The train ran north out of Naples through the middle of the afternoon, and I watched the coast give way to hills, and the hills flatten into the long, golden plain that finally becomes Rome. I had just spent days in a city that took me by the arm the moment I stepped off the platform and refused to let go. I did not know yet that Rome would do the opposite. Rome does not hurry out to greet you. It has met everyone already.
Roma Termini was vast and pale and full of motion, and I came out of it into a heat that sat on the city like a hand laid flat. Taxis. A hundred overlapping conversations. The great bulk of the station at my back. I stood for a moment at the edge of it with my bag over one shoulder, the way you stand when you have finally arrived somewhere you have imagined for years and discover you are not quite ready to begin.
So I walked into it slowly. It felt like the only honest way to arrive in Rome. The streets narrowed and rose, and the noise of the station fell away behind me. The city began to layer itself around me the way it does, one century leaning quietly against the next. Ochre walls softened by time. Green shutters left half open against the afternoon. Cobbles worn smooth by more footsteps than anyone could count. I pulled my small case over the stones, its wheels becoming the only sound in the lane, until somewhere above me a window opened, a voice called across to another window, and then the silence settled back into place as though nothing had disturbed it at all.
The hotel was an old palazzo hidden behind a heavy wooden door, warm stone and a brass plaque polished by generations of passing hands. The cool air inside drifted out to meet me like water. I left my case, climbed to the terrace, and there it was, the view I had carried with me all the way from Naples. The rooftops of Rome fell away in every direction, terracotta and pale gold, broken now and then by a dome, a bell tower, or the dark-green crown of an umbrella pine. Far beyond them all, holding the horizon without asking for attention, rose one great dome I did not need anyone to name. I stayed at the railing longer than I had intended. The city did not perform for me. It simply went on being enormous, patient, and entirely itself, and allowed me to watch.
When the worst of the heat had passed, I wandered back into the streets. On a quiet corner I found one of the little stone fountains the city keeps running for anyone who is thirsty, a curved iron spout spilling a thin ribbon of cold water that has probably never stopped flowing in a lifetime. I cupped my hand beneath it and drank. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache, and somehow that felt like the first genuinely Roman thing I had done. In a city built on such an impossible scale, it was the smallest kindness I found myself remembering.
I drank a coffee at a marble table on a quiet street with my sunglasses pushed into my hair and watched the afternoon continue without asking anything of me. A priest crossed the square carrying nothing but a folded newspaper beneath one arm. An elderly waiter polished glasses that already looked spotless. Nobody seemed in a hurry. Later there was a gelato from a little shop on a sun-warmed corner, eaten while walking because somehow it felt wrong to sit still with it. I passed a row of old Vespas leaning against a peeling wall the colour of egg yolk, and a market beginning to fold itself away for the evening, the last lemons stacked into wooden crates, cut flowers gathered into buckets, a man rolling down the striped awning above his stall. I crossed a piazza just as the pigeons lifted together, and the pale baroque facades caught the first hints of evening.
I ended the day where the city seems to end its own, beside the Tiber. I leaned against the old stone parapet as the light slowly changed, the water slipping from green to bronze and finally to a slow-moving gold. Every wall along the river caught the last light differently. A pair of gulls drifted over the bridges. Somewhere behind me a church bell began to ring, and another answered a moment later. The sound rolled across the rooftops until it no longer seemed to belong to any particular century.
When evening settled properly, I changed and went back out into the blue hour, and Rome revealed another version of itself. An Aperol the colour of the fading sky in a small piazza while the lamps came alive one by one. Narrow lanes glowing amber beneath old lanterns. The smell of basil, garlic, warm stone, and something frying somewhere just out of sight. A trattoria with a candle on the table, a simple plate of pasta that disappeared before I realised I had stopped looking around, and a glass of red that tasted faintly of the hills the train had crossed only hours before. On the walk back I paused beside a fountain lit against the darkness, marble figures frozen in gestures that had outlived generations. The water continued falling, just as it had for centuries, beautiful without ever asking to be noticed.
They say everyone comes to Rome to become someone else. Standing there, I understood why people say it. Naples had reached for me immediately and folded me into itself before I had found my bearings. Rome never reached at all. It simply existed, with complete confidence that it did not need to. It has watched emperors and pilgrims, lovers, students, priests, tourists with tired feet, people arriving full of hope and others leaving quietly disappointed. It remembers none of them for very long. Standing there, I realised the city had no interest in who I had been before I arrived. I found that strangely comforting.
I walked back to the palazzo through streets that still held the warmth of the day and showed no interest in ending. I opened the shutters and let the sounds of the city rise from below, a scooter passing somewhere out of sight, a burst of laughter from the next street, the last notes of a song drifting upward before disappearing into the night. I stayed there for a long time before turning out the light.
V.
For Victoria’s Complete Guide to Rome, click here.
Read also: Under the Roman Sun and The Sacred and the Ordinary.
More from my trip to Rome:
