ROME BY NIGHT Rome is a crowded city. Always has been. Tens of thousands of people jam themselves into tiny medieval squares to tour these famous monuments. But when you decide to explore the city at night, this changes.  On a warm night, sites like the Trevi fountain still have 100-200 people crowding around at 3 a.m. But at 6 a.m., no one is on the streets of Rome except for the ever-scavenging pigeons. When you go back to see these sights, you’ll feel like you met them intimately and shared a secret with them. You feel superior to the tourists who only get to see the very top of Trevi over the crowd of 500 packed into a medieval square, completely blocking a view of the fountain itself. Forget unlocking Foursquare badges. The best location game to play when you travel is making an internationally iconographic site feel personal. My first piece of advice to anyone going to Rome is to use your first couple days of jetlag to sightsee at night. Don’t worry about adjusting your bodyclock as soon as you can. Sleep for the first two days and wake up around 10 or 11 at night. Order room service, have a nice meal, take a shower and then around midnight or 1 am, go explore the major sights of Rome. See the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, the Colosseo and the Vatican. See them at 2 am. See them at 6 am. Yes, you can go back and see them again later in the day, but you’ll be competing with the crowds. Between 1 am and 6 am, the city of Rome can be yours and yours alone. My first night out in Rome was a late 2 am walk to find the Trevi with Vasant. It was still crowded when we got there, as I described above, but it was virtually empty compared to how packed it is during the day.   Street vendors were constantly coming up to us, demanding we buy roses from them or order a polaroid of ourselves. We kept waiving them off, but it began to get worse as we sat there. They seemed very upset that the Americans weren’t buying up roses, as I suppose they expected us to do. It was a romantic night, the air was heavy and warm and the streetlight cast a lovely glow down the narrow alleys that opened up into the small Trevi piazza. But we aren’t stupid, and that made them more determined.  So there we were, at 3 am, our second night in the city, still very sore and tired from our trip. It was my first major monument in Rome and these vendors were ruining it, coming up and pitching crap in English and Italian and then pretending to only speak Hindi when we refused them in BOTH languages. I was upset. They were ruining my experience.     Soon, some drunk American girls wandered in and sat on the edge of the fountain, giggling as some fortuitous Italian men spotted them and came over. The vendors spotted easier prey and ran away from us, quickly offering the new group roses, which the men bought, and photos, which the girls posed for. Vasant and I laughed as we watched and it got funnier as the police drove into the piazza, and the vendors scattered. I felt I was allowed to enjoy the scene again.   As we left later that hour however, I looked over at the vendor who’d been pestering us. It was sad. This vendor had come back after the police had chased him away. It was his place of work. He was not looking at the fountain, but at the people there enjoying it in a way he couldn’t. I realized as I stared at him that this was my first glimpse at the reality of Rome. There are no monuments that are free from vendors. They hang around the piazzas where these icons are and wait for an opportunity to make a buck. They don’t see the site as much as they see a living to be made off of it. And it’s always been this way. As long as Rome has attracted spectacle, there have been people trying to capitalize off it, from lowly street vendors and shopkeepers to Caesars and Popes. This aspect of Rome, being a part of the city and yet excluded from it, was the first thought that stuck in my mind and became part of the framework for our documentary a week later.  *  One of my favorite moments in Roman night is tied between the night that Vasant and I walked to the Colosseo and read Goethe and the night we filmed the sun rising over the city. The Colosseo evening is described in the post prior to this one. The Pincio Hill shoot is described here:  I wanted to get a time-lapse shot of the city waking up. We scouted locations for a week until I found the perfect spot: a lovely park at the edge of the Villa Borghese (Rome’s version of Central Park). We got up at 2:30 am and walked north across the city until we came to Piazza del Popolo.     From there, we climbed to the Pincio Hill terrace, set up our camera and waited. We sat on cold marble benches, wrote in our journals, talked about the project and then… did other things that any young romantic couple would do atop a starry hill in Rome. Every now and then we’d stop, take a whole new round of photos and point excitedly to a changing star position.   