College Tribune | November 25th 2008
Features
17
Travel
On 365 Evenings in Roma...
Karina Bracken experiences all the highs and lows on offer after a year in the Eternal city Erasmus. The best of times, the worst of times. It’s having the Colosseum as your bus stop. It’s being mistaken for a prostitute while waiting for said night bus at four in the morning. There is something in the air in Rome that heightens every sensation. It was the most alive I’ve ever felt, and simultaneously the most pissed off I’ve ever been. Living there meant that I had to forget the twenty-one years of manners that I had learnt. Crossing the road meant taking your life in your hands, charging past bewildered tourists tottering on the edge of the pavement and suffering windburn from the proximity of the Vespas that whizzed by you. Closing your eyes and praying to the nearby Vatican seemed the popular option. Public transport, in the form of the Metro, has its own particular etiquette. Whether it’s busy or not, whether there are grandmothers or children, they will push. Italians have no shame when it comes to staring. That’s when their eyes aren’t shielded with sunglasses. Even underground. Or at night. The Metro, as did the various piazzas and historical monuments of Rome, presented great opportunities for knacker drinking. There’s no CCTV and besides, for the half the year I was there alcohol consumption wasn’t even against the law. If you were lucky enough, there was always the haunting musical styling of the Romanian gypsies’ and their accordions. The dome of St. Peter’s could be seen from the rooftop of our apartment and we lived ten minutes from the Centro Storico, which housed the Roman Forums, the marvellously
tacky Vittoriano and the Palatinee d. Hill upon which Rome was founded. During one early morning wander I saw a pink sun rise over bridge off angels and St. Peters Square. Onee evening I witnessed the orangee dusk setting over Rome from the city’s highest point. We saw the Sistine chapel emptied of people after being the last to be ushered out. I watched a lightning storm from the top of the Spanish steps and sat drinking espresso at 5am at a deserted Trevi fountain. One needn’t have worried about a culture overload either. Two Erasmus organisations competed for our attention with teneuro all-you-can-drink parties. The cheapest bottle of wine in our local supermarket was €1.59. For Halloween, we made twenty litres of Sangria for under €25. The lure of cheap train fares was hard to resist. In war-torn Naples we stayed in a hostel called Giovanni’s Home. It actually was Giovanni’s home. Thank God Giovanni was a legend and not a sleazy old man, we mused as we drank the complementary bottle of red wine on the candle lit roof ced terrace. The next day we experienced ngs near-death as we traversed the throngs at the famous Christmas markets. Sitting in a quaint pizzeria on the sea front we ate Caprese in the birthplace of the pizza. The adage being true that the dirtier the restaurant in Italy - the better the pizza. In Florence, we drank hot chocolate from a roof terrace with a magnificent view of the duomo. As the rain
The adage is true. The dirtier the restaurant in Italy - the better the pizza.
poured down and the wind overturned our umbrellas, we shunned the minimum forty-five minute wait for all the major attractions and opted instead for marvelling at how dry Zara was. Out of a dozen Irish pubs in Rome, we found the best one -
Sch Scholar’s. It was run by a Wexfor man and showed GAA on ford Sun Sundays. You could get that staple of the Irish student diet – the chic chicken fillet baguette. I spent so mu time and money in Scholar’s, much ev I eventually got a job there. So I cou spend more time and money could ther Among other Irish, Scottish, there. Engl English, American and French who wor worked there were two Swedish girls who spoke better English than did I did. Th Those of us from UCD actually began to forget English words. We spok Italian but not fluently, which spoke mean the stumbling in our native means langu language was probably caused by slight brain damage due to the quantities of cheap alcohol that we consumed sumed. The main reason we were there was, of course, to study. I went throug the History of Art departthrough ment - so I figured that since there was mu of it in Rome, I was learnso much ing by just walking around. Lectures t were two hours long and in Italian. Usuall they were overcrowded, so Usually res we resorted to bringing cushions to t ease the numb ass syndrome when we sat on the floor. Our Erasmus coordina ordinator was an angry woman who ignore us during the year and then ignored shoute at us during the oral exams shouted when we hadn’t read the book that we didn’t know we were supposed to read. Needless to say, my attendance at lectures in the second semester was non-existent. Somehow I passed, due in part to the extra credits that appeared magically on my transcript. God bless Italian bureaucracy. Erasmus is a travel opportunity not to be missed.