I spent three weeks in Rome over New Years Eve 2000 visiting old college friends who had moved there in January 1999. It ended up being a Babel summit meeting or reunion of sorts. These are the notes I took:

Yves, his wife Sienna and their son Marcel had moved to Rome in January 1999. A week before I arrived (on the 27th of December), Andrew arrived in Rome from Vienna to spend the holidays with Yves and Sienna. Andrew quit his job temping at a law firm in downtown Seattle in September and flew to Vladivostock with his father and they then took the Trans Siberian to Moscow and then after his father flew home a month later, Andrew kept traveling on through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Warsaw, Budapest and Vienna before getting to Rome for the holidays. He met a woman in Moscow through a Russian personals site before he left Seattle and ended up getting engaged to her when he was in Moscow. The wedding will be sometime this year in Moscow and after they honeymoon in Spain she’ll accompany him to Seattle.

A few days after I arrived in Rome, Bryan joined us after spending a few months in Galway and a couple of weeks in Normandy.

A couple of weeks after New Years Andrew and Bryan rented a car and drove over to the Adriatic coast of Italy before taking a ferry to Croatia and then on to Bosnia and Prague.

Yves’s wife Sienna Reid is a portrait painter (she’s been working with nudes for years now and is going to have her first gallery show in Rome in the spring. She’s been hanging out in Rome with an art critic for the New York Times. I’ve had a profile/interview and online gallery walk of quite a few of her nudes on the Babel site for over a year now.), and their 8 year old son Marcel(lo) who is already correcting his parents Italian and who was also born on Valentines Day, like me.

Yves is now a tech writer for the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization which is a branch of the United Nations) and plays in a band called The Station Masters (Capo Stazione) with three other Romans; the 21 year old early Genesis fan Gionluca on bass; 30 year old Lou Reed aficionado Alessandro on drums; and 33 year old Bruno on lead guitar and harmonica who is totally blazing and a huge Sonic Youth fan.

I got to watch them rehearse three times in Gionlucas folks garage since they had no gigs while I was there, but they were just interviewed on Italian TV last week. They also have some MP3s out. They’re incredible, they drift in and out of perfection all the time. Just at that point where they’ve been playing long enough so they now know what everyone can do. One of the nights I watched them practice was right after spending the day at St. Peter’s basilica and the Vatican museums. I thought that was a nice way to encompass the past, the present and the future all in one day.

For New Years Eve itself Yves and Sienna had a dinner party in their flat where there were 12 of us (Yves, Sienna, Elizabeth, Andrew, Bryan, Anny, Bruno, Gionluca, Alessandro, Marizia, Raniero and I), but we were enjoying ourselves so much (blasting Prince’s 1999 with Bruno cavorting around with Sienna’s blue fun fur and Yves wrapping a red feather boa around his neck) that we didn’t actually leave the apartment until about 11:30! We were going to head over to Piazza Venezia, which is the Roman equivalent of Times Square which usually is a nice long walk. So we walked to the Colosseum and got there in about ten minutes and then joined the flow of other party revelers and jogged and then ended up running to Piazza Venezia and got to the square itself and finally saw the readerboard countdown right when it was at forty seconds to midnight! Phew! Just by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins.

It was INSANE, THOUSANDS of people, EVERYONE with a champagne bottle. Fireworks going off everywhere. According to some friends of friends of Bruno’s there was a party across the river, towards the Vatican, so we all held hands and arms to create a serpentine so we could get across the square without losing anyone, and if anyone did get lost Yves had on the red feather boa still which ended up being the navigational stroke of genius of the night.

After we managed to trample across the piazza with broken bottles EVERYWHERE we stopped by a carousel that played The Blue Danube over and over and over and climbed aboard for a few spins while Bruno’s friends went to meet up with some other friends of theirs who returned a half an hour later and we continued our trek to the party.

