“Rome is a place, where everybody who has a mind of his own must go, sooner or later. Whether for good or evil, it is the Grand Despot among cities.”
Charles Dickens

I had a handful of days to explore a relatively tiny area of the Eternal City before beginning the writing and walking journey with Joanne Fedler and 12 other women.

Roma, “the city of visible history,” [George Eliot] is enormous, grizzled and glorious. It wouldn’t be my wholly favourite city in Italy – that privilege lies with the smaller and more walkable city of Firenze, with Bologna close on its heels, and for other reasons that I’ll describe while I follow the ghost of myself through the journey. The soul and presence of Roma is something that artists, poets and film directors have attempted to capture, and it always slips just out of reach of human peripheral vision.

My journey began back in the days where smartphones weren’t quite yet that smart, and I brought along my first generation iPad – the one without a camera – opting also to take a Motorola flip phone loaded with an Italian SIM card, and left my HTC phone in Australia. The Canon camera accompanying me on the trip was the largest non-SLR digital of the time; it was heavy and hollered “tourist!” when worn round my neck, but I knew I’d be reeling in the snapshots like fury and it took far better photos than the HTC.

So, it was just as well I left it in my room…

As an aside, my husband and I moved into our new home last month, and the unpacking and flat-pack assemblage continues. But in one of my boxes that I hadn’t opened since I came back from Italy in 2023 I found the catalogue for the 2012 tour. The photo on the front is of Via della Ripa in Santa Fiora, a street I walked almost every day for 11 years.

I’ve posted two entries today from the Ali in Italia blog below. The first is from the day I forgot to take my camera with me while exploring Rome and just had to “be” in the moment, and the second are first impressions of Pitigliano, a fabled Etruscan town built into soft tuffaceous rock, layered in history from the Etruscan caves through to medieval bell towers and arches. Russet stone on a mesa presiding over scrub and river and valley, and the carved winding Etruscan trails of the Vie Cave.

I smell that forest floor still.

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Roma, Secondo Giorno

First Published 4 June, 2012

I thought it a grand idea to leave my camera at the hotel today, in the safe…where it was safe. Unfortunately, that is usually the day you see everything worth photographing.
Today was one of those days.
Any of the days is one of those days.
It’s Roma.

Four images you don’t get to see but will have to take my word for:

An art installation at the MACRO in which video images of blinking eyes lit in various colours are projected onto balls of foam. I want one.

Graffiti in Italian on a sun-splintered door that would be older than my grandmother (the graffiti and the door).

Five women who were, moments before, walking and buzzing with talk, suddenly becoming wordless with delight at the first mouthful of pizza in Italy.

A fine flock of Carabinieri looking svelte and fetching in their butt-hugging Giorgio Armani uniforms.

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Roma to Pitigliano

First Published 7 June 2012

I’ve been without Wifi and have lost track of time. I’ve enjoyed living slowly, meal to meal, over the last few days. Those days could have been weeks, in part.

I have met a group of wonderful women and I am surprised by the different dynamic living with a group of women presents, as opposed to going on holiday as couples or in a mixed group.

And yet for all the slow, the days have motored by and, now and then, I feel a desperate sense of trying to hang on to ‘now’, to force the day into a slower pace – the irony of that is, being on a writing and walking journey, the time moves at double speed.

So, Pitigliano. My introduction to Toscana.

What can I say?
‘Took my breath away’ is a cliché, but you’ll know what I mean if you’ve visited Pitigliano. Instead, I give you this, a snippet of a larger piece I wrote as the town was waking up on Tuesday morning:

“The sun angles in on the morning on this side of the town. Below, a severe ravine softened by a forest of owls and foxes, a weir surrounded by greens I thought impossible. The colours of champagne bottles, midsummer vine leaves, the eyes of cats.
Deep greens, holy greens, haunted greens. These greens hide in plain view and have seen more than will tell. The stone that speaks in its sleep will tell you more than the shrewd city of forest greens.
Swallows and crows dart and drop and fling their flocks sideways, in and out of wide smears of shade. One side of the ravine won’t greet the sun for several hours yet and I imagine in these places the cool of moss and freshets of night air bubbling from loam…“

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