A personal recollection of 11 September 2001 as seen from Trastevere.

The eleventh of September is the only date I can think of which marks an event known to everyone, everywhere. In Italy il quattro novembre marks the end of the First World War, in Britain and elsewhere it’s the eleventh of November. Victory in Europe at the end of the Second World War is the eighth of May in the UK; Liberation Day in Italy is il venticinque aprile. The United States celebrates independence on the Fourth of July, Italy celebrates the declaration of the Italian Republic il due giugno, and, well, Britain doesn’t do that sort of thing.

The tobacconist on via del Moro. 2022.

But speak of the eleventh of September, or September eleventh, or 9/11, or l’undici settembre, or however one chooses to say it, and everyone knows what you mean. And pretty much everyone old enough at the time remembers where they were.

In September of 2001 I had just turned twenty-four, and was newly, giddily, surprisingly, and profoundly in love. I had been working in a rather ad hoc manner as a guide for nearly three months taking groups of up to twenty-five people around the Vatican Museums and St Peter’s. Things were very different then, you could get away with that and I had no idea that to do so was somewhat illicit. The past is, as they say, another country. In 2001 I was paid 70,000 lire per three hour tour, a bit more if the group was full. At the time that was about £23 (and the tour company’s timetable meant I could only do one a day). In those distant days before online reservations I spent at least three unpaid hours a week standing in queues, distracting folk from the tedium of waiting, usually all at once on a Saturday morning.

Despite my absurd lack of experience or qualification, the company for which I worked had me “training” an American student on the eleventh of September of 2001. As I was winding up with the group in St Peter’s Basilica at about three o’clock she, embarrassed, distanced herself from the group as her phone rang. She silenced it immediately.

As we were walking out of the church together, the tour over, it rang again. It was her mother calling from California, where it was six o’clock in the morning. Understandably worried, she said she’d better answer it and hurried off. As I walked through the colonnade of piazza San Pietro, still unencumbered by metal detectors, I looked at my phone. A clunky thing, even by 2001 standards, its text messages only used capital letters which was a bit like being shouted at all the time. There was a message from my flatmate. Something about a plane crash in New York. It buzzed in my hand, another message about another plane. It was very odd, and I thought it a joke, or perhaps describing a film. Then my phone rang, and my boyfriend (and subsequently husband) asked where I was. Piazza San Pietro, I said. Go home, he urged, right now. Because it really felt that anything might happen, anywhere.

Extraordinary as it is to imagine now, no one around me knew anything had happened. Mobile phones did not work easily between the US and Europe and I walked along Borgo Angelico, passing cafes where tourists ate and chatted cheerfully entirely oblivious to events across the Atlantic. It felt very odd, and very sad, to know something they didn’t. I lived in Trastevere then and as I passed the tobacconist on via del Moro I saw people gathered inside, staring up at a tv screen over the door in silence. I walked in and followed their gaze. Dumbstruck we saw the planes flying into the World Trade Center. Over and over again, on a loop, as the commentators struggled to find something to say.