At this point Elizabeth was starting to silently fume because no one had told her that we were going to be walking so far that night. Unfortunately Elizabeth (who looks not unlike Bettie Page) was wearing a very elegant Chinese dress with the absolute last shoes you would want to be wearing if you were going to be walking clear across Rome on New Years Eve. It got to be so bad that she ended up being practically held up by Yves and I on the way to the party. By the time we finally did get to the party she had to stop and sit down on the pavement in front of the building for about fifteen minutes just to keep her composure.

We finally went up the few flights into the party and the apartment was beautiful. Six or seven bedrooms, a gigantic library with books all the way from the floor to the sixteen foot high ceilings, gorgeous furniture and a DJ keeping the party lively with a couple of cd walkmen hooked up to the living room sound system. As you danced you could even look out of one of the open windows and see the cupola of St. Peters basilica not more than half a mile away. We danced and ate and drank until dawn when suddenly there appeared a man playing the Irish bagpipes and a young woman playing a bodhrain accompanying him as she sang what Maria Lamkin explained to me weeks later is an old Roman tradition, when the gypsies would come into town and tell the tales of yore.

At six in the morning we all decided that it was about time to go home so we bid farewell to the host, Massimo, who, like Sienna, is also a painter, so we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and headed out into the first day of the new century.

No one really knows why we left at six rather than waiting until seven which is when the subway would have been running again, but off we hoofed it anyway and it didn’t take too long belong Elizabeth was sore again because of her wrong shoes, so Yves and I took turns holding her up as we all walked back to San Quintino. We got a good deal of the way home before Elizabeth just couldn’t take it anymore, so the rest of them walked back and I waited with Elizabeth for three quarters of an hour until Yves returned with the motorino, still with the red feather boa around his neck!

When Yves showed up we all three managed to perch ourselves on his Vespa and slowly but surely got back into traffic, and we were oh so close to home when who should come up behind us blowing their horn but the Carabinieri, the military police. So Yves pulls over to the side off the road and one of the officers asks him “Where are you from?”

Yves replies: “America.”

The carabinieri asks “Her?”

Again, Yves said “America.”

“Him?”

“America.”

The carabinieri looks down and says “I know what happens in America and if you tried to get away with this in America they would mess you up. What do you think this is? That you can do anything because its the new millennium? If one of you get off the motorino right now nothing will happen to you.”

“Hey Malcs, get off.”

“And if he gets back on up the road a ways then you all will be in trouble. Got that?”

So as Yves and Elizabeth started off home, I did too, but on foot. I didn’t care, though. It was only a 15 or twenty minute walk and I remembered that I had to get some cigarettes on the way home anyway, and what with all of the night in my system still I sure was feeling fine, especially since it was the first morning of the new century and it was a clear, fresh and sunny morning at that.

I hadn’t walked more than five minutes before who do I see bombing down the other side of the street but Yves, still with the red feather boa on, saying “Malcs, wait right there” while he turned around and came to pick me up.

By the time we got back to his apartment everyone else had gone to bed except for Bruno and Anny, and now Yves and I, so we stayed up another hour or two talking.

New Years 2000 in Rome was my best New Years ever. I even got to walk through the Jubilee holy door at St. Peters. I really didn’t think the Sistine Chapel was that big. And that ceiling is not to be believed. Almost makes you wish that they had a scaffolding set up so you could climb up and get closer to it because its so much farther away than what youre used to in all of the art books. The guards all jump anytime anyone tries to use a flash. But the restoration is absolutely amazing. So clear, so colorful, such visual acuity. Beautiful. (All over Rome there was proof that they must have just taken the scaffoldings off everything. Elizabeth, (Sienna’s 18 year old second cousin from Port Townsend who is staying with them for convenience, especially since 8 year old Marcel(lo) needs a baby sitter sometimes. She also shares Yves birthday of August 2nd), told me that only a couple of weeks before I got there the Trevi Fountain had been covered up. I’ve seen many films that show the Trevi Fountain and there is no way that you can get an idea of just how large and impressive it is until you’re actually there. Its the back end of a large building that is the end of an aqueduct and its magnificent. The horses are gigantic, as are the statues. Such gleaming white, now, too. And the thing is, there are no good camera angles because there’s not much room in front of it because its right by other city blocks, which explains why no matter how hard photographers and film makers have tried, it just doesn’t seem to work.

