Youth

Roman holiday

Duncan Fallowell

Supporting upon the soft bridge of her nose a pair of thick, lime-green-glitter, pebble-lensed, cat's-eye Miami spectacles, and one haemorrhaging foot scarcely across the threshold of the Pantheon, a rebarbative Brooklyn lady, whose body seemed to have been built up from separated milk solids, declaimed in a whisper which disregarded the acoustical properties of the building, " Christ, another goddam tomb! Ain't Europe got nothing else? ", an observation which has point, particularly in that lushly-upholstered dormitory town called Rome. Urbs aeterna, I know. But how long is eternity? Might it not have ended yesterday? One sometimes has that feeling. In which case, where are we now? It would be blockheaded to endorse all such put-downs of the treasures: they stand there like our founding fathers, massive outcrops of masonry tending to topple, sheltering smaller pieces carved by Medusa's children. And Borromini is an authentic weirdo who could make stone creep like flesh. But there is no denying it, the rustle of superseded cultures can echo through the city as desolately as the cry of a banshee over an Irish bog.

Such pressure grows brutal and would choke any community. International hostess for centuries, Rome has now attached its fortunes even more resolutely to the past, its population an affair of passports, its economy a flutter of travellers' cheques, the occasional healthy kick of resentment (viz, the genius who lifted £55 out of my pocket with the sangfroid of a scorpion), otherwise only too willing to skip and expose itself for a dollar. And so, as a capital city, It must pay the reciprocal price in terms of original contemporary energy. For reasons it might be distracting to go into here I adore Rome but its excitement does tend to have 'Fifties Flash stamped on it, a cautious chi-chi which they spend millions from Las Vegas to Waikiki trying to reproduce.

The social tempo is set by unyoung foreigners: amiable queens and salonieres propos, film people with synthetic features and intertribal names (would you believe Jimmy de Goldstein?), sabbatical professors, postgraduates with spades, heiresses in search of their fortunes, novelists you won't have read, scions of Manhattan Jewry blowing the profits from grandpa's sock factory in Pittsburgh. Rome must boast the world's ritziest stew of hasbins, willbees and neverwozzes, all more or less fed by a host of dry-cleaned priapic gigolos suffering from a collective mother hang-up (like all Latin males). At the last junction on the endless drift south, before the real heat begins, these sun-stroked macaws have somehow come to a halt in the city and sink slowly into its stonework clutching their Kinross Specials. And I can th'ink of worse ways to go. It is reassii. ig that due to the endless ingenuity of the specius these scattered pockets of self-induunce can still be found. I spent two months among them, which is just about the right length of time before the expatriate fug hits you like a poultice.

From the Pincio let your eye travel across one of Europe's finest urban views.

All of Rome in one snapshot, surprisingly small. Now get down to street level. Narcissus is everywhere, a superficial sexuality evaporating off him like cold ether, In some respects he makes our permissive society seem, well, reticent. But, first impressions in this case are deceptive. The movements in his brain are trad, preacid, pre-McLuhan, pre-socio-ecological, pre-war one might say. The youth of Rome swaggers in some private Playboyland where they will all one day be Hugh Hefners. The entire scope of ideas loosely dubbed 'the alternative society ' and the controversies to which this gives rise (which in Northern Europe and America is now our primary cultural concern) hardly intrudes upon a male chauvinism which inclines to callousness or, at best, naiveté. Either way, it is disarming.

Despite the anti-pollution bomb blasts in the north around Milan, despite the leering

example of Venice, the penny refuses to

drop. Despite the largest Communist Party this side of the Iron Curtain, Italian life throughout all classes is almost a parody of the bourgeois ethic. A primitive family tyranny attempts to keep the imagination at square one. Their private materialism, for instance, is so pronounced as to be almost transparent. To survive in Rome, indeed simply to correspond, demands a deep withdrawal from these new and vital areas which the hip mentality has been exploring over the last decade or so. We unveil a thousand dream utopias every day and bicker about them; they are content with Shirley Bassey and old opera. Which comes first as a shock, then a relief, then a kind of durab paralysis in large regions of one's thinking. It is very seductive if you're not concerned with the nitty-gritty.

In this resides 'the holiday,' from one's friends and oneself, from new norms of intercourse, from that surfeit of adrenalin which sharpens the vision and which the heavily industrialised Northern psycho chemical mechanism employs to generate body heat in the absence of sun. Where is Luciano Berio? He lives in America now.

