Vespa Tunes XXIV: Nostalgia Canaglia, Romina Power & Al Bano, 1986
Twenty-five years ago I moved into a flat-share on via della Pelliccia in Trastevere. My rather grand room cost nine hundred thousand lire a month, payable in cash to the landlord who lived upstairs. At the time it seemed a small fortune, about three hundred pounds. I was twenty-two and paid for it (and not much else) by working long days traipsing across the Roman hinterland and beyond teaching English in the sort of bleak corporate setting of which I had erroneously imagined Italy to be free. I took a lot of public transport and was often lost.
The work part mostly wasn’t much fun, but it was an exciting time: a giddy combination of exoticism (after all even those unlovely industrial parks had a frisson of Romanness) and being on the cusp of adulthood.
When I didn’t have to be out of the house at dawn, I sometimes took a swift espresso at the Bar del Cinque. Occasionally an American lady who lived on the same road would be at the bar too and say hello, demonstrating a generous interest in the experiences of fresh-faced newcomers. I didn’t know it at the time but she was Romina Power, a superstar in Italy, named for the city where her parents, swashbuckling leading man Tyrone Power and the proto-Bond girl Linda Christian, had fallen in love.
I also was then entirely ignorant of what all of Italy knew, that she had recently separated from her husband and singing partner, Al Bano, following the never-resolved disappearance of their daughter in New Orleans in the nineties; a tragedy beyond imagining.
Twenty-four years ago last month, a year and a bit after I first took my coffee at the Bar del Cinque, in the middle of June of two thousand and one, I gave my first unsupervised tour. It was a dusty, hot late Sunday afternoon. The city was deserted. All but a few Laziali were at the Stadio Olimpico or in front of a television, willing AS Roma on to victory in the last game of the season which saw them win the scudetto, the Italian Premier League.
I remember the date well for many reasons, but most importantly because the day before I had met Massimo at a mutual friend’s birthday party. The sixteenth of June; Bloomsday. Three years and eight days later we were married. So many versions of me have walked past the Bar del Cinque in the last quarter of a century. So many coffees melt into a positively Joycean temporal hologram eddying around that single cobbled street corner.
Life is mutable and complicated—alternately beautiful and painful; simultaneously glorious and awful—and over the last couple of years Massimo and I have been in the process of no longer being married, because sometimes things don’t last forever. Not to mention him would, however, be a massive omission in recalling that heady midsummer weekend when, aged twenty-three, I began to fall in love for the first time—much to my delighted surprise—and started what I thought was a summer job and would become my career.
As my tour of the Jewish Quarter and Trastevere began to draw to a close we grazed the Bar del Cinque—una strada, un’amico, un bar— and as my group and I crossed the Ponte Sisto and the somnolent city erupted in a cacophony of horns as cars and scooters waving flags appeared from nowhere to zoom along the Lungotevere. Scooter riders jammed their accelerators to defy death (I hope) and emulate Vincenzo Montella’s aeroplanino goal celebration and Rome didn’t sleep for days.
That hot weekend in the prelapsarian June of two thousand and one—the twenty-first century’s own Long Edwardian Summer—just before the world changed forever in early September, will always spark a twinge of nostalgia so acute I can taste it; the intense joy that lasted for so long, combined with retrospective melancholy and optimism for the future in equal measure. That weekend heralded the beginning of years of both personal and professional riches for which I will always be intensely grateful. If I could go back to the weekend when Roma won the scudetto I don’t think I’d change a single thing; at the time it was, quite simply, perfect. Even if the memory leaves a slight nodo in gola.
