The day I got back from Milan, Liam arrived in Rome from London. While we didn’t swim the Tiber, as I’d hoped, we did manage to pack a shedload into the week that he was here. Here’s a sample.
1. Drinking Danish beer (Tuborg) in possibly the oldest bar in the world. That is, the remarkably preserved ruins of a bar at Ostia Antica, dating from the first century AD ( called the Thermopyleum)! Liam had heard that Ostia Antica was a good place to visit, much like Pompeii. It surpassed both our expectations. I was thinking maybe a block or two of ruins. Try an entire town with a two kilometer main road, amphiteatre, forum, you name it. This was the commercial hub, the sea-port at the time of the republic. We strolled around the ruins for most of the day – and when we found the bar, complete with feint frescos, earthenware jars, and most imporatantly, beer-garden / courtyard, we went to the merchandise-café area a few blocks away and bought ourselves a couple of ambers to drink with the ghosts of ancient Roman merchants.
2. Bernini in 30 seconds. Well, in truth, we saw a fair bit of Bernini, and there are no better sculptures than Apollo and Daphne and The Rape of Proserpine in the Museo Borghese. Hmmm. How to describe these? Both are remarkable in that they capture sheer movement in stasis, climactic episodes from Ovid’s metamorphosis. The former – marble representing flesh becoming wood – depicts the precise moment Daphne transforms into a tree. Her hips are wrapped in bark, her fingers metamorphose into the most delicate leaves. The latter shows Proserpine trying to flee the amorous advances of Pluto; his hardness is contrasted with her suppleness where his hand presses into her thigh. The indentation his hand makes on her thigh makes the marble look like flesh, and draws all manner of gasps. After this, we bolted to the church down the road to see Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa – a controversial piece that makes the saint look more like a lover in the throws of sexual passion than anything pious. The problem was, we arrived half a minute before mass started, and so only got the most cursory of glimpses of the work – though it was impressive enough to burn itself into my memory as though I’d stared at it for an hour or more.
3. Aperitivi in the Café Greco. 
I used to hang out here a bit in the first couple of months after my arrival, a café brimming with literary cache, where everyone from Mark Twain to Arthur Schopenhauer, Goethe to Shelley used to drink. These days it’s more of an upmarket-looking tea-house, but they do serve fantastic aperitivi at the bar. So it was aperol and free salmon sandwhiches in the early evening, just a few doors down the Via Condoti from the Spanish Steps. Gold.
4. Beer at the Trevi. You might be getting the impression that there is a constant in these highlights, that being: beer. And if so, you’d be right. But this was certainly one of the best beers I’ve had in Rome. We hit the Trevi in the evening, the best time to view the fountain, and sat in the middle of the steps facing it. Liam disappeared and returned with two brews. The tide of people ebbed and flowed around us as night descended. For some reason, it was just one of those perfect beers.
5. Reading John Forbes poems in full, drunken voice, and engaging in heated debate about the world’s problems – from Sarkozy to Mugabe, Mussolini to Vanstone – on the terrace of the studio, until dawn. Alcohol involved. Complaints from neighbours the next day (but hey, the first and only complaints since I arrived, and apparently they were much more frequent with former residents).
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