Rome

May, 2002

They’ve put signs in antiqua everywhere they possibly could. The typeface used on Trajan’s column lives on in Rome to this day.

Water pumps of the kind you might find in a village are all over Rome and people use them.

There’s an inordinate number of TV antennae on every house.

It says SPQR on every building, manhole cover, and in every corner. It means Senatus Populusque Romanus (“the Senate and people of Rome”, it’s the equivalent of the Moscow Soviet sign on lampposts in Moscow). And yet not a single taxi driver knows what the abbreviation stands for, although it’s almost two thousand years old.

On the traffic light the red light is twice as large as the yellow and green ones — just to make sure people definitely notice it.

From time to time you see pedestrian traffic lights like the ones you get in New York: there’s writing on them.

They’ve got no qualms about putting up signs you have to read from both sides of the street.

Tobacco for sale.

One-way street.

Postbox.

Pay phone.

Car number plate.

In the summertime the sun can beat down so hard that you can only hide from it behind blinds. That’s why there’s not a single window in the city that isn’t equipped with shutter, roller shutters, casement windows, awnings, and other contrivances.

The right of all Italians to hide from the sun even extends to trains —there’s a button for lowering and raising the blinds next to every window in the carriage.

You could take the sky and the clouds in Italy as they are, frame them, and put them in a museum. The same goes everything in the foreground.

They don’t light candles in Italian churches. In one church you can buy a candle, but you aren’t allow to actually light it — you’re supposed to place it on an assigned shelf in the church and leave it there. That’s how you light a candle, supposedly. It goes without saying that later the clergymen take these candles off the shelf and sell them again. Zero-waste manufacturing. It’s weird that they hadn’t thought of that in Russia.

But their inventiveness doesn’t end there. It ends when all of the candles are electric. You stick in any coin and press the button. The “candle” which you lit starts flashing (for you to understand that this is the one you paid for), then proceeds to burn quietly and peacefully. It switches off a few minutes later. In a different church I saw an in-between model — you don’t have to put in any money, but there is a switch next to each candle. I switched it on and off a few times just to check how the interface works, may god forgive me.