I have never been so excited for the sun to rise. Every rise in rosy hue that we saw was exhilarating. We were cheering it on! I must’ve snapped over a thousand photos in those three hours.  After the sun was up, we left and walked through the park, down towards the Spanish Steps, which were empty of tourists at that early hour and so beautiful in the pink morning light.  But I suppose this isn’t really a post about Rome at dawn, so I digress.   * My other favorite night memory was our first night shooting in Rome. My dog of 14 years, Maggie, had died the night before and we stayed up skype-ing with my family in Seattle all night, crying and exchanging memories. We’d spent four hours with Maggie the day before. She hadn’t moved or stirred in a day, but when we skyped with her, she perked up. She looked at the laptop and listened for our voices and her breathing eased. She died an hour after we signed off. As you might imagine if you know me at all, I read something into that. I felt horrible for being away from her while she was in pain and even worse for not being near my family while they were going through this pain. But Vasant and I couldn’t stay on our laptops all day. We had to begin shooting. Our schedule in Rome was tight and a day lost would’ve been devastating to the project.   So we went out into the city. We were going to film the sunset from onto of the Il Vittorio and then shoot the Vatican at dusk. It was one of the most difficult walks of my life, from our flat to the Il Vittorio. Rome is a dog-lover’s city. Every evening, people are out walking their dogs. Every dog I passed on the street brought tears to my eyes. I kept thinking, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. But then I thought of Pixar. Some of you may remember that Vasant and I have been getting through our education at the UW by watching Pixar documentaries and commentaries (along with hundreds of others). But we come back to Pixar over and over for the sheer love of story-telling and movie making. Last year, they released the first two Toy Stories on bluray and with them, a tribute to Joe Ranft. Joe Ranft was their lead storyman and one of the beating hearts behind what made Pixar magical. He died in 2005, in his prime, and the piece dedicated to him came to my mind as I walked the streets of Rome. For years, people at Pixar have been inspiring Vasant and I. Their words and their films have reminded us why we’re working so hard, why we do without certain things and why we’re pushing ourselves. And that day, they inspired me to push through my grief and go to work. I know it may sound ridiculous to compare a dog to a human. I’m not equivocating the losses. But I was reminded that throughout my career, I will begin losing people. It’s something that, at my young age, I haven’t had to face too often. But those losses shouldn’t stop me from working on what I love. I reminded myself that I was in Rome to tell a story: a story about the city. I told myself that if I ever wanted this to be my career, then it had to be worth more to be than my right to sit alone in the dark and cry.  So we filmed for the next nine hours. And we got the most amazing sunset atop the Il Vittorio.   And we not only got dusk over the Vatican, but I got the best picture of my trip. As dusk was settling over the Eternal City, filling the sky with violet and the waters of the Tiber with indigo. The lights of the city were beginning to flicker on, like little flames over the Bridge of Angels. And over the bridge, by the Castel Sant’Angleo, we saw fire eaters.  We filmed these two performers for almost an hour. I’ve seen fire-eaters before, but always in a carny-type capacity. These two seemed to be entranced by the flame. Their performance was beautiful and ballet-like. The two of them, specifically the man, seemed like they loved nothing more in the world, including each other, more than the fire they worked with. He eats the fire while she waves the firey swords around her and they both dance to the music. Watching her dance and him breathe fire is the most spiritual experience I had in the city. And then a fireworks show began from a barge on the Tiber, releasing not only fireworks into the air, but lighting colored flames upon the surface of the Tiber, floating lazily downstream. That night was a triumph. I had sprained my ankle and Achilles’ tendon earlier that summer and it had given out on me earlier that week. I still went out. My dog had died and I dealt with my grief throughout the night, went out and filmed and then that night, we went to a nice restaurant in Vatican City and talked about our memories of Maggie. I felt like I had proved something about my own mettle to myself. I also felt like Vasant and I had proved something about how we worked with each other. Somehow, as we raced from location to location against the ticking clock of the setting sun, we managed to continue grieving and supporting each other, while we worked. We’ve been working towards filmmaking for years while in school, but I’m a pragmatist. Somewhere in the back of my head was always a voice asking if this wasn’t all academic and/or wishful thinking. Would we be able to really do the work? Would we really be able to work together as well as we believed? That night, we found out that the answer was yes. Yes to both questions.  *   My last night memory that I’ll write about in this already epically-lengthed post, is about one of our favorite spots in Rome. It was a wonderful restaurant on the Piazza Farnese. It is close to the tourist-choked Campo dei Fiori, and yet it feels miles away. The waiters are warm and funny and speak almost no English, so it was a great place to force me to master my italian. The food was life changing. Black truffled trofie with porcini mushrooms, zucchini blossoms stuffed with cheese and anchovies, swordfish, lamb…. you name the italian specialty, they made it better than anyone else for the best price. By our fourth visit there, the waiters had warmed up to us and were teasing us, telling us what to order and asking us personal questions. They were all very sweet, but one man was our favorite. He had silver hair, a broad grin and glasses that perched on the tip of his nose and wobbled as he nodded while listening to orders. After our fourth dinner there, he asked us to come back the following night, our last night in Rome. He told us he would set aside a table for us and prepare a special dinner for us. We were floored. We felt like we had won something from the city. A special dinner, a reserved spot, and if you could’ve seen the excitement gleaming in that man’s eyes, you would’ve danced back to your flat as well. The regular food at that place had already become our favorite in the world. What would off-menu specialties do to us? We never found out. That morning, at 7 am, we finished our documentary. We hadn’t slept in over a week. We had rushed to get our project finished and turned in and by noon that Friday, realized we had 24 hours left in the Eternal City and we still hadn’t done 45 things on our list. We hadn’t been inside the Colosseo or the Forum. We’d been to plenty of museums and hung out around these sites for over a month. But we had missed the biggest attraction in the city. We rushed, after finishing our documentary, to see these things. After three hours in the Forum and Palantine Hill, a storm broke out and drenched us. So, sleep deprived, hungry and wet, we took a taxi back to our flat and decided to take a teeny, tiny nap.  We woke up at 10:30 that night. I saw the clock and shouted at Vasant and we jumped up, slid our shoes on and raced out of our flat. We ran two blocks and arrived just as the restaurant was starting to put up our tables. Our waiter saw us and threw his hands up in the air. “We are closing. I’m so sorry!” I shook my head and caught my breath and replied in Italian that we were the sorry ones, that we had overslept and I apologized several more times. He asked if we could come again tomorrow and we told him that we were leaving at 4 pm tomorrow. He looked heartbroken for us. He motioned to the kitchen. “What if I make you both a sandwich?”  It was a sweet offer, but we had (geniuses that we are) skipped all meals that day. We needed to find a restaurant that was still open and eat a large meal. We thanked him and told him how much the food and service had meant to us. It was the loveliest part of our trip. He told us to have a safe trip and waved at us for the next several minutes. We kept turning about, sad and pathetic creatures that we were, staring back at the most affordable five star osteria in Rome, but more importantly, a Roman who knew our name, took interest in us and regarded us as more than just tourists. A half hour later, we were eating greasy pasta elsewhere for three times what our favorite spot would’ve charged. It may sound like a sad ending, but it actually underscored for us how dear that place had become to us.  * One of the people we interviewed, a woodcarver near the Pantheon, said that Rome was a completely different city in the day than it is in the night and that he preferred Rome at night. I do too. I guess that’s not surprising for anyone who knows me: I almost always prefer ANY place at night. But I recommend Rome at night for anyone else, even non-night owls. Rome at night offers more opportunities for unique encounters, personal connections to well-known places and of course, allows you to beat the heat and the crowds. For me, more than anything else, is the fact that I loved being able to whisper into Vasant’s ear in all of these places. And that is only something you can do at night, when all the alleyways are empty and waiting to be explored.

