneous sight or smell is going to entice me a single centimetre, is bounded right and left by the Piazza di Spagna and the Piazza del Popolo, and north and south (though don’t trust me on directions) by the walls of the Borghese Gardens and the fascistically ruined Via di Ripetta. So it’s not exactly what you’d call a byway. Tourists to the left of you, tourists to the right of you, and Romans doing their shopping all around you. But if you tuck in behind the Via del Babuino, on the Via Margutta, you are able to savour the sensation of escape.
In truth, even the Via Margutta, so couth in its expensive dustiness, a near silent village street of discreet antique shops, shaded courtyards and ateliers, is rich in touristical associations, particularly British. The whole area was once known as the English Ghetto, and it was on Margutta itself that Sir Thomas Lawrence chose, in 1821, to found the British Academy of Arts. Think of that: we who today are so conscious of our aesthetic inferiority to the Italians, setting up shop right here. George Eliot lodged here-abouts, and, if I’m not mistaken, Henry James as well. And of course, around the corner, Keats. A writerly and painterly ghetto, which is no doubt part of the reason I like it. Nonetheless, this foreignness appears to have been appropriated into modern Rome as an amenity, lending a rarefied, not to say rural, atmosphere not only to the modern artists’ studios and galleries, but also to the designer shops that line the Via del Babuino and have their rear windows on Via Margutta. This is to be numbered among the foremost charms of staying here — the sense of being both out of time and somewhere else, yet at the same moment in the very heart of contemporary, fashionable Rome.
The Via del Babuino is named after the baboon-like figure of a silenus, once one of the “talking statues” of Rome, around which were plastered lampoons, personal denunciations, abusive epigrams and all the other mouthings of a garrulous city. Still are, though the face of the statue has been clumsily remodelled and the scrawled satires upon Berlusconi, calling him a buffoon, a ne’er-do-well and a podgy robber (or does “porco ladro” mean a stealer of pigs?), read ineffectually in an age of poli- tical disenchantment. But that there should be any continuation of this tradition of statuary invective at all, a mere hop and skip from Giorgio Armani, and on a thoroughfare prettified with ferns in great terracotta pots, like one large garden path, strikes me as wonderful. Not an incongruity but an inclusiveness. As is the vigorous English woman I espy, also a mere stride away, pumping away at the organ of the Anglican Church. The last person to have signed the visitors’ book here is a Jim Carruthers. I wave to the organist, who, it occurs to me, could easily be Jim Carruthers, and am not surprised that she does not wave back. When in Rome, behave as the English do.
AFTER WHICH it is time for cappuccino on the Piazza del Popolo. Whether it’s having to solve the problem of rainwater that explains the extravagant cambers of this exhilaratingly fanned square, I don’t know, but I always prefer an artistic to an engineering explanation. They just love a convexity, the Italians. Thus, anyway, and without breaking sweat, am I arrived from my little hotel in Margutta to one of Rome’s great art churches, the Santa Maria del Popolo, where only a glutton or a fool could complain there are not enough Raphaels, Bramantes, Cara- vaggios, Sebastiano del Piombos and Pinturicchios to justify the entire trip. Because I always enter churches through the wrong doors, thereby rendering my guidebook useless — there isn’t a little chapel on the left! — and because the lights in Italian churches never work, I am an embarrassingly long time admiring a del Piombo that is actually a Raphael. But there’s no mistaking the Caravaggios, all campery and sensationalism, or the lovely Pinturicchio Nativity imagining the birth of Christ as just another quiet day in Eden. A perfect conception for this wedge of Rome, where the past is never lost, but enjoys a sort of perpetual absorption into now.
If the Piazza del Popolo is exciting to reach, it is no less invigorating to leave, on account of the choices you have. Back along Babuino, which never tires, back along the Via del Corso, once the scene of Roman carnival races, and where elderly Jews kidnapped from the ghetto were fed with cake and made to run until they collapsed — bad taste makes me joke to friends that I wouldn’t have minded the cake part — or back via Ripetta where Mussolini mistook architectural bullying for imperial grandeur. I have quickly settled into the tradition of coming by Babuino and leaving by the Corso. No carnival now, but the near permanent passeggiata of the young does almost as well. And the Corso gives you the best access, also, to the crisscross of narrow streets, Via della Croce and Via Condotti intersecting with Via Mario de’Fiori and Via Bocca di Leone — a lovely mouthy jumble of cobblestones and chic, every window a sight for sore eyes, and the question you can’t help asking: how the girls in the highest of high heels navigate the cobbles without sacrificing an iota of poise.
