Reading Week in the Eternal City

On my first full day in Rome, the city is damp and wet, but mercifully the temperature has climbed above zero, and last week’s heavy snowfall is nothing but a melting memory.  That said, as we made the final approach into Fiumicino, I noticed that the hills to the north were all still wrapped in a mantle of white, as if preparing for their first communion.  I joke with friends about the extraordinary but quite unnecessary efforts they have made to make this particular canadien errant feel right at home.  They laugh, and beg me to take it back to Canada.  Snow is a rarity in Rome.  The last major snowfall was back in March 1985, and by coincidence I was also in the city at that time.  I remember rushing to the Pantheon to watch large flakes drift gently down through the oculus, a sight never to be forgotten, and one that I am unlikely to ever see again. 

But by mid week the skies have cleared, the sun is shining, and the temperatures are soaring.  It reaches 18 degrees on Friday – shirt-sleeve weather, and the outdoor cafés are doing a good business.  The air is now soft, and pregnant with the promise of spring.  The season is turning – and in a post-Berlusconi Italy, both literally and metaphorically.  Change is very much in the air – change that may be difficult to manage in the short term, but that most agree is necessary, indeed vital, for a sustainable future.

I perform my usual rituals: a quick visit to the Pantheon, which seems more crowded than ever, and for the first time in memory has instituted a one-way system through the single doorway, to separate those entering from those exiting; a dinner at La Campana, a restaurant which has existed in the same location and under the same name for more than 500 years, since at least the pontificate of Alexander VI Borgia; and a stop to pay my respects to my former friend and mentor, Leonard Boyle, whose tomb lies in a space that played a prominent role in shaping both our lives.  Some things don’t change – ever.

It is a week for friends old and new, one of the many advantages of staying in a residential community of scholars, the British School at Rome.  In the Library I meet a former colleague from the University of Victoria, and over a plate of pasta we catch up on the 12 years that have passed since our paths last crossed.  Italian colleagues are anxious to tell me of recent discoveries, and I am plied with books and offprints.  I spend a memorable morning with colleagues from the “Soprintendenza del Foro Romano” in the excavated medieval church of S. Maria Antiqua, where the expert restoration, just concluding, has revealed various novità.

I am asked repeatedly about the state of universities in Canada, and I respond that we are doing OK, at least in comparison to Europe. The Drummond report contained no enormous unpleasant surprises, and now we await the provincial budget to see what our future will hold.  In the interim, reconnecting with my life as a scholar is a welcome break from the usual grind of administrative tedium.