Getting back to the Vatican Museums though, I must say the Raphael rooms were my favorite. The entire rooms are frescos. The entire rooms. All the way down to the floor molding. Wow. And the colors, again, are just so rich. You could spend years in the Vatican Museums.

As I already knew Id be going back to Rome again I didn’t try to see everything in the mere few weeks I was there. (I also didn’t feel rushed to get out of Rome and go to Florence, Venice, Naples or Sicily because with all that I know about Florence (alone) I could easily spend three full weeks there, and the thought of just spending a couple or a few days in Florence or Venice (on my own, to boot) just didn’t sound very appealing to me. Especially because you can spend forever in Rome (much like London) and not even realize you haven’t left the place.)

I thought about going back again a day or two later to the Vatican but it was just before my last weekend and I didn’t get to go back. Its very strange realizing that Vatican City is only a hundred acres or so and only has a thousand people living there. It makes you turn to the dictionary to actually look up what the definition of country really is. Then, of course, you realize that Mussolini separated Rome from it in 1929 in a Fascistic attempt to dilute the church’s reign over Italy. Its so funny seeing the Swiss Guard in their little courtier uniforms, the same ones they’ve been wearing for 400 years.

I also got to meet two of Babel’s Italian translators when I was there. Maria Lamkin has been sending in bimonthly reports for the last year about what are the upcoming art exhibits all around Italy. She’s also written pieces about what the Italian traditions are for Natale, Capodanno and Befani (Christmas, New Years and Epiphany). Maria came up from Gaeta to visit with us once and Anny Ballardini came down from Bolzano for Capodanno. Anny is responsible for most, if not all, of the Italian translations on the site, including all of the Gallery section. She translated my entire first novel, Estrelica & Vic, into Italian for me last summer, bless her heart, after reading it and falling in love with it. Only took her three months, too. She’s also almost finished translating Yves’ short stories into Italian so he can try to get a publisher in Rome lined up. She’s also managed to get a woman in charge of the Southern Tyrolian Province interested in funding Babel.

I also met a friend of Sienna’s named Ilaria (the Italian version of Hillary) who was having her own gallery show in Rome when I was there and managed to get Sienna introduced to the person who secured her own show. Ilaria is having a gallery show in Frankfurt right now and once she returns I’m going to start getting some of her scans up on Babel.

Suffice it to say that I fell in love with Rome. It happened pretty quickly too. I knew as much when I suddenly felt as if I had no pressure to see as many things as I possibly could in as short a time as possible. I knew I would be going back so I was able to appreciate the city in a completely different way. And what with being able to stay with friends who live there who have been there long enough to have their own Roman friends, I got taken to all sorts of obscure restaurants with great food at amazing prices that are far from the beaten path, as well as some pretty hip clubs and discos none of the tourists would know about. It reminds me of London is so many ways that I think I fell in love with it in the same way that I fell in love with London. There just must be something about cities that are older than the hills that really appeals to me.
The traffic in Italy is not to be believed. I think the penalty for road rage offenders in this country should be to banish them to Rome. The roundabouts in Rome make the ones in London seem polite. Its a free for all. There’s a very complicated system of reading the eyes and gestures of the other drivers and pedestrians. You jockey at red lights like its time for pole position at NASCAR. Its insane.

Well, that’s how the Babel founders ushered in the new century. Andrew just got back to Seattle last week, in fact he called me today and I’m going to be meeting him tomorrow. Bryan came back to Seattle briefly to do his taxes and regroup for a month but he’s back in France now hoping to work on an organic farm for the spring and summer. Yves is, naturally, in Rome still.