A Missive from Rome

When in Rome, don't do as I do

This is not your normal newsletter. This is an overly long explanation of why I didn’t publish a newsletter this past week. The fifth anniversary post I promised will have to wait a couple weeks, as next week’s newsletter will focus on New York City Beer Week, which begins next weekend!

Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fa in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, one of the best beer bars I’ve ever visited

I wanted to love Rome.

I really, really did. My ancestral roots are not far from here (about two hours east in Abruzzo), and the fact that it took this long into my life to get to Rome was somewhat embarrassing. After all, it’s a magical city with thousands of years of history, jaw-dropping architecture, and amazing food and drink.

Oh my god, the food and drink. The varied types of pizza — a loose term here used to describe many things that are all equally delicious. The bakeries serving tarts and breads that give Paris a run for its money. The maritozzo con la panna I had every morning at the cafe around the corner from my hotel. The Carbonara, the Cacio e Pepe, the Amatriciana. The late-night trappizino in Trastevere. So many carbs, and every gram of them worth it.

And then the carbs from beer. Just a cavalcade of great Italian beers. Rome doesn’t have a lot of great beer bars, but that just makes the beer adventures here that much more manageable. Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fa is a world-class beer bar with a location that drives volume, meaning there’s always something new on tap on each visit. My first visit included my first Italian-made Italian Grape Ale, my last included some Cantillon. Johnny’s Off License in Campo de Fiori is a bottle shop with an exhaustive list of Italian beers. Vincenzo, who was there on each of my visits, seemed to memorize every one of the 600+ beers in the shop and would suggest beers to me effortlessly. Delirium Cafe, the Roman offshoot of the overblown Belgian outfit, was a great place to people watch at 1am on a Saturday, when groups were chugging beers next to friends playing chess and solo drinkers reading books in quiet corners. Jungle Juice Brewing felt like any other American brewery in a desolate industrial area, but the beers were all dialed-in, particularly their Jellyfish Saison, which paired very well with the mildly funky Gorgonzola on their cheese plate. La Botticella, just off Piazza Navona, is a bar with an American feel that had six excellent Italian craft beers on tap in a venue that was a welcome respite from the madness outside.

Let’s talk about that madness outside. Because Rome is a fucking mess of a city, and it’s all because of an exhausting string of bad decisions in the last hundred years that made it more unpleasant a city than it probably was two thousand years ago. Cars dominate every single inch of this city. Historic piazzas are covered with parked cars. Streets around major tourist destinations are often six to ten lanes wide. For example, the Circus Maximus, an ancient site of chariot-racing that dates back two thousand years, is surrounded on all sides by car sewers that make the enjoyment of such an historically significant place almost impossible. Across the city, the pedestrian environment is, at best, shitty. The sidewalks are not nearly wide enough on major thoroughfares to accommodate the tourists even on a Thursday in February. The side streets lack sidewalks altogether, and while you’d think this would be a great opportunity to pedestrianize streets that are barely wide enough for a single car to pass, Rome simply doesn’t do this in most areas. And in the areas where they have pedestrianized, the sheer number of tourists visiting this city have made it an infuriating walking environment.

“There should be a law banning groups of more than ten tourists,” I said to myself on Sunday as I attempted to steer my way through Central Rome as tour groups, led by their leaders holding those stupid little flags, would block entire streets, oblivious to the fact that other people might want to walk in the opposite direction that they’re headed in the same space. This place makes Times Square look like a quaint rural village. Hustlers abounded, including several who complemented me on my shoes and one who literally grabbed by arm to get my attention before I was able to wrestle it free. Pick-pocketers are a constant threat, and it doesn’t help that the pedestrian walkways are so crowded that you simply cannot avoid bumping into people.

Because of this known threat, I typically don’t leave my hotel when I travel anywhere abroad with more than some cash, an ID, and a single credit card. Which made the reason that I didn’t publish my newsletter last week not nearly as bad as it could’ve been. I was walking back to my hotel on Thursday night after watching the USA-Latvia men’s hockey game, with the intention of getting back to my room and editing last week’s newsletter and hitting publish on it. But I didn’t make it that far. On a quiet street in the generally busy Monti neighborhood, I was jumped by three men on the street. They pushed me to the ground, took my phone (not without a fight — I managed to wrangle the case for my phone away), literally beat the pants off of me to take the one credit card and cash in my pocket, and then ran away when I yelled for help on a block where a hotel with a 24-hour doorman watched this go down. They were not that bright, but they were definitely bold to do it where they did. The doorman couldn’t have been nicer and more helpful, but the police didn’t treat the incident particularly seriously because I wasn’t physically injured, and I returned to my hotel a couple hours later to report my credit card stolen and try to get over the initial trauma of what happened.

I don’t know what I would’ve done differently. I didn’t think I was walking in a particularly dangerous neighborhood, it was not terribly late, and yet my thoughts the next day were dominated by questions like “why didn’t you just call an Uber? You had already walked 20,000 steps on Thursday, why did you think you needed the exercise? Would one fewer beer at the bar have improved your judgement?”

Three days without a phone in a foreign city has been challenging, but also somewhat refreshing. I used a physical map to get around. I thankfully have the ability to plot out a mental map in my head, so when I looked up directions to places once, I could generally navigate without help. My Apple Watch, which coincidentally was stolen off my wrist at a busy pub in Nottingham, England two years ago before it was found a year later and returned by a local who found it on the ground, became my means of communication with the outside world. I had a lot more conversations with strangers. I took in my surroundings in a very different way. I stood at the top of the dome on St. Peter’s Basilica on Friday and stared down on the city that stripped me of my dignity the night before. I wandered aimlessly to find an international book shop and bought a book to read, which helped get my mind off what had happened. I returned to the places I visited before the incident, just to see familiar faces.

My phone is somewhere in the Pigneto neighborhood of Rome now, or at least it was yesterday, when it had its last ping. Coincidentally, it was last seen a block from Birra +, the beer bar that I intended to visit on Saturday night that was recommended by several locals here. But that phone can be replaced, and my replacement credit card has already been shipped and is supposed to arrive on Tuesday.

I’m unfortunately convinced that Italy is cursed for me. Each time I’ve spent any measure of time in this country, I’ve had something bad happen to me. The first time, my luggage was lost for an entire six day trip, arriving back to my hotel 12 hours before I was to return home. The second time, I missed a connection in Milan (a minor inconvenience in comparison). This is my third time here, and I think I’m going to need to be escorted everywhere if I’m ever going to reverse this trend, which I desperately want to. There’s so much more of this country I want to see, and one bad decision in Rome isn’t going to stop me, bad luck be damned.

Cheers,
Chris