Rome is a wonderful city. Wonderful, primarily, because I don't live here. The grass is always greener — an observation as old as the world itself.
First things first: Signora Paradi, that rather plump, middle-aged woman who had greeted us at the hotel, briskly and cheerfully sorted us into our rooms — parents in one, Hermione and I each in separate ones. All perfectly proper, from any angle you care to consider. Every conceivable amenity was on offer, and what distinguished it from a large and expensive hotel was scale, not quality. Each room had its own bathroom, all the necessary furniture, light, cleanliness, and there was even a small restaurant in the same building. Breakfast included with the stay, everything else at a generous discount — if you were a guest, naturally.
What was missing? Well, Rome isn't a resort, and this wasn't that sort of hotel. No swimming pool. Did that matter? Not in the slightest.
After checking in, our first order of business was the restaurant on the other side of the building. Signora Paradi and her husband Luigi joined us for lunch, which stretched into long conversations about the past, about travels, about how they'd all come to know one another, and about life being generally rather splendid. Life becomes even more splendid, of course, with the assistance of skilled cooks. At the moment, the menu leant heavily toward vegetable dishes and various lamb preparations — that being the direction of the local cuisine.
In any case, sitting in that restaurant — quite calm and pleasant — I worked out several things. Father had known Luigi and his wife Francesca for a long time. Some shared adventures and dealings bound them together, and they could quite fairly be called good friends. Next: Mother and Hermione had taken warmly to Italian cooking, Roman cooking in particular. It was a hotel restaurant, after all, with a strong emphasis on local fare, though they could apparently produce anything from shepherd's pie to sushi — the ingredients were apparently all there.
Our parents decided to continue their evening with their acquaintances, having taken their advice to begin exploring the sights at first light.
"I'm going for a walk," I said, pushing back from the table. "I'd like to have a look at the city and the people."
I was dressed for summer — loose shorts, light trainers, a T-shirt — everything nearly white. And a rucksack, naturally.
"I'm coming with you," said Hermione, dressed similarly, continuing to ignore the existence of dresses and their like unless the occasion demanded otherwise.
"Won't you get lost?" Mum looked at us with some concern from across the table; Father, however, was confident in our ability to find our way back, if nothing else than through magic.
"We won't get lost," I assured her with a reassuring smile. "With our abilities, it's simply not possible."
"Abilities?" Madame Paradi asked, surprised.
"Perfect memory," I said, shrugging — and our parents took the hint and raised no objection to our walk.
Stepping out of the restaurant, we found ourselves in the shade of the neighbouring building, shielded from the scorching afternoon sun with just two steps along the tarmac path between rows of parked cars and assorted scooters.
"Where are we going?" Hermione looked slightly at a loss.
"Don't you know about the wizarding quarters in Rome?"
"None of the literature I've read about such places in Europe ever mentioned one in Rome. Though I don't suppose that's particularly strange."
"Then we'll just head into the centre."
I set off confidently along the pedestrian path, and Hermione fell into step beside me immediately.
"You know where you're going?"
"Of course."
"How?"
"Saw a map."
"And worked out where we are from that?"
"You could put it that way," I nodded.
We emerged onto a fairly wide, not especially busy street with a roundabout, and amongst the modern buildings — a couple of them rather tall — stood a church that was, at least on the outside, no less modern. I didn't know whose it was, and it didn't particularly matter. Another notable structure was something built from red brick, styled to look like an angular fortress. I mentally catalogued every building, every stretch of pavement, every detail and distinguishing feature of the surroundings, then walked on, heading north-west — or more precisely, west, if one were being honest. Moving in that direction, we would sooner or later find ourselves in the centre, somewhere near the Colosseum. The other landmarks were mostly clustered there as well — seven hills, all of that.
But my knowledge was fragmentary, and most of it belonged to a past life — things here might not be quite as I expected.
"You can't even imagine," Hermione was saying as we walked through the city. Ordinary still, for now — modern, tarmacked, with nothing ancient about the buildings around us.
"Imagine what, exactly?"