Never go indoors in this part of Rome is my advice. Especially at night. And when you are ready to eat, eat at any outside table you can grab. On my first evening here, friends did persuade me to try Alfredo’s famous fettuccine restaurant (“dove si mangiano le migliori fettucine del mondo”) in the shadows of Mussolini’s ruination of Ripetta, but while it’s true that the fettucine is remarkable — more cream, more butter, more parmigiano per mouthful than you would otherwise eat in a week in Rome, and the pasta disconcertingly alive, like some great white stringy octopus — I am not sure that it merits having to support the banter from the waiters, all of whom wear hairpieces (a side effect of cream and butter?), and all of whom take it as a given that if you are a tourist, you are a moron. Since which time I have religiously avoided eating at any table that isn’t on the cobblestones. Pizza, pasta, prosciutto, it doesn’t matter: it’s the sitting out in the silken night, watching the parade of Armani bags, listening to the click of the heels on cobbles, you’ re here for.
IT SEEMS naff, not to say ghoulish, to make a museum out of Keats’s last lodgings, but I recommend his house on the Spanish Steps. He lived here briefly, too ill to write much beyond a letter — “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence” — and then died, unable to bear another person’s breath, because it came to him “like ice”. It is an affecting place, partly because it is genuinely used for study, and partly because Keats’s own old room, preserved in death, looks out directly on to the Spanish Steps themselves, the scene of so much outlandish life. A wedding party — English, I would say, from the inappropriateness of their dressing to the weather, or to the idea of wedlock, come to that — occupies the steps when I look out. Everyone laughing wildly. Posing for photographs. Or running to drink water from the sunken barge fountain. A young person’s venue, more like Prague than Rome. But then Keats was only a child himself when he died with no lungs left. Outside, the crude cruel life and colour; and at your back the breath that comes like ice.
Hold back a tear here and you don’t deserve to be in Rome. I am so stricken by the sadness of it all that I need to recuperate in Babington’s, the English tearoom on the other side of the steps, where the slender palm trees frame the toffee-pink palaces of the square before it narrows into the shopping streets I have grown to love. Babington’s is preferable to the Caffe Greco, even if it’s no less ersatz. You can sit here more comfortably for longer, lose yourself in the tea menu, among the Imperial Oolongs and the Jasmine Dragons, and feel truly — that’s to say Englishly — foreign, rather than merely metropolitan. Then it’s out, into the dazzling light, and the wedge is yours again, the dusty lane that is Margutta, the lovely terracotta-ed Bab-uino, with its patched-up talking statue, and the beautiful bright young things, untroubled by poesy, clip-clopping on the cobbles.
Travel brief
Getting there: British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies from Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh; from £119. Alitalia (0870 544 8259, www.alitalia.co.uk; Ireland 01 677 5171) flies to Rome from Heathrow and Gatwick (from £111), and Dublin (from €179). Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com; from £40) and EasyJet (0870 600 0000, www.easyjet.com; from £41) fly from Stansted.
Where to stay: the Hassler Villa Medici (00 39-06 699 340, www.hotelhasslerroma.com) is an impossibly luxurious hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps; doubles from £358. Or try the Hotel Mozart (06 3600 1915, www.hotelmozart.com), which has a lovely rooftop terrace; doubles from £154.
Tour operators: British Airways Holidays (0870 443 4439, www.baholidays.co.uk) offers three nights in the five-star Hotel de Russie from £781pp, including BA flights from Heathrow, Birmingham or Manchester. Other three-night packages start at £334pp. Or try Kirker (020 7231 3333, www.kirkerholidays.com), Sovereign (0870 576 8373, www.sovereign.com) or, in Ireland, Citiescapes (01 677 5533, www.citiescapes.ie).
