June's Monthly Newsletter
Rome is busy at the moment, and approximately as hot as the surface of the sun. But it doesn’t have to be.
With judicious timing at busy spots, and forays into cool churches, less visited archeological sites, and down shady side streets, glorious treasures await without heat and chaos. Even before social distancing was a thing I couldn’t bear crowds, and with a little flexibility they are almost always entirely avoidable everywhere in Rome.
Masks have all but disappeared, and the last couple of years (was it really only a couple?) seem like a curious dream. Last night we had supper with our pals Gillian and Mark at our local, Pigneto Quarantuno, and I was reminded of those first uncertain days of lockdown when the restaurant cleared the fridges and gave us a haul of delicious things. It feels simultaneously as if it were yesterday, and also something that happened a thousand years ago, in a dream, possibly to someone in a novel.
As we sat outside on a torrid Tuesday evening in June, eating fried courgette flowers and drinking cold Ribolla Gialla amid a sea of full tables overflowing with conviviality, those long months of lockdowns and restrictions blended in memory to a single and perpetual August Sunday of deserted streets couldn’t have felt further away.
My photos tell me that it was two years ago that movement was permitted between Italian regions, and that Massimo and I took advantage of the generous offer of a friend’s empty Venetian apartment. I had never before visited Venice in the summer, and the deserted canals, calli, and campi were especially magical and bizarre in a city which is, even in normal circumstances, surely one of the most magical and bizarre places on earth.
We went to restaurants that had just reopened and were delighted to see us; the chaps at the enoteca on the campo closest to the apartment cheerily greeted us every time we walked by after the purchase of a single bottle of wine; I gave talks on Zoom beamed from California to Canberra, punctuated by the bells of i Frari; children played football unhampered by crowds; we rode vaporetti empty but for elderly ladies and their shopping, and a handful of suited bank workers and civil servants; I visited the Accademia and saw three other people. It was a strange and unsettling time, but the joyousness of those first forays back into the world were glorious. I feel very fortunate indeed to have seen La Serenissima at her most serene.
Venice is certainly one of the most magical places on earth. I have only ever visited in the winter when the mist adds a sense of mystery to the magic, and when exploring is quite pleasant as the tourist numbers are more than bearable. Your pictures are almost surreal, to see the city deserted in this way is an experience you could never forget.
If I didn't have pictures of my own summer 2020 in Venice (we went for Rendatore that year, the Venetians biggest festival and the one that celebrates the end of a plague) I wouldn't believe a picture like your Rialto one could be real.