Thoughts from Rome

In this installment, I'm going to depart from my usual thematic essays to write a little about my experience so far at the American Academy in Rome, where I've been for the past three weeks.

Here's the basic set-up. For one year, I'm one of 30 fellows who've been awarded a place to live as well as an office in which to work, two meals a day six days a week, and money for basic expenses. We live together in a historic villa where there's a constant round of lectures and organized trips, as well as support for the research most of us are engaged in. The other fellows come from a range of backgrounds. They're art historians, architects, museum directors, landscape architects, painters, and more. Everyone is brilliant, which is not an overstatement, everyone pursuing provocative individual projects involving questions like the role of the family in the development of organized religion or the history of madness.

And during the course of this year I'm expected to... basically, to do whatever I want. A free year in which to read, write, wander, anything, in a beautiful romantic historic city--you're probably hating me by now.

So far it's too soon for me to speak conclusively about my impressions of Rome, but what the hell, I'll give a few anyway. I've been most surprised by this city's small town feel. It's more like a collection of small villages shoelaced together than a single city with a pulsing, unifying center. Also, there's a strange way in which it feels strangely like a backwater town. Milan is the capital of business, Turin and Naples centers of contemporary culture, Florence, the capital of the Renaissance, Venice the capital of romance. Rome is a bit like Washington DC, the political and symbolic historic capital of the country, a beautiful city constantly inundated with tourists, and yet it's strangely calm and quiet.

People fall in love with this city, its slow pace, its historic alleys, its comfortable cosmpolitan atmosphere. I haven't fallen in love quite yet, but I think that's primarily because I've found that the English language, my primary tool for ordering the world, doesn't work here. The buzz of news, gossip, print, advertising, and TV I've become so used to surrounding myself with in New York is suddenly gone. And in its place is a babel of sounds that occasionally and entirely without warning come jarringly in and our of focus. "hand" "table" "Don't be ridiculous!" "Let's go inside this way" "By yourself." Words and phrases popping in and out, but to connect them, nothing. Sometimes I'll get a run of sentences that seem tantalizingly within my grasp, and then an unknown word creeps in and I'm lost again.

This is good for me. But not easy.

The other thing I find most difficult here is feeling at peace with my own solitude. Rome is not a city of solo acts. Everyone I pass seems to be walking with someone else, especially the tourists, but also the locals walking hand in hand with their lovers or children or even their friends. It's become shocking to me to see someone walking by him or herself. But then I catch a glimpse of myself, alone, in a shop window, and that lone wolf is me. And it makes me wonder, so who am I?