Roman Routines

I wrote this post in one of my last weeks during study abroad but forgot to post it. Found it among a pile of drafts and decided to share.

The nostalgia crystallized a few weeks ago. Every time I walked past a monument or ordered a meal at a restaurant that’s become one of my “regulars” I wondered: Is this it? Is this the last time I’ll see the Colosseum? The last time I eat a pizza from Dar Poeta?

There is this distinct feeling that things are winding down here. On Saturday, we move out of our apartments.  As summer begins, so ends my semester in Rome.

In the beginning, it was overwhelming and unfamiliar when it should have been so simple. I couldn’t walk on the cobblestones without tripping. I didn’t where to look for a street sign when I was lost. I couldn’t even pronounce arrivederci.

Someday I will forget the name of the street I lived on and I will forget which bus takes me to the Vatican. And this, really, is what it is like to leave Rome.

It’s good-bye to a city that has become a second home and a life that has so quickly become normal, as routine as my breakfast at Bar San Calisto. As habitual as my walk past the flower stand on Viale de Trastevere.

No matter how bad my day was, no matter how many Italians looked at me like I was an idiot, seeing that little stand on my walk reminded me to smile, to acknowledge I was living in Italy.

I first noticed the nameless awning. There’s a lack of branding in this country that would never work in America. How many restaurants in Rome are simply called ristorante? Owners don’t need names. To their customers, it is simply the restaurant on Via Garibaldi. The pizzeria near Piazza Trilussa. The flower stand on Viale Trastevere.

The owner of the flower stand was always chatting on his cell phone. He’d smoke cigarettes and yell at the nearby taxi drivers. He’d gesture wildly with his hands in a way that was just quintessential Italy.

His stand isn’t like that of one selling souvenirs. He doesn’t push his product onto people because his customers are all locals. No tourist will buy a bouquet when they’re living in a hotel for a week.

I promised myself back in January that I’d one day buy a bouquet to prove I was not a tourist. That I lived in this city like any other Italian.

It never happened. I kept putting it off, telling myself the flowers were unnecessary, that they’d die within a week. That was my American mindset: practicality.

But here I am, at the end of the semester, regretting my lack of a purchase. It took five months, but I now see value in those flowers. They represent Italy and this country’s love for appreciating the little things even if they’re only temporary.

I am not sad to leave the Rome of the Trevi fountain and tourists. I am sad to leave the Rome that has become my home and the little things that became my routine. My Roman routine. Like passing that flower stand a couple of times each day.

The old me would never shell out a couple of bucks to buy a plant destined to wilt. But this pang of regret I am experiencing now is how I know how much I have changed. Or really, how much Italy — and that little unnamed flower stand — changed me.