Letter from Rome (I)
I suppose in these grim days no news is good news and mine is not particularly noteworthy. In general, I’ve been feeling fine, most of the aches and pains of the autumn have seemed to moderate and my foot is healing quite nicely. I’m able to tromp across the cobblestones for a fair long distance without agony and I’m guardedly optimistic that Mrs. Lapin’s son will tap dance again.
As always, we have been busy with work and the usual sundry social adventures. E. has single-handedly determined that we must perforce make up for any and all deficiencies in our cultural diet by a steady stream of visits to galleries, museums and decaying palaces. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen more than 600 paintings and other works of art and hauled ourselves up several majestic ceremonial staircases into the past glories of renaissance and baroque Rome. The weather has been in the main chilly and damp, with a few glorious sunny days that seem to exist as a kind of psychological caesura providing a much needed pause amidst the on-going gloom.
When not being dragged kicking and screaming to yet another cultural highlight, I’ve been reading lots and writing a little. After years of unsuccessfully trying to read Henry James, I seem to have finally found a place where his work is all at once and suddenly accessible. I am at present reading Portrait of a Lady and loving every page, much to my own amazement and also perhaps chagrin. I’ve diss’ed him for so long and in so many settings that it seems almost contra natura to be enjoying his dense impenetrable prose as much as I am.
Now that we are officially poor people, we’ve mainly been eating at home which has the dual excellence of helping to save money and keep the calories within reason. I’ve lost a bit of weight which is good and we’ve not spent a huge amount of money which is better. We visited our regular joints of course and have a few new places to try, but all in all there’s not a lot to report on the cuisine front. Well, that’s not exactly true, on Thursday, we are going to a lecture at the American Academy by Leonard Barkan entitled “Loving the Grape: Food and High Culture in Early Modern Europe” which, given the brilliance of his book Unearthing the Past (which I’m currently reading) ought to be highly entertaining and, yes, perhaps even nutritious. Here’s a link to the book at Amazon: Unearthing the Past
We did have one minor mishap worth noting. On Saturday morning, E. went to the ATM to withdraw some cash and it proceeded to eat his card, informing him to contact our bank immediately. We did so in the afternoon where we learned that his card and pin-number had been skimmed by some machine or another and that over a $1000 had been withdrawn in Bulgaria. Yes, BULGARIA! Happily, they caught the fraud and we were spared the indignity of losing money that we don’t really have, but the lesson of course is beware, beware and be more ware. I’d read about these ATM skimming devices, but it appears that they are now becoming ubiquitous both here and in the States.
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