Neither here Nor there by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson [Bryson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crónica, Viajes
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 1991-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

13. Rome

Well, I’m sorry. I had intended to reach Rome as you would expect me to, in a logical, systematic way, progressing diligently down the length of Germany, through Austria and Switzerland, across a corner of France and finally arriving, dusty and weary and in desperate need of a launderette, by way of Lombardy and Tuscany. But after nearly a month beneath the endlessly damp skies of northern Europe, I longed for sunshine. It was as simple as that. I wanted to walk down a street in shirtsleeves, to sit out of doors with a cappuccino, to feel the sun on my face. So it was with only the odd wrenching spasm of guilt that I abandoned my planned itinerary and bounded with a single leap across 1,500 miles of Europe. Travelling is more fun – shit, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

I hadn’t been to Rome before, but I had been wanting to go there for about as long as I could remember, certainly since I first saw La Dolce Vita as a teenager. I love Italian movies, especially the truly crummy ones – the ones that are dubbed by people who bravely refuse to let a total absence of acting skills stand in the way of a good career. They always star Giancarlo Giannini and the delectable Ornella Muti and have titles that tell you just how bad they are going to be – A Night Full of Rain, That Summer in Naples, When Spring Comes – so you have no anxieties that you will be distracted by plots and can concentrate instead on the two important things, namely waiting for Ornella Muti to shed her clothes and looking at the scenery. Italian films are always full of good background shots – usually of Ornella and Giancarlo riding a buzzing Vespa past the Colosseum and the Piazza Navona and the other tourist sights of Rome on the way to having either a brisk bonk or a soulful discussion about how they can’t go on like this, usually because one of them is living with Marcello Mastroianni.

Movies everywhere used to be full of this kind of local colour – every film shot in Britain in the 1960s was required by law, if I am not mistaken, to show four laughing swingers in an open-topped Morgan roadster crossing Tower Bridge, filmed from a helicopter at a dizzy angle – but now everyone but the Italians seems to have abandoned the practice, which I think is a huge pity because my whole notion of the world was shaped by the background scenes in films like To Catch a Thief and Breathless and Three Coins in a Fountain and even the Inspector Clouseau movies. If I hadn’t seen these pictures, I would be living in Peoria now and thinking that that was about as rich as life gets.

Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.

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