A post of several subjects, which I’m sure could be linked together properly if I took a bit more time and if I were a bit more clever...

As if I planned for a mood change to coincide with Lent (which I didn’t), I’ve been fairly contemplative this past week.  I certainly haven’t given up any vices (read sweets) but still, contemplative as if I were the one wandering the desert.  I’ve been doing all that ‘personal work’ which sometimes requires silence and aloneness.  Earlier this week I realized how much I missed playing music when I found myself at Piazza Mattei, staring into an art gallery with a grand piano.  It just sat there as a woman, clicked away on the keys of the computer against the back wall.  After a few minutes, I realized there was no reason why I was standing there.  I hadn’t had any luck inquiring after a practice room through school and it wasn’t as if I was going to be playing the piano at this gallery.

I came home and started work on the next blog post, which was supposed to be about Brooklyn, Italians, and Brooklyn Italians. 

I have spent some time in the Rome’s Jewish Ghetto.  Bakeries have a fair amount of magnetization where I’m concerned and while I can’t commit to trying every single Jewish bakery, I have tried a few...several.  I kept hearing about this special pizza/cookie that is sweet rather than savory, which comes in one flavor: burnt.  But since I hate to wait in line, and there is always a line for this bakery, I just keep moving along to the next bakery.  The next one happened to have a window display of apple cakes as big as my head.  It took the accompaniment of at least a dozen cappucini, but I managed all right...

One of my professors says that for her birthday every year she goes to Da Giggetto in the Ghetto and has a deep-fried artichoke, zucchini flowers, and grilled lamb chops...As much as I have wanted to go there every night since she told me that, I thought I might wait for some company to arrive and make an evening of it.

The Jewish Ghetto is well located, both in modern times and in ancient, being directly on the Via Peregrinorum (the ancient Pilgrimage route to St. Peter’s) and with easy access to Tiber Island, the hospital, and the river.  There has, of course, been a Jewish population in Rome for quite a long time, which is itself is an interesting concept for a city that houses the center of Catholicism.  This particular area was set aside and the Jewish population forced to live there by the popes around the 1500s.  This was intended to expedite their conversion to Catholicism...it didn’t seem to work so well.  

The reason I bring it up, apart from the bit about the food, is because later in the week, I had left the Ghetto and wandered into a rather nice shop.  It made me wish I were shopping for menswear (for some reason I love shopping for menswear).  The store had some neat and unusual things.  I bumped into two women, Brooklyn Italians, shopping for their husbands. Their accents sounded harsh and biting after hearing so much of the lilting Italian. Hearing that accent was something I didn’t know I missed.  We chatted briefly about cabbages and kings and they mentioned that the presence of Jewish bakeries made them feel right at home.  Since they were from Williamsburg, Brooklyn (where I spent a delightful but frozen birthday not so long ago), they well knew Jewish Bakeries that stood beside Italian markets.   They were quick to mention that all the Italian stuff was new and strange, perhaps not as advanced or as fast-paced as they had expected.  It was the Jewish thread that they had latched onto as being familiar. 

The infrastructure of Rome was so advanced in the early centuries CE that the aqueducts carried in 84 million gallons of water per day.  With a population of approximately one million inhabitants, that is pretty impressive.  That means that every person could consume 84 gallons of water every day.  Incase numbers aren’t your game; here’s a way to provide some context.  According to a fellow named Blumensthil, in 1901 the same number of inhabitants lived in Brooklyn and they had the same water supply: 84 gallons per person.  Only the Romans had done it about eighteen hundred years earlier. 

Tonight as I was walking home, I realized that I kept resisting crossing over the bridge toward Trastevere.  I always have lots to do at home; reading, Latin, painting, laundry, there is always something.  So when I resist going home, I usually try and pay attention to why.  Obviously I wouldn’t be bored at home, so I decided that I was too restless to be in the apartment.  I passed through the Ghetto again and decided to try the burnt pizza/cookie...even though it sounds completely bizarre.  The line wasn’t too long and several ageing women shuffled behind counters of what appeared to be burnt homemade energy bars.  Besides a tray of freshly toasted nuts, which one of the women was scooping into customers’ bags with her bare hands, there were no other consumables in the bakery.  Just the pizza...slash cookies.  After paying what seemed an exorbitant amount, more than three euro, I got a dense bar of fruitcake.  That’s exactly what it looked like.  There were nuts in it, dried fruit, and those green bits whose origin no one is able to pinpoint.  Plus it was burnt.  I could not have been LESS enthusiastic.

It was so amazing.  It didn’t taste burnt at all and the center was surprisingly moist.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that it changed my life.  I still have no idea what those green bits might have been but it was probably the best three euro I’ve ever spent.  I ate one third of it, then turned it around and ate the other end.  I considered going back for another.  While eating, I didn’t realize where I was going and again found myself at Piazza Mattei.  I walked up to the art gallery where the piano was clearly visible through the large glass door.  Just as I did so, the older man inside put down his phone and walked to the baby grand.  He flipped up the lid and started playing Debussy.  Then Chopin.  He took no notice of me, with my nose against the glass, pizza/cookie in hand and practically in tears.  This was the reason I didn’t want to go home.  This is what I had to see.  I stood there for about forty minutes.  I knew some of what he played, some pieces I had always meant to learn.  Then I noticed something quite funny. 

He moved his mouth when he played.  I couldn’t tell if he was actually making noise, but he wasn’t quite singing, he was doing exactly what Alfredo used to do.  Alfredo, ‘The Spaniard,’ ‘The Black Cloud of Death,’ aka my last piano teacher and Maestro from the turn of the century (yes, I did just say that), would make sort of ‘mam-mum-mom’ noises while he played the piano out of habit.  Lot’s of musicians have little quirks while they play: Kyle looks like he is having a seizure, Leif’s tongue used to dart out like a gecko’s.  I always used to try and stay quite still when I was an adolescent, deathly afraid that I would look like a ridiculously emotional pianist.  I still don’t like to show emotion in public but I realized that trying to hold still was actually interfering with my performance.  These days, I flare my nostrils a bit when I play.

You know how once you learn a new word, you suddenly find that word everywhere?  I remember when I learned the definition of ‘encroach’ and the next day I started reading ‘Rebecca’ and in the first paragraph, which starts with the famous line ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...’  It was strange to find this man playing the piano with the exact same musical tick as Alfredo (it’s like a chattering of the teeth but with the lips instead) because I haven’t even talked to Alfredo in almost ten years.  It has only been since this week that we have begun emailing each other. 

When I arrived home tonight, still full from my pizza/cookie/fruitcake/bar and thrilled after my 'private concert' at Piazza Mattei, I still really wanted to play the piano.  So I posted a question on FaceBook, “Does anyone know of a practice room in Rome with a decent piano?”  Within half an hour, Alfredo had suggested a place. 

The loose theme of this post was supposed to be Brooklyn Italian, but then the Jewish Ghetto/Bakery/Piano/Alfredo/Sweets/Lent thing happened.  Life is curious.