That time I accidentally emigrated.
I realised this morning that today is a big anniversary for me, so please excuse the self-indulgent nature of this post. I arrived in Rome on the evening of the last Saturday in January of the year two thousand, which was twenty-three years ago today and I didn’t know a single person in the city. So that’s officially just over half of my life living in Rome which feels like a milestone. Gosh. I had thought I might stay for six months.
I was twenty-two and had graduated six months earlier with a degree in Architectural History from Edinburgh University. It was a different, unphotographed, world: I didn’t own a computer or a mobile phone; there were no low-cost airlines (I came on a one way ticket to save money); I “wasted” time reading decent novels; getting on a plane didn’t involve passing through a metal detector; and British twenty-two year olds could decide, on a whim, to go and work anywhere in the European Union.
I’d like to say I came to Italy exclusively for noble and erudite cultural reasons, but if I’m honest it was largely a yearning for sunshine, exotically crumbling grandeur, and a Vespa. Gauche as it is, I think I thought it would make me seem more interesting. I also came for the same reason I would become a guide: I was painfully shy, and very much didn’t want to be. Doing something exciting and terrifying felt necessary, and so I accidentally emigrated.
As I stepped off the Alitalia flight that January evening, the air hostess’s melodically exotic arrivederci ringing in my ears, I was giddy with excitement and trepidation. I had visited Italy a few times: a school trip to Venice, a few family holidays, a university trip to Rome. I’d also spent a summer in Florence when I was twenty where, in theory, I was learning Italian and where I was, in fact, being twenty over a summer in Florence which was reward in itself.
I’d written my degree dissertation on the buildings in the paintings of Piero della Francesca and thought that if I were to continue with more university I’d probably need to know Italian properly. And so it was that I moved to Rome, despite having left school after years of being radically hopeless at French and entirely convinced that I was physiologically incapable of learning a foreign language. Happily this turned out not to be true.
I found a job in a shonky language school and spent long days of buses and trams and trains to business parks and improbable offices in the unlovely Roman hinterland on dreich winter days clasping Tuttocittà, the Rome A to Z. I was perpetually lost. It wasn’t much fun. After perhaps a year I progressed to a smarter school, and could walk to lessons in the centre of the city. I taught civil servants in the Quirinal and the Senate, and TV producers at Berlusconi’s studios behind an ancient aqueduct on the Caelian Hill.
This, I thought, was more like it. Romans, I discovered, don’t learn English in the summer and so in my second Roman summer, nearly twenty-two years ago, I began giving tours for a budget tour company in quite the most ad hoc manner to rowdy groups largely made up of hungover Australian backpackers. After three months of anxious, nauseous terror, it turned out I was both quite good at talking to people and enjoyed it. In Italy guiding is a licensed profession and I embarked on the Byzantine process of having my British education recognised and qualifying as a Rome guide.
The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly and I shed many tears of frustration—the UK school system is twelve years, the Italian is thirteen; you must translate your twenty-thousand word dissertation, I was told on one occasion (not true, though I would have done it)—and many administrative dead ends. But there were also many helpful people (thank you to the official at the Ministry of the University who I eventually found who knew exactly what was required; thank you to Dr Jim Lawson, my former tutor at Edinburgh, who wrote in elegantly Renaissance Italian to explain how the Scots system worked and fished out all of my exam results; thank you to the commission for the famously tough oral guida turistica exams which were held in public at a hall at the then Province of Rome offices and who extended warm congratulations on my efforts).
My persistence had paid off, and I had a clear idea that now properly qualified I wanted to share the excitement of exploring Rome, and the sense of discovery which comes from following those infinite threads which make up the extraordinary and complex fabric of the city. That is why I started Understanding Rome fourteen years ago. Gradually, and organically, it has become more than I ever hoped it would, and these are just some glimpses of this week’s tours. I see new things in the city every day. Thank you all for reading and for joining me in exploring this relentlessly exciting city!
Absolutely lovely post Agnes & inspiring too. Also that selfie is adorable !
Young yes, but you had nerve.
Great Post.
Congratulations.