Eat, Pray, Love

gio paintings always make me feel weepy and overwhelmed, but I cheer myself up by moving
to the other side of the church and enjoying a fresco which features the happiest, goofiest,
giggliest little baby Jesus in all of Rome.
I start walking south again. I pass the Palazzo Borghese, a building that has known many
famous tenants, including Pauline, Napoleon’s scandalous sister, who kept untold numbers of
lovers there. She also liked to use her maids as footstools. (One always hopes that one has
read this sentence wrong in one’s Companion Guide to Rome, but, no—it is accurate. Pauline
also liked to be carried to her bath, we are told, by “a giant Negro.”) Then I stroll along the
banks of the great, swampy, rural-looking Tiber, all the way down to the Tiber Island, which is
one of my favorite quiet places in Rome. This island has always been associated with healing.
A Temple of Aesculapius was built there after a plague in 291 BC; in the Middle Ages a hos-
pital was constructed there by a group of monks called the Fatebene-fratelli (which can
groovily be translated as “The Do-Good Brothers”); and there is a hospital on the island even
to this day.
I cross over the river to Trastevere—the neighborhood that claims to be inhabited by the
truest Romans, the workers, the guys who have, over the centuries, built all the monuments
on the other side of the Tiber. I eat my lunch in a quiet trattoria here, and I linger over my food
and wine for many hours because nobody in Trastevere is ever going to stop you from linger-
ing over your meal if that’s what you would like to do. I order an assortment of bruschette,
some spaghetti cacio e pepe (that simple Roman specialty of pasta served with cheese and
pepper) and then a small roast chicken, which I end up sharing with the stray dog who has
been watching me eat my lunch the way only a stray dog can.
Then I walk back over the bridge, through the old Jewish ghetto, a sorely tearful place that
survived for centuries until it was emptied by the Nazis. I head back north, past the Piazza
Navona with its mammoth fountain honoring the four great rivers of Planet Earth (proudly, if
not totally accurately, including the sluggish Tiber in that list). Then I go have a look at the
Pantheon. I try to look at the Pantheon every chance I get, since I am here in Rome after all,
and an old proverb says that anyone who goes to Rome without seeing the Pantheon “goes
and comes back an ass.”
On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most
strangely affecting—the Augusteum. This big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a glori-
ous mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of his fam-
ily for all of eternity. It must have been impossible for the emperor to have imagined at the
time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus-worshipping empire. How
could he possibly have foreseen the collapse of the realm? Or known that, with all the aque-
ducts destroyed by barbarians and with the great roads left in ruin, the city would empty of cit-