The Green, Green Birds of Rome
On Nostalgia and Nasoni
Sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, two distinct species of bright green parakeets escaped from aviaries in the center of Rome. Or perhaps, they were purposely released; no one has ever come forward with knowledge to clarify the event itself, making it an even better story. The rose-ringed parakeet, a tropical, red-beaked Afro-Asian bird, has the awful tendency to evict Roman woodpeckers; the more discreet South American monk parakeet tends to spend its time building communal nests. They have never mixed, they do not migrate, and they are prolific wherever there are trees in the city. For better or worse, they too are now part of the fabric of Rome.
It’s not hard to understand why the birds stayed, though, is it? After all, as they say here: Roma è Roma. “Rome is Rome.” For all of its chaos and frustration, for the heat and the crowds, Rome is a thrilling place. Why is that? It’s theatrically beautiful, but many cities can say the same. It is loaded with history, but so are legions of other places on the planet. There is an outstanding number of things to eat, drink, buy, and do; that’s hardly rare in a world overflowing with options.
Perhaps what makes Rome well, Rome, is exactly what the green birds figured out. Because you see, Rome will adopt anyone. The heart, the core of Rome is animated with an inherent and unrelenting generosity that is pervasive and perceptible by man, woman, child, and bird alike.
It is exceedingly far from perfect. The table is crowded and nothing starts quite when it’s meant to, and there are stretch marks in visible places. It can be gruff, brusque. If you’ve come here and been flummoxed by what doesn’t work or what isn’t as you thought it would be, you’re not wrong and you’re not alone. Tempers can get short, and if you come in one of those periods where lines and crowds and heat waves dominate, the collective patience will wear thin. You may not even notice the green green birds chirping overhead, and no one would blame you.
But if it does adopt you, Rome will become that place that you can rely upon, a garanzia, as they say here. It will undoubtedly sag in places, but it will still be as warm and full of laughter as you remember, no matter how long has passed. The traffic will be infuriating and there will be garbage and you’ll look at it occasionally and think if they could just do one or two things but they won’t and it won’t matter. The overwhelming relief that almost all of what you left is still in its rightful place will outweigh everything that Rome could or should change about itself.
I think of this frequently here, and I’ll tell you exactly when and where and how. If you’ve been here you’ve likely encountered i nasoni, stout fountains with a U-shaped spout that purposely resembles the rounded nose of an elderly aunt you haven’t thought of until just now. There are thousands of them around the city and they are at the service of everyone, indiscriminately. Most will stop for a drink on a scorching day, but many will bring a bucket to fill for their nearby flower stand, or perhaps audaciously attach a hose for purposes all their own. Some collect water to clean their cars, still others to clean themselves. They exist at the perfect height for dogs to partake, making it seem almost as though the wolves who founded the city wanted something personally left to their progeny. The ubiquity of i nasoni and the multiplicity of their uses is one of the great, small things about this city, a city bursting with big monumental things.
If you’re in Rome on one of those blindingly hot days that seem bleached of color, you’ll probably pass a nasone that’s been jimmied open to increase the water flow beyond that nasal trickle. You might see people lining up to drink, but you might also see children splashing in the basin, their world momentarily tinted a cool blue. And if you’re like me, you might think back to a time when you were a child in a city somewhere and someone would open a fire hydrant on a torrid day, releasing a gushing stream onto a parched pavement. If you’re like me, you probably played in that current until it slowed to a drip and someone from the fire department arrived with admonishments. You might have sat outside on your steps to wait for your clothes to dry because your mother wouldn’t let you in the house otherwise. But everyone was outside and you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else anyway, so it hardly felt like punishment. Because if you’re like me, everything you’d ever wanted was right where you were.
We lose so much. Whether they’re taken from us, misplaced along the way, or we foolishly let them go, things and people disappear before we’re ready and before we realize the consequences of not trying harder to keep them. We’re all too young, always; none of us know what we’ve got until it’s gone. And we are almost never allowed a do-over, where we can actually go back home again and feel something akin to the innocence we only recognize after it disappears. We reconcile ourselves to having gained wisdom, but it is paltry compensation for what we’ve left behind. But sometimes, some very rare times, we can go back to someplace and recapture that beautiful, cool blue naivete of places that are exactly as we left them. We can splash in it, laugh about it, and hold it close without being afraid of whether or not we’ll ever feel it again. Some things do stay.
So when you hear someone say that Rome is the Eternal City, don’t just think about the monumental things that have stood for millennia. Think of the green green birds who opted to stay despite having wings and a world they might have conquered. Think of us sitting on the street at the end of a warm day, splashing water around and laughing. Think of me, and I’ll think of you.
*(I'm working on some longer projects involving overtourism in Rome, and I couldn't help but think about this essay, which became part of a Lonely Planet guidebook sometime last year. This is a somewhat different version that I thought deserved another spin and I thought you deserved something a little lighter for this Sunday afternoon.)