"Rome is an extraordinary city. There's so much here, so much to see, so many antiquities."
"I'd wager, Mione, that you'd find something worth seeing in any city whatsoever."
"Well, practically every old city has something like that... Something of that nature."
"Pithy."
It was rather engaging, walking along the sunny street amongst the locals — not tourists — noticing how on the right there was a modern building, its grey ground-floor walls covered in graffiti, and on the left some rather old structure, or at least an old-looking one, whose design and stonework simply oozed antiquity... which turned out to be some sort of institute. And of course, more graffiti. The longer you walked, the further your feet carried you through the city's streets, the more struck you were by the sheer quantity of it — street art absolutely everywhere. Not a single building without graffiti, whether a simple scrawl or elaborate artwork.
We were still in a part of the city of no interest to tourists, so there was nothing extraordinary around us. Though the vegetation did merit some attention. Familiar enough grass along the kerbsides, familiar-looking trees — and then, suddenly: a palm tree in the distance.
. . . . .
Walking at a brisk but unhurried pace, we idly peered into shop windows on the ground floors — glass-fronted boutiques or small corner shops alike — scanning everything around us for something of note, while my mind kept producing images of entirely different cities, not magical ones but places from a past life. Here in Rome, in the ordinary quarters rather than the historic ones, despite the difference in climate, I felt a strange sense of kinship that I had never felt anywhere in England. These buildings, their facades, their colours, their design, the arrangement of the little shops, the alleyways — all of it extraordinarily familiar, yet different. It made for a very interesting mental experience.
Sooner or later it was bound to happen. What, exactly? We encountered our first genuinely ancient structure — the Porta Asinaria. Though more accurately, we arrived at a road passing through a wall — eight arches, no less. The gates themselves were literally ten metres away. And my attention was also caught by something resembling a flea market, a shabby bazaar stretching the entire length of the street between the gates and the neighbouring buildings. A flea market... I hadn't thought of that word in a long time; a faint wave of nostalgia drifted through my thoughts. Memories surfaced of endless haggling with stallholders, the eternal "Ah, take-take, is good for you, is good." Then came analogues from the shards — markets from entirely different worlds, eras, and circumstances, yet absurdly identical. It seemed markets of this kind were one of the constants across all worlds.
Crossing through the Aurelian Wall felt like a transition of sorts — from ordinary city into historical. Or at least, that was the impression it gave. Immediately one's eye was drawn to such landmarks as the Lateran Basilica and Palace, the Scala Santa, the parks, the lawns, the cypresses pointing skyward.
Walking along the length of the Lateran Palace, Hermione and I stopped beside the obelisk.
"I can't read what it says," Hermione raised a hand to shade her eyes from the sun, squinting at the Egyptian hieroglyphs carved into the stone. "But it strikes me as rather ironic."
"The cross on top, you mean?"
"That among other things."
"Well..." I scratched my head. "During the time of the Roman Empire, a great many obelisks and other cultural treasures of Egypt were, shall we say, acquired."
"You were going to use a different word."
"Doesn't matter," I waved a hand, and we began circling the ancient relic together. "Someone was always taking something from somewhere — secretly, openly, through diplomacy or as trophies. It's always been that way. But placing a cross and a Catholic relic atop an obelisk from the Temple of Ra — and it's from there, if I'm remembering correctly — is very... predictable."
Having looked our fill at the relic, Hermione and I moved on down the street, and soon we were descending a slope along a narrow pedestrian path, paved with small stones. Walls to the right. Walls to the left. A tarmac road just wide enough for one car — two could never have passed, not that it mattered, as the traffic was one-way.
Walking past yet another church, one began to grasp that one was sinking deeper and deeper into the historical heart of Rome. Walls... Ancient ones, partially crumbling, built from bricks and stones of varying sizes, with greenery growing directly out of them. From another wall hung actual cascading shrubs of something climbing, and the architecture — a mixture of old buildings, new ones, intact and not — began to resemble mild delirium, or Picasso canvases.
One crossroads, and everything changed again. Now the pavements were tarmacked, and the road itself was cobblestone. Contrasts everywhere, contrasts everywhere — but one thing stood out: no tall buildings. Car parks, rubbish bins, awnings over market stalls, potted plants lining outdoor restaurant terraces, leaning road signs, the tarmac underfoot giving way once more to stone, someone's animated argument audible from a window above, restaurant patrons laughing loudly — and still no tourists. Why? Wrong street. I wasn't about to count us and two Americans with cameras as a "crowd."
There, in the distance, at the far end of this long straight lane, the Colosseum was just visible.
Walking the street to its end at last, we emerged onto a wide tarmacked road with tram tracks. To the left, not far off — a hill, tall trees, very pleasant. To the right, equally close — another hill, fewer trees, buildings visible, also pleasant. In the middle — the Colosseum, or rather what remained of it at the present day. Pleasant? In a manner of speaking. For some reason I felt no particular emotional response to the sight. Perhaps I had expected something more.
"Strange feeling," Hermione said slowly, studying the Colosseum walls across the road.
"In what sense?"
"Well — you come to Rome expecting something extraordinary and tremendous. And then you end up walking from a modern, slightly grubby city to a square full of historical monuments, passing through what felt like a rather unpleasant ghetto, and now you're back among grand antiquities. It feels more like a dig site."
"Oh, it is. And we haven't even seen the Roman Forum from the hill yet. From up there the whole thing looks like one enormous excavation."
"You're talking as though you've been there."
"Saw pictures in a magazine."
"Shall we go inside the Colosseum?"
"No, there'll be queues — you need tickets. Better to come with the parents first thing, especially as we're going with the Paradis. As locals, they'll take us to the right places — the real ones, not just the tourist traps. Though if you want the spirit of Rome, I know a neighbourhood worth visiting. Across the river."
I gestured westward — somewhere over there ought to be Trastevere, with its abundance of interesting little streets and eateries of every conceivable variety. I didn't precisely remember, I simply knew that there was where you could walk, look, and eat — if you timed it right, since Roman restaurants tended to operate on a schedule, opening for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and so on, though some opened a little earlier and closed a little later than the rest.
We walked round the Colosseum and headed toward the Circus Maximus, intending to cross the river from there into Trastevere. The area there was absolutely swarming with people — everyone going somewhere, looking at things, some photographing, others simply standing or sitting wherever they pleased. Though as we moved further from the Colosseum the crowds thinned rapidly — they had stayed behind, at the ruins, at the Arch of Triumph.
. . . . .
"I wonder," I said, glancing back at the Colosseum as we walked away from it. "What would happen if you cast Reparo on something that ancient?"
Hermione looked at me with an expression of mild surprise, almost bewilderment.
"Given," she began, with a faintly instructive tone, "that the complexity of the spell scales with the size of the object, its structural complexity, and the time elapsed since it was damaged... Nothing would happen. Nothing at all."
"Right, yes, you'd need rather a lot of power for that."
"And bear in mind that the Colosseum has been restored multiple times — they've certainly incorporated external structures and the like."
"Still, it would be amusing," I smirked. "Imagine — Romans wake up one morning and the Colosseum is standing there good as new."
"Hilarious, yes. The local MLE would find it particularly funny. It's a decent act in principle, but the phrase 'all hell breaking loose' wouldn't cover a tenth of the collective nightmare. If a wizard capable of such a thing ever appeared, imagine how terrified everyone would be of them. The sheer power involved..."
Perhaps someday I would attempt something of the sort. Not for the power — no. Simply to see what came of it, and watch that particular cauldron of unpleasantness that many call the wizarding world come to a rolling boil.
"...And anyway, how did you even arrive at that thought?"
"No idea," I shrugged as we crossed the road. "Just curious, I suppose. Here's this ancient ruin, something important and tremendous, and there's simply no way to restore it by ordinary means. But with magic — one wave, and there it is. Go look, go study."
"Pity it doesn't work that way."
And so we wandered the streets, and when we crossed the bridge over the Tiber into Trastevere... we carried on wandering, naturally. But this neighbourhood was far more interesting in every regard, even without any ancient relics as such. Narrow streets, buildings that looked as though they'd been designed and placed at random. The cobblestone roads twisted and turned constantly; long straight stretches were rare, and in certain spots — on irregular little piazzas — one could notice distinctive bare patches in the paving stones, a different colour from the rest: former fountains. These piazzas, resembling courtyards enclosed by buildings, were often home to the outdoor terraces of restaurants, of which there were enormous numbers here.
Ice cream was one of the essential purchases to make if you were walking here in summer. Though nothing prevented you from sampling the many other interesting dishes on offer, a good number of which were far removed from any notion of light eating. It was fortunate that our parents had thought ahead to exchange money into lire, otherwise we'd have been in some difficulty... Because during the entire walk through Rome, I had found absolutely nothing magical. Which meant no Gringotts, no currency exchange. Although — you could exchange pounds for lire at a bank here... My brain was very powerful, but that didn't make me a particularly forward-thinking intellectual.
Sitting at a table outside one of the little restaurants, in the shade, Hermione and I simply rested, satisfying the mild hunger that had built up over the long walk.
"It's fortunate there are so many tourists here," said my sister, looking around at the other patrons and the place itself — pleasant enough, in the shade, though too many people moving about to lend it any real atmosphere of calm.
"That's true. Otherwise neither of us speaks Italian. I've picked up a few words and phrases by now — enough to ask directions — but that's about it."
"Yes... I like this neighbourhood more."
"More than what?"
"More than everything. It feels... properly Italian here, unique. Whereas over there," Hermione gestured vaguely eastward, "it's like anywhere else."
"Well, there are plenty of tourists here too. Same as by the Colosseum. Though the prices are almost reasonable — not for everything and not everywhere, but still."
I looked around, taking in the ivy-covered walls and awnings, the mixed crowd of tourists and locals, the buildings and all the small details, and smiled.
"It's a unique neighbourhood," I continued. "Historical and fully residential at the same time, and partly commercial and touristy as well. Cramped, odd, chaotically laid out. The Colosseum, the Forums and the rest — those are historical monuments, heritage, and that makes them the same as all the other monuments. And the bustle around them is the same. But Trastevere is something distinct, its own thing. I'm sure tomorrow we'll go there with our parents, wander through the ruins and more, see everything... and it won't stay with us for long. But this neighbourhood — this you'll remember. That's just how it is."
We ended up walking almost until evening, but had ventured so far into the depths of the city that there was no strength left to walk back, and using public transport simply didn't appeal. On the other hand, we were now standing on the terrace of a little restaurant beside the observatory on Monte Mario — and yes, in this particular case, Hermione and I had cheated somewhat. The idea of walking up to what was probably the highest point in Rome had struck us as too absurd. We Apparated, concealing ourselves with magic — and the terrain had been scouted in advance by my phoenix-self. My phoenix-self, incidentally, had likewise detected nothing magical in Rome — if there was anything here, it was hidden a good deal better than in London, which was, in principle, not surprising.
We stood there and looked out over the city below, trying to commit the view to memory as best we could — it was magnificent from up here.
"We ought to be getting back," Hermione said at last. "Our parents will be starting to worry before long."
"If they haven't already."
We spent a couple of minutes finding a secluded corner and concealing ourselves with magic, then Apparated back near the hotel, dropping the concealment. Back in an ordinary neighbourhood. The magic of Rome hadn't ended — it had simply taken a break until morning. At seven o'clock we were already planning to be ready for a trip with our parents to the sights, the Colosseum first among them.
At the hotel, we discovered our parents had returned from their own outing some twenty minutes prior and were sitting in the restaurant — still in the company of the Paradis, as it happened — so we joined them for dinner, over which we told them about our walk. We did omit the visit to the observatory, naturally — too far away, impossible to reconcile with a simple walk on foot, and fabricating something felt quite unnecessary.
. . . . .
That night, once everyone had gone to bed, I set off on my own exploration of the nocturnal city, looking more carefully for any trace of something magical. Even the faintest hint would do. My phoenix-self flew