Rome – First Impressions

Ann keeps telling me that no one reads my posts because they are too long, so I am going to chop them up into little digests as an experiment, and I’m going to start with our arrival in Rome.

Fiumicino airport is average, as airports go. It isn’t an architectural wonder, but it isn’t dysfunctional either. We collected our bags without incident and headed to the train station in the airport. There’s a very easy train connection from the airport to downtown Rome, which takes about a half hour. Except that our trip took closer to an hour, for which the recorded voice expressed its sorrow. I got the feeling that recording was played a lot.

As with most train lines, it isn’t the most scenic ride into the city. You pass through a lot of suburbs where there are low, tan colored apartment blocks lined up against the tracks. The two things I noticed were the abundance of hanging laundry and satellite dishes. In many ways it reminded me of Moscow.

Roma Termini is the central station, and it’s suitably huge. It’s also suitably dirty. We walked from there to our hotel (only about ten blocks), and my initial impression was that Rome was a dirtier than average city. My second impression was that I walked ten blocks and didn’t see a single ruin! Obviously, I had to readjust my expectations.

Before I leave you with the impression that Rome is unimpressive, let me be clear: Rome is an extremely impressive city. Just not from a cleanliness or architectural beauty viewpoint.

What IS impressive about Rome is its scale. It’s a big city, and it’s full of fast moving people and traffic, but at the same time it conveys a sense of time that is more Mediterranean than most northern European countries. People stop on the streets in the middle of the narrow sidewalks and chat to each other. The waiters never hurry to serve you. The attitude is both friendly and aggressive at the same time, a bit like New York actually. And the Romans know that they are the center of Italy.

More on Rome later, but thought I’d leave you with these first impressions to begin with.