ROME BY NIGHT

Rome is a crowded city. Always has been. Tens of thousands of people jam themselves into tiny medieval squares to tour these famous monuments. But when you decide to explore the city at night, this changes. 

On a warm night, sites like the Trevi fountain still have 100-200 people crowding around at 3 a.m. But at 6 a.m., no one is on the streets of Rome except for the ever-scavenging pigeons. When you go back to see these sights, you’ll feel like you met them intimately and shared a secret with them. You feel superior to the tourists who only get to see the very top of Trevi over the crowd of 500 packed into a medieval square, completely blocking a view of the fountain itself. Forget unlocking Foursquare badges. The best location game to play when you travel is making an internationally iconographic site feel personal.

My first piece of advice to anyone going to Rome is to use your first couple days of jetlag to sightsee at night. Don’t worry about adjusting your bodyclock as soon as you can. Sleep for the first two days and wake up around 10 or 11 at night. Order room service, have a nice meal, take a shower and then around midnight or 1 am, go explore the major sights of Rome. See the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, the Colosseo and the Vatican. See them at 2 am. See them at 6 am. Yes, you can go back and see them again later in the day, but you’ll be competing with the crowds. Between 1 am and 6 am, the city of Rome can be yours and yours alone.

My first night out in Rome was a late 2 am walk to find the Trevi with Vasant. It was still crowded when we got there, as I described above, but it was virtually empty compared to how packed it is during the day.

 

Street vendors were constantly coming up to us, demanding we buy roses from them or order a polaroid of ourselves. We kept waiving them off, but it began to get worse as we sat there. They seemed very upset that the Americans weren’t buying up roses, as I suppose they expected us to do. It was a romantic night, the air was heavy and warm and the streetlight cast a lovely glow down the narrow alleys that opened up into the small Trevi piazza. But we aren’t stupid, and that made them more determined. 

So there we were, at 3 am, our second night in the city, still very sore and tired from our trip. It was my first major monument in Rome and these vendors were ruining it, coming up and pitching crap in English and Italian and then pretending to only speak Hindi when we refused them in BOTH languages. I was upset. They were ruining my experience.  

 

Soon, some drunk American girls wandered in and sat on the edge of the fountain, giggling as some fortuitous Italian men spotted them and came over. The vendors spotted easier prey and ran away from us, quickly offering the new group roses, which the men bought, and photos, which the girls posed for. Vasant and I laughed as we watched and it got funnier as the police drove into the piazza, and the vendors scattered. I felt I was allowed to enjoy the scene again.  

As we left later that hour however, I looked over at the vendor who’d been pestering us. It was sad. This vendor had come back after the police had chased him away. It was his place of work. He was not looking at the fountain, but at the people there enjoying it in a way he couldn’t. I realized as I stared at him that this was my first glimpse at the reality of Rome. There are no monuments that are free from vendors. They hang around the piazzas where these icons are and wait for an opportunity to make a buck. They don’t see the site as much as they see a living to be made off of it. And it’s always been this way. As long as Rome has attracted spectacle, there have been people trying to capitalize off it, from lowly street vendors and shopkeepers to Caesars and Popes. This aspect of Rome, being a part of the city and yet excluded from it, was the first thought that stuck in my mind and became part of the framework for our documentary a week later. 

* 

One of my favorite moments in Roman night is tied between the night that Vasant and I walked to the Colosseo and read Goethe and the night we filmed the sun rising over the city. The Colosseo evening is described in the post prior to this one. The Pincio Hill shoot is described here: 

I wanted to get a time-lapse shot of the city waking up. We scouted locations for a week until I found the perfect spot: a lovely park at the edge of the Villa Borghese (Rome’s version of Central Park). We got up at 2:30 am and walked north across the city until we came to Piazza del Popolo.  

 

From there, we climbed to the Pincio Hill terrace, set up our camera and waited. We sat on cold marble benches, wrote in our journals, talked about the project and then… did other things that any young romantic couple would do atop a starry hill in Rome. Every now and then we’d stop, take a whole new round of photos and point excitedly to a changing star position.  

I have never been so excited for the sun to rise. Every rise in rosy hue that we saw was exhilarating. We were cheering it on! I must’ve snapped over a thousand photos in those three hours. 

After the sun was up, we left and walked through the park, down towards the Spanish Steps, which were empty of tourists at that early hour and so beautiful in the pink morning light. 

But I suppose this isn’t really a post about Rome at dawn, so I digress.  

*

My other favorite night memory was our first night shooting in Rome. My dog of 14 years, Maggie, had died the night before and we stayed up skype-ing with my family in Seattle all night, crying and exchanging memories. We’d spent four hours with Maggie the day before. She hadn’t moved or stirred in a day, but when we skyped with her, she perked up. She looked at the laptop and listened for our voices and her breathing eased. She died an hour after we signed off. As you might imagine if you know me at all, I read something into that. I felt horrible for being away from her while she was in pain and even worse for not being near my family while they were going through this pain. But Vasant and I couldn’t stay on our laptops all day. We had to begin shooting. Our schedule in Rome was tight and a day lost would’ve been devastating to the project.  

So we went out into the city. We were going to film the sunset from onto of the Il Vittorio and then shoot the Vatican at dusk. It was one of the most difficult walks of my life, from our flat to the Il Vittorio. Rome is a dog-lover’s city. Every evening, people are out walking their dogs. Every dog I passed on the street brought tears to my eyes. I kept thinking, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. But then I thought of Pixar. Some of you may remember that Vasant and I have been getting through our education at the UW by watching Pixar documentaries and commentaries (along with hundreds of others). But we come back to Pixar over and over for the sheer love of story-telling and movie making. Last year, they released the first two Toy Stories on bluray and with them, a tribute to Joe Ranft. Joe Ranft was their lead storyman and one of the beating hearts behind what made Pixar magical. He died in 2005, in his prime, and the piece dedicated to him came to my mind as I walked the streets of Rome. For years, people at Pixar have been inspiring Vasant and I. Their words and their films have reminded us why we’re working so hard, why we do without certain things and why we’re pushing ourselves. And that day, they inspired me to push through my grief and go to work. I know it may sound ridiculous to compare a dog to a human. I’m not equivocating the losses. But I was reminded that throughout my career, I will begin losing people. It’s something that, at my young age, I haven’t had to face too often. But those losses shouldn’t stop me from working on what I love. I reminded myself that I was in Rome to tell a story: a story about the city. I told myself that if I ever wanted this to be my career, then it had to be worth more to be than my right to sit alone in the dark and cry. 

So we filmed for the next nine hours. And we got the most amazing sunset atop the Il Vittorio.  

And we not only got dusk over the Vatican, but I got the best picture of my trip. As dusk was settling over the Eternal City, filling the sky with violet and the waters of the Tiber with indigo. The lights of the city were beginning to flicker on, like little flames over the Bridge of Angels.

And over the bridge, by the Castel Sant’Angleo, we saw fire eaters. 

We filmed these two performers for almost an hour. I’ve seen fire-eaters before, but always in a carny-type capacity. These two seemed to be entranced by the flame. Their performance was beautiful and ballet-like. The two of them, specifically the man, seemed like they loved nothing more in the world, including each other, more than the fire they worked with. He eats the fire while she waves the firey swords around her and they both dance to the music. Watching her dance and him breathe fire is the most spiritual experience I had in the city.

And then a fireworks show began from a barge on the Tiber, releasing not only fireworks into the air, but lighting colored flames upon the surface of the Tiber, floating lazily downstream.

That night was a triumph. I had sprained my ankle and Achilles’ tendon earlier that summer and it had given out on me earlier that week. I still went out. My dog had died and I dealt with my grief throughout the night, went out and filmed and then that night, we went to a nice restaurant in Vatican City and talked about our memories of Maggie. I felt like I had proved something about my own mettle to myself. I also felt like Vasant and I had proved something about how we worked with each other. Somehow, as we raced from location to location against the ticking clock of the setting sun, we managed to continue grieving and supporting each other, while we worked. We’ve been working towards filmmaking for years while in school, but I’m a pragmatist. Somewhere in the back of my head was always a voice asking if this wasn’t all academic and/or wishful thinking. Would we be able to really do the work? Would we really be able to work together as well as we believed?

That night, we found out that the answer was yes. Yes to both questions. 

*  

My last night memory that I’ll write about in this already epically-lengthed post, is about one of our favorite spots in Rome. It was a wonderful restaurant on the Piazza Farnese. It is close to the tourist-choked Campo dei Fiori, and yet it feels miles away. The waiters are warm and funny and speak almost no English, so it was a great place to force me to master my italian. The food was life changing. Black truffled trofie with porcini mushrooms, zucchini blossoms stuffed with cheese and anchovies, swordfish, lamb…. you name the italian specialty, they made it better than anyone else for the best price.

By our fourth visit there, the waiters had warmed up to us and were teasing us, telling us what to order and asking us personal questions. They were all very sweet, but one man was our favorite. He had silver hair, a broad grin and glasses that perched on the tip of his nose and wobbled as he nodded while listening to orders. After our fourth dinner there, he asked us to come back the following night, our last night in Rome. He told us he would set aside a table for us and prepare a special dinner for us. We were floored. We felt like we had won something from the city. A special dinner, a reserved spot, and if you could’ve seen the excitement gleaming in that man’s eyes, you would’ve danced back to your flat as well. The regular food at that place had already become our favorite in the world. What would off-menu specialties do to us?

We never found out. That morning, at 7 am, we finished our documentary. We hadn’t slept in over a week. We had rushed to get our project finished and turned in and by noon that Friday, realized we had 24 hours left in the Eternal City and we still hadn’t done 45 things on our list. We hadn’t been inside the Colosseo or the Forum. We’d been to plenty of museums and hung out around these sites for over a month. But we had missed the biggest attraction in the city. We rushed, after finishing our documentary, to see these things. After three hours in the Forum and Palantine Hill, a storm broke out and drenched us. So, sleep deprived, hungry and wet, we took a taxi back to our flat and decided to take a teeny, tiny nap. 

We woke up at 10:30 that night. I saw the clock and shouted at Vasant and we jumped up, slid our shoes on and raced out of our flat. We ran two blocks and arrived just as the restaurant was starting to put up our tables. Our waiter saw us and threw his hands up in the air. “We are closing. I’m so sorry!”

I shook my head and caught my breath and replied in Italian that we were the sorry ones, that we had overslept and I apologized several more times. He asked if we could come again tomorrow and we told him that we were leaving at 4 pm tomorrow. He looked heartbroken for us. He motioned to the kitchen. “What if I make you both a sandwich?” 

It was a sweet offer, but we had (geniuses that we are) skipped all meals that day. We needed to find a restaurant that was still open and eat a large meal. We thanked him and told him how much the food and service had meant to us. It was the loveliest part of our trip. He told us to have a safe trip and waved at us for the next several minutes. We kept turning about, sad and pathetic creatures that we were, staring back at the most affordable five star osteria in Rome, but more importantly, a Roman who knew our name, took interest in us and regarded us as more than just tourists. A half hour later, we were eating greasy pasta elsewhere for three times what our favorite spot would’ve charged. It may sound like a sad ending, but it actually underscored for us how dear that place had become to us. 

*

One of the people we interviewed, a woodcarver near the Pantheon, said that Rome was a completely different city in the day than it is in the night and that he preferred Rome at night. I do too. I guess that’s not surprising for anyone who knows me: I almost always prefer ANY place at night. But I recommend Rome at night for anyone else, even non-night owls. Rome at night offers more opportunities for unique encounters, personal connections to well-known places and of course, allows you to beat the heat and the crowds.

For me, more than anything else, is the fact that I loved being able to whisper into Vasant’s ear in all of these places. And that is only something you can do at night, when all the alleyways are empty and waiting to be explored.

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