I landed at Roma Fiumicino on 1 June, 2012. I realise I didn’t write half about what happened the day I arrived, so exhausted and gobsmacked was I. Most of it has been lost to that time and the exhaustion induced by a long-haul flight.
Some impressions remain.
Wheeling around to land: the flash of the Tiber ribboning toward the coast, stands of stone pines casting out lattice through afternoon fields, clusters of buildings sharpening into view from dun, sand, ochre into the first outlines that sing out, unmistakably, distinctly Mediterranean.

Whatever I’d expected when we disembarked was overlayed by the complete ordinariness of an airport arrivals area. One of the women who was going on the tour, Yvonne, had been on my flight and company during the stopover in Dubai. While we were walking along the corridor, a moustached man in his fifties pushing a jewel-spangled elderly woman in a wheelchair loaded to the gunnels with their luggage rammed the vehicle right into Yvonne’s achilles tendon. He bruised her pretty badly and when she scolded him for not watching where he was going he simply demonstrated the “che me ne frega” flavour of arrogance that I would later get to know as the less-than-sweet opposite of the kindly Italian stereotype.

The driver that my travel agent had arranged to collect me from the airport didn’t show up. For a whole hour Yvonne and I perused the parade of scribbled names on A4 sheets held aloft by lineup of NCC drivers, before declaring at last my name – in whatever version we thought it might have been translated – wasn’t going to be conjured by us doing yet another circuit. We ordered an NCC driver at the counter and negotiated the cost to 20€ for our delivery by minibus to the hotel in the centre of Rome.

The chaos of that first ride along Roman roads: the flicker of light and shade between the pines and buildings; dry summer heat and sweat at my neck; a tobacco box perfume of foreign notes that danced my mind to the home of my immigrant grandparents, and those of their friends; our driver throwing shapes and snarls at the motorini riders flitting like rondine in front of the bus.

Old, old, layered in old.

Once checked in, there were still three hours till dinner, and I crashed onto the hardest, narrowest of mattresses I had (until that moment) ever known. I slept long through my dinner alarm and woke in the wee hours. In the half light, while my tummy growled, I tilted my chin and glanced up the skirts of a crucified Jesus, ruing the fact that many hotels in Rome don’t even have a kettle in the room.

The tour didn’t begin in earnest till June 4. Over the days leading up to it, the writing and walking women met as they trickled in from their lands, keen to explore; expectant, experienced, or (like me) newborns into Italy.

I haven’t enhanced any of the images from my 2012 posts. It’s all old digital tech, the camera Ken Raffe gave me (tech that seemed gloriously and exquisitely new in those days), a camera long since passed on to one of my young ESL students who was showing promise as a keen photographer.

First Impressions of Roma

First published 3 June, 2012

After an inflight purgatory tailor-designed for me (that beingbeing sat next to a continually wriggling sole-travelling child high on cola for 14 hours) I am in Rome and in love with the city. Tourist maps are another matter – more likely my reading of them – but communication is less a barrier than I imagined…so I must have soaked in more of the language than I realised.

Gesticulating, smiling, grinning like an idiot and nodding emphatically all help. A fair attempt at the language is also appreciated, as are manners. And tips.

Here are a few images from today during my hours lost in the streets of the Eternal City.