The great joy of seeing Rome again – he’s finally realised it

My daughter was born in Rome, and as someone from the countryside, I’m proud of that. I consider this a successful decision, yet she has consistently remarked—apparently to contradict me—‘Come on, Mum, what is Rome, really?’ She would have preferred to grow up free in the countryside. To have a small donkey, pigs, rabbits, not to breathe in the concrete in summer and not to trip over broken beer bottles outside the house all year round. She would have preferred a garden, a chicken coop, and far more trees. I didn’t even get Rome right. Sorry, but I used to take you in your pushchair to see the Colosseum at sunset – what could be better in the world? Honestly, what more could I have done? So you say I take everything as a personal offence, and actually I do have that problem, I know, but to those who’ve asked me over the years, whether sarcastically or out of genuine curiosity: ‘How do you put up with Rome?’, I’ve always replied that I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world. And when they add: ‘But what about the noise?’, I play it down whilst thinking to myself: ‘The noise?’ What noise? It’s the noise of life; it’s the noise the centre of the world makes. When Romans say: ‘I’ve had enough of Rome’, I can’t believe them. They’re pretending. It’s just for show, to appear bored with everything, used to everything. To show their superiority over me.

However, the fact that my daughter – who, incidentally, speaks and writes in a very vivid Roman dialect – isn’t all that keen on the city her mother gave her as a birth present has always annoyed me. The light, the sky, the cinemas, the churches, the squares, the broken drinking fountains, the crowds on the streets, nobody taking offence, the Trevi Fountain where I’ve been tossing coins for forty years, first asking to return and then to stay, the Indian restaurant that’s always open to welcome us. They all seem like such great blessings to me that when a taxi driver says, ‘But you’re not Roman’, I get upset all over again and assure him that I do everything I can to be one; I explain which route to take to show I know my way round, and we end up arguing.

My daughter hasn’t been home for over a month – she’s doing a bit of temporary work – so she’s been living for over a month in a very green spot up north. She sent me some videos of geese honking. ‘Lovely,’ I said, ‘really cute.’ Yes, yes, very cute. I replied with a few videos from home: the cats, the heat, the steps outside our block of flats which fill up with beer bottles in the evening. Me walking the dog, whose paws are getting burnt. The Indian restaurant we’re going to in a week’s time. But I should have realised something was about to happen simply from the fact that yesterday she rang me after eleven in the evening – or rather, simply from the fact that she rang me at all: whilst I was telling her something rather uninteresting (the new health card that had just arrived, the SPID, all the things to sort out when she got back), she interrupted me to say: “I never would have believed it, but I miss Rome.” What a twist. I was silent for a few seconds.

She added that she misses the sign: Roma Termini; she misses leaving the station and having to be careful not to have her phone snatched from her pocket; she misses the smell of kebabs (she’s a vegetarian); she misses that flight of steps with all the broken bottles. She misses the river of people on the streets, and the orange sky. But above all, she misses the drinking fountain where we can’t stop for a drink because it’s always out of order. It was as if she were saying to me: I miss you.