Rome – the first trip Dec ’97-Jan ’98

Rome – the first trip

Few destinations seem as romantic and enticing as Rome. Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning, according to the 13th century painter Giotto. We were anticipating everything while expecting nothing as we landed in Rome at the end of December 1997.
We always arrived in Rome at an ungodly hour – usually 6 am on a Sunday. And often after a gruelling journey of up to 40 hours including one or two long, tedious stopovers in airports at odd hours of the night. Airport land is like hospital land, or government department land – timeless with harsh lighting. Rome was the destination of most flights from Perth to Italy before Emirates starting offering flights through Dubai. Even after the long flight which stopped at Phuket, Bangkok and Frankfurt before flying into Rome, we were still thrilled finally to walk out of Rome airport to find the train into the eternal city.
The train from Fiumicino airport in Rome is now called the Leonardo Express but we called it the Kimbo train as it bore a huge advertisement for a brand of coffee on both ends. It had a big fat green engine with a friendly face but very unwelcoming steps – narrow and high. Everyone struggled with suitcases and we, even now, question why they either don’t raise the platform or lower the train. It seems a simple solution. Even when the train carriages were changed for the Giubileo in 2000 the design didn’t change. In 1997 we were travelling light: our cases weighed about 13 kg each so it wasn’t very difficult to get onto the train. As it was winter in Italy we were wearing most of the heavy items – big coats and heavy boots.

Coming out of Termini was a different experience before it was renovated and remodelled for The Great Jubilee in 2000. A Jubilee is a year during which forgiveness and mercy are offered to pilgrims from all over the world – and as a bonus, is a great boon to tourism. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Year-of-Jubilee. McDonald’s is still opposite and is still the first thing you see but there used to be a ragged collection of gypsies outside the shabby and rundown station. They swooped on tourists offering all kinds of services – and possibly hoping to ‘acquire’ something while you weren’t looking. They employed several tactics to distract tourists. A popular and fairly successful one was to walk right towards someone and thrust a “baby” (a bundle of rags) at them and while they were distracted, deftly slip a hand into a coat or bag and take whatever was on top. They did the same with a newspaper or cardboard and slipped a hand underneath into a coat or bag. They were quick. Being forewarned, we avoided them.

Even though we arrived tired and out of sync with local time we were keen to converse with our newly polished language skills. We’d been to Beginners’ Italian at TAFE for a term. It didn’t take long to realise that I could phrase grammatically correct questions but couldn’t understand Italians speaking. A small problem, sure. Rob, on the other hand, has a good ear – as they say in the classics – for languages and can recognise random and useful words. I conjugated verbs and selected vocabulary and delivered my question to a man waiting near us to cross the road in Rome – but was too dazed to shift brain gears to understand the answer. The crucial words were the key to the directions to the hotel Donatello – ‘semafori’ and ‘sinistra’ – traffic lights and left. We found the Donatello with the help of those directions and because we had memorised the small map in the Qantas Hotel catalogue. It’s a bit different today! We outsource that part of our brain now to our phones or the GPS.

We travelled on a budget because we always wanted to stay as long as we could on the money we had saved. It used to be a challenge and sometimes a necessity. In 1997 we travelled on $100 (Aus) or 100,000 lire per day. We had selected the Donatello in Rome with the help of Kirsty, our friend and travel agent at the time. It was featured in the Qantas brochure as a Hot Deal at $45 per night with two stars. Breakfast included! We had vouchers. We had prepaid. We expected them to be waiting for us. When I think back I wonder what I was expecting – perhaps a reception like Singapore or Bali, the only places we’d stayed in a hotel outside Australia. Greeted as welcome and special guests – hi, it’s Lynne and Rob from Australia at last. Wait no more!
We hauled our luggage up a narrow fight of stairs to see a man enclosed in a small reception window. He didn’t speak English. He didn’t have our vouchers. There was no room booked for us. Not only was he not anticipating our arrival, he was not expecting us. I managed to tell him that we had booked – and paid – and wanted our room. In retrospect, check in wouldn’t have been until the afternoon but that was foreign to us at the time – we were naïve travellers.
He called for his assistant – a short (shortened further by her stooping), grey-haired woman with a grim look and dark beady eyes who may, or may not, have been his mother. She shuffled about our room muttering her grievances about the owner. We gathered it was his fault that we had to sleep in what was quite evidently the storeroom. She gathered piles of linen and shoved them into one of the cupboards in a kind of anteroom, making a space for us in the poorly lit room. It was light enough, though, to see the stains on the bed cover and it upset her more when we asked for a clean one. I remembered the phrase – non e´pulita – it’s not clean. She ripped it off, shouted more abuse – not in our specific direction. Suddenly her face was transformed by a sly and apologetic smile. I’m not sure whether it was before or after we gave her 1000 lire (the equivalent of $1) for her trouble. We had made a friend! It was his fault and not ours.

This tiny, gloomy, noisy and not-very-clean room has become the benchmark for rooms to follow. We remember it with affection. Time blurs memories, often leaving a more mellow image – and now we remember the poky winding stairs from the street right past our bedroom with amusement, an almost affectionate nostalgia. To enter the hotel, guests rang a buzzer which sounded like an out of tune foghorn. People came home late –as they do in Italy – and often it was 3 am before everyone was settled in. That’s a good time to get some sleep – before the garbage trucks trundle and scrape, and Vespas are revved up. Silence is a rare thing in Italy: people talk loudly or shout. Drivers use their horns to hurry things up. Vespas needed to be revved loudly to get up the hill.

Since then rooms have been bigger, sometimes smaller. Some cleaner, a few dirtier. Many noisier. The Hotel Donatello is still on the Qantas website – http://www.Qantas.com – and rooms start at $85. It features terraces and rooms with balconies and seems charming. We might revisit.