In August 1968 my father ferried me from Washington to New York and deposited me on a nonstop Pan Am flight to Rome where I would visit a woman I had not seen in two years: my mother. My parents had become estranged in 1966, and I had sided with my father in a marital dispute I struggled to understand. My mother had written me letters and postcards I largely ignored, but now I was on my way to “her” city, Rome, a place I had passed through many times but did not know well. That would change dramatically during my two-week stay, primarily because my mother, like many Romans of that era, took long and sleepy breaks in the hot afternoon, giving me ample time to mark up street maps and explore.
So far, 1968 had been a fearsome year. There had been intense left-wing street protests in Paris, and Soviet Russia had invaded its satellite state, Czechoslovakia, to quell anti-communist uprisings. In my own America, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in quick succession.
But I was fifteen, and when I arrived in Rome, this turmoil was irrelevant. I had never traveled alone, and I felt suddenly as if the city and world were mine and mine alone.
What I remember most about my long-ago sojourn were the walks I took alone by day and the motorcycle rides I got at night, the latter thanks to Roberto, the son of a friend of my mother’s who at eighteen already owned what I saw as a machine from another planet, a sleek and powerful Moto Guzzi, at the time the most coveted motorcycle brand in the world.
The walks began at my mother’s apartment, in the upscale Parioli neighborhood, and took me across the Villa Borghese to the Spanish Steps.
Even the Sistine Chapel was darkened and peeling, testimony to centuries, not decades, of age. I loved it. Far more than I would later love the more sedate Rome refurbished beginning in the late 1980s.
Rome was ruled by cars, far fewer than today, but nonetheless they were the dervishes that made the center of the city tick. Walls were dark with car exhaust. Cars whirled around areas now reserved for pedestrians, including the very area beneath the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, immense Piazza del Popolo, the Corso — all since converted into walkways. Rome was dirty, filthy, raw. Even the Sistine Chapel was darkened and peeling, testimony to centuries, not decades, of age. I loved it. Far more than I would later love the more sedate Rome refurbished beginning in the late 1980s, just before Italy hosted the World Cup in 1990.
The city was awash in its own detritus, a hallmark, it seemed to me, of a city that had lived long enough to accumulate scabs of all kinds. I mostly walked backstreets and stared at cars, which had insurance labels affixed to their inner windshields. These listed the make and the potency of the engine. I came to love the Fiat 2399, rare, and the even-rarer Alfa Romeos. Most cars were still tiny, Fiat 500s and 600s, and Vespas were also abundant.
The people were unlike any I had ever seen, the men sleek in perfect jackets, the women natty and aware they, and their appearance, were central to the overall landscape.
The languid, debauched Rome portrayed in novels and more recently memoirs was a stranger to me, as was Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” version. I saw no women in fountains and met no disenchanted and world-weary men. Then again, what fifteen-year-old senses adult ennui?
In the late afternoon, after my copious walks, I would return home where my mother ushered me to a local bar, the Cigno, or Swan, where she and her friend would spend the very late afternoon and evenings chatting and smoking, speaking about nothing consequential to me, though the loathing of communism was shared. America was a dream country demanding emulation, and, sadly, that cultural copy-catting would soon come to pass. Although not on this trip or the next, thankfully. Several decades passed before the first McDonald’s and its fast-everything ilk.
We dined often at a place called Passetto, near Piazza Navona, where instead of indulging in gelato I drank whole bottles of the mineral water Fiuggi, leading my mother to call me pesce. It was an apt-enough term as mother and son were busy trying to negotiate a truce, speaking as little as possible of my father. The truce would take another decade to reach fruition, each move made slowly in a dance inimical to today’s instant culture of phones and tell-alls. Consider that when I left for home, it was a true departure: There was nothing much instant about that era, and I would not see my mother again for three years. In that ancient time an overseas call could cost hundreds of dollars, then a prohibitive sum.
Roberto did one thing and one thing only, for which I will always remember him. He plopped me behind him, and we set off on high-speed runs through the ash-dark city.
After my mineral-water dinners came Roberto time. He would fetch me wherever I was, often from the side street beside the restaurant, where I went to avoid being seen by my mother’s judgmental entourage.
Roberto did one thing and one thing only, for which I will always remember him. He plopped me behind him, and we set off on high-speed runs through the ash-dark city. He spoke little, since his English was poor and my Italian broken. He’d take me to strange places and point, either at things or people. He rushed along the shoreline by the Ostia seashore cabanas, cutting deep into the Mediterranean air. He’d speed through woebegone streets lined with prostitutes, whose trade, as a naïve boy, I struggled to comprehend. He’d find churches whose steps he’d learn to navigate, each bump a thrill. In my eyes, he did what could not be done. He was an emissary of all things forbidden, as, to me, was nightlife itself. When we paused to meet his friends in late-night cafes, the air was always thick with smoke, and on one of these nights I smoked my first cigarette, a bootlegged Chesterfield from a stash of in-vogue American brands. Those rides and Roberto did what they were perhaps intended to do, to grow me up a few years in two weeks.
When I left Roberto and his Moto Guzzi, Rome, and my mother with it, I felt changed, somewhat more aware of the variety of the world, and even my father sensed it. “What happened there?” he’d asked.
“Nothing,” I replied with solemn eloquence.
I said this because the trip had in the end not concerned either parent, let alone their marital spat.
It was, perhaps for the first and the last time, all about me. An unfettered version. A version eager to take further steps forward even if the world, at least the world portrayed by the daily news, was ugly as sin.
Rome’s sins, as did St. Peter’s cobblestones illegally raced across, Roberto in charge, showed instead that all was worth living. And that all began in the worst of times, 1968.
