WHITING: To Rome with love

By way of ItaliaRail, Ryanair and Venice Water Taxi, I was finally in Rome. I sat on my upper bunk in the Sandy Hostel on Via Cavour and made a point of understanding that I was a five-minute walk away from the Coliseum and Il Vittoriano and that gelato could be purchased just around the corner. But having eaten my free coffee and croissant — backpacker breakfasts, it seems, are always the same regardless of location — I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.

European universities give abnormally long spring breaks with the expectation that students will use the time to study before exam weeks. I was based in Paris last year, but as étudiant étranger, faced with close proximity (and extremely cheap flights) to real Italian pasta, Swiss chocolate, Greek baklava et al., I had a different sense of urgency.

Rome was the fourth of seven stops I’d be making on a 10-day backpacking trip. My early flight had been delayed, and the hostel manager was drunk when he signed me in and told me that from 136 Via Cavour it takes about 20 minutes to walk to the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon and about 40 to Vatican City. The subway was out of service, either because it was broken or there was a strike — I can’t remember.

I was exhausted. Yeah … it was Rome, and before Rome it was Milan and Bologna and Venice, and I had been eating great pizza and seeing great artwork and doing all the other great things you do when you are young and in a new country. But one thing I learned on this trip was that it’s very possible to see a whole cosmopolitan city in two days when equipped with a sturdy pair of Converse sneakers, a Let’s Go Europe guide book and an ugly Le Sport Sac messenger bag. Essentially, I’d been on my feet for four days straight.

Also, it was March, and apparently Italian Marches can be pretty cold and rainy. I was traveling with the blue North Face backpack I used to carry books in during high school. I didn’t bring any warm clothes, and I certainly didn’t have enough socks because everywhere we went we were stepping in puddles and nowhere did we have laundry. In Milan, for example, it rained everyday. Our only shelters were the Duomo Cathedral and the Armani bookstore, where we obviously could afford nothing. It rained as much in Rome as in Milan, so I wore my shower shoes on the streets and bought an orange poncho to keep dry.

I don’t mean to say that travels are not the greatest of luxuries, no matter how cold and wet you are on the road. Still, what you see in movies — the accordion players, the happy, pretty people, the lavish meals — is not what you experience when backpacking. Backpacking is not so romantic or comfortable. You wear the same ripped pants everyday until you find a laundromat, and the only thing you have to keep you warm is that military surplus jacket you bought for five euros at the vintage shop next to the falafel joint on Rue des Rosiers. You share rooms with multiple people and alarms go off at the oddest hours. I once shared a bathroom with sixteen others — it only had one toilet … you don’t want to know how it smelled.

But there is some romance in backpacking, what with it’s being a sort of halcyon of college years, when you’re body can handle getting just a few hours of sleep, and you can walk around the streets without showering for a few days, and rejoice in the fact that in Europe, you don’t tip waiters. There’s something magical about finding cheap gnocchi, or a café that serves a particularly awesome Nescafé Frappé or other little Italian idiosyncrasies like Pocket Coffee, these little chocolate capsules with a shot of “espresso” inside of them. True, you forget about the greatness of the Romans because all you can see are stumps of columns and only drawings of the real thing. And you can’t afford chicken on your pasta dish, and the line to St. Peter’s Basilica is long, and you often get lost to trying to find a recommended underground pastry shop, but the worth of the journey is indisputable after you’ve seen the inside of Michelangelo’s architectural masterpiece and you’ve tasted a zeppola or Torta Caprese. You can’t help but feel that despite your minor discomforts (boo hoo, you study abroad student!), what they say is true — travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer, no matter now much you pay.

It becomes a Roman Holiday when you’re walking back to your hostel late at night because you’re too poor to take a cab, and you wouldn’t be able to explain to a cab driver where you’re trying to go anyway. The Tiber River is lit golden by the yellow streetlights, and you smell pizza in all the alleyways. The only way you know how to get home is to ask where the Coliseum is because you’ve walked by it one too many times on your way to and from 136 Via Cavour, forgetting that you’re walking by the first football stadium, as it were, of modern civilization. The ruins are lit up at night, and you try to imagine Emperor Titus sitting against one of the pillars when he couldn’t sleep. I didn’t fall in love with Rome until after I’d left it. While there I was distracted by my lack of towels and exhaustion so much that only in hindsight do I appreciate how amazing it was.

Anne Whiting is senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at aew@bu.edu.