Happy 2773th Birthday, Rome !

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR ROME, ON YOUR 2773TH BIRTHDAY !

I love you so : you are the city where my grandparents arrived one hundred years ago.

The city of my birth, of my mother’s birth….

my daughter’s birth..

….an endless treasure trove of historical suggestion, of art and archeology and architecture.

A city of deep shadows cast by Renaissance palaces, of capers growing in the Aurelian walls, of hissing espresso machines and rounded cobblestones, of splendid fountains, succulent cooking, of animated, creative, satirical people.

You are a city with a tremendous joy for living.

Of gelato, licked languidly, and all year long.

You are the city my mother knew when goats were still milked in the Trajan’s Forum.

You are the city that tens of thousands of sheep marched through four times a year during the transumanza.

In my childhood memory, you are the city of craftsmen in handmade, pointy newspaper paper hats, hammering away in sleeveless undershirts in the side streets.

You are the city where I learned to walk, then to run. Along your Tiber river I learned to roller skate. (And so did my daughter.)

You are the city of a few knife sharpeners who still work by hand.

The umbrella pines of your Janiculum Hill gave me my first taste of pine nuts.

I first kissed in Trastevere, at the old Cinema Pasquino, where the roof opened up during the interval and the ice cream man came round, with his wares on a box tied around his neck.

I was tear gassed in your Largo Argentina when I was 17, trying to get home during student protests in the 1970s.

You are a palimpset of periods, of colors, of light and of shadows.

You are underground in your necropoli, your catacombs, and your subterranean Roman remains.

And you reach up high in your campanili, your domes, your medieval towers.

You are a city of spogli, Roman reliefs affixed, often randomly, on the courtyard and porch walls of ancient churches.

You are a city of odors : of pizza bianca and of incense when someone pushes a church’s heavy doors and comes in or out.

Of freshly ground coffee, of dog urine baking in the sun, of soffritto of onion and celery and carrot sizzling in the frying pan.

Of jasmine…

Of exhaust.

Of stone dirt, of dry basalt that you stir up with your feet and that settles down again in between volcanic cobblestones.

On the island or by the Tiber, the scent of your green, fabled river is fishy and algal.

You are a city of artichokes, and artichoke lovers.

And of maritozzi, bursting with whipped cream, to accompany a cappuccino.

Today must be so surreal to you as you are left to celebrate your birthday on your own.

Those of us who love you are not on the Campidoglio, which is your living room, designed by Michelangelo, and a testament to your enduring, startling beauty.

We are not there for the concert that is normally your birthday hymn, nor to see (until as happened until quite recently when the city coffers ran dry) the roughly one thousand oil lamps lit like birthday candles set all along the majestic Campidoglio staircase, and in every window, on every wall and ledge on that square. Those lamps glowed from twilight and through the Roman night in your honor.

We are not in Circo Massimo for the lively, ancient Roman historical reneactments that normally take place all day on your birthday, in full costume, including a trench digging ritual which recalls the founding of cities like you followed by offerings thrown into it to encourage the gods’ intervention.

No, we are not there. We are in quarantine, for how long we do not know.

But nevertheless we are all here. We are here.

And when we come out, may we hope that our love for you will translate into concrete action so that never again, as in recent years, may we look at you and see shameful signs of abandonment.

May our respect translate into a civic obligation to guarantee the preservation of your antiquity. May we demand selfless governance whose single goal is the public good.

May we commit ourselves to guaranteeing that your gardens and your trees are our priority, while we systematically rid you of the fossil fueled vehicles that have corroded your marble facades, eroded your Aurelian Walls and poisoned you and all of us who live with you.

Eventually when we come out of our homes, taking our first cautious steps, we will flood back into your squares, your alleys. We will return to the personal sides of you that we each hold most dear.

You are the Grande Bellezza, the Eternal City.

The central question is, may we, the modern Romans, prove ourselves worthy of you ?