I was lolling on the Spanish Steps in what evidently seemed a position of classical repose cum hif when on looking

up from Dharma Burns I saw two men circling. In black shades, black polo necks,

black crew cuts, they could only just have

failed the auditions for Fritz the Cat. Contact. Do you know where we can score? Two Australian soldiers looking for a light

buzz. Some chat about Sydney being wild and easy. OK, OK, I get the message, you may be in the army but you are still part of the 'Now' generation etc. Up to a point I believe that barracks depravity routine. Soldiers have far more in common with people than you might expect. But Roma just isn't Dope City. I gave what advice I could. For those for whom rip-off clip joints do not seem the perfect way to spend a five-day leave I recommend a bottle of wine, half a bottle of Sambuca, and a few of those tranquillisers you can buy at the chemist in sachets of four at two hundred lire a throw. At this point things should begin to happen. No, I can't join you. In half an hour I'm meeting a Knight of Malta at Babington's for Knickerbocker Glories. Later in the week I came across one of them doing the carousel inside the huge lavatory pan of the Colosseum, the world's most eye-catching traffic island, now on the way down. Apparently I could well have been killed by flying masonry. He was looking somewhat estropie, I thought.

When it comes to being way out, Rome doesn't have a Schwabing, a Greenwich Village, a Notting Hill Gate, nor even a Chelsea. Although the area round the Campo dei Fiori is trendying up, with the odd painter or assistant director in its crooked romantic houses, Trastevere is the nearest they come to it, a Left Bank of sorts on the other side, particularly lively in and around the Via Garibaldi. II Spazio Zero is on the crest of an environmental wave at present, with inflatables and contact sculptures everywhere and a rather appealing atmosphere of mucking about in boats. The Rising Workshop is less solemn still, a soigné orgy hangout whose denizens save all questions till later and had me going back to the Satyricon for references.

Apart from its corny name, Beat '72 is the place for experimental drama but whenever I went there it was closed. Perhaps this was one of the experiments, unless they had inadvertently locked themselves in. Somewhere around here is Giugliano Vasilico, a latterday descendant of the Commedia dell' Arte, a less acerbic Petrolini, who has rewritten Hamlet for four male parts and himself in particular.

Painters: few and obscure, hanging out in Via Margutta apartments.

Writers: Alberto Moravia with a court of sycophantic apprentices, Peter Menegas passing through.

Film-makers: huge commercial set-ups only and Anthony Quinn still playing the roué in Harry's Bar.

Playwrights: Jerome Max runs a cute line in sardonic self-deprecation .somewhere near St Peter's.

Music: with the help of his patroness Natalie Lavine (or maybe 'La Vine' — she never gave me any cheques), Vittorio ' Tivoli ' Ulisse processes sounds from water with electronic machines, a beautiful if somewhat perilous extension of Rome's famous aqua fetish.

Dance: Cattza Palombo knows how to move in a low dive near the Station, which also features strippers, a Val Parnell light show, Italian rock music, and bad films (a great place this, the haunt of insomniacs, pimps, crooks, sailors, Natalie Lavine, and me).

The University: adjacent to barracks and police depots, it looks like one of their recruiting establishments and runs crash courses in Italian.

The Alternative Press: the what?

Rome is not the hottest place for sparky young people to live and its capacity for enchanting visitors out of their wits may be the only truly eternal thing about it. But those who think the Beverly Wiltshire

is the fin-de-siècle apogee of our time should linger a little on the Via Veneto

where the style is that degree more stylish and the mentality that bit more disconnected and the whoring unabashed. In fact for anyone with an axe to grind, whether left or right or cloud-cuckoo-land, a social sojourn is recommended. They will tell you to shut up, stop being boring, have some more wine and who've you been sleeping with lately?—a brand of therapy needed by many people. Perhaps it is all dreadfully passe, the behaviour very predictable (so often were my meals accompanied by 0 Sole Mio ' that, like Pavlov's dogs, I now start salivating whenever I hear it), and yes, if you are twenty you will look like every other twenty-year-old and probably like everyone else as well, dividing only by sex, which is a right bore after London where the people look like nothing on earth, least of all each other, and certainly don't divide by sex; and it is extremely expensive, and unless you like wandering about under a hot moon or watching films of blonde buxom vampires (interesting that our vampires always have black hair) or getting drunk in the Piazza Navona, you might be pushed for something to do in the evenings by way of passive entertainment, and you might end up with a grand lovehate passion for the place similar to mine. Oh, and Spartacus? Like the Decameron, he is any one of a dozen films these days.