Cafe Greco

After visiting the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij, I went for a stroll to the Piazza di Spagna to sit on the Spanish Steps. On the way, I ducked into the Café Greco on the Via Condotti (the famous shopping street I mentioned in an earlier post).

Because it was Friday night, I felt a little underdressed, flanked as I was by the Prada store, and next to it, Yves Saint Lauren, with Valentino and Armani just a few doors down. A lot, it seems, has changed since 1891, when Chekov wrote (in a letter to a Moscow friend), “neckties are amazingly cheap here, so terribly cheap that I may even take to eating them"!

Now, I remember in high-school debating the topic, ‘That clothes make the man’, and I objectively imagine myself not being fazed at all by such things, but being surrounded by fashionistas while wearing a t-shirt I picked up somewhere back home for ten bucks, coupled with being alone, made me feel as though I could do with a whiskey… or four.

And what better place to do this than Café Greco. This was the ‘local’ for countless eighteenth and nineteenth century artists; the café/bar’s regular clientele included Goethe, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Mark Twain, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nikolai Gogol, Byron, William Thackery and Hans Christian Anderson; composers, Liszt, Wagner, Bizet and Medelssohn; as well as mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (favourite subject of Australian infant terrible Michael Dransfield’s!). (Strangely enough, the café doesn’t really trade too much on this fact.)

I must’ve had three whiskeys in fifteen minutes at the bar, and was feeling quite a bit better. What’s more, they serve sandwiches and nuts with every drink – apparently it’s the law – so you get quite a meal with a few beverages. When I walked out onto the street I no longer cared a jot about the fashionistas (I suppose I wasn’t looking particularly derelict!), and felt altogether un-selfconscious.

I stopped only briefly at the Spanish Steps, wrote a few lines, then decided to leave. On my way back to the tram I took a detour and wandered into the Sant-Ignazio di Loyala, the church of the famous Jesuit saint (the first Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesu, is nearby, but I haven’t been in yet). Now I haven’t been to St. Peter’s (building up to it, you might say) but this is a remarkable church; the frescos on the ceiling, which must be ten storeys high, are very dramatic. Giant figures peer down at you as if they’re leaning over a ledge – all the more exciting, possibly, after a few whiskeys.

I spent about twenty minutes in the church with my jaw on the floor – when I left, I made the sign of the cross with some holy water on my forehead; it’s hard not to, really. As when in Westminster Abbey (see earlier post) all those years at a religious boarding school seemed to flood back; some habits are hard to break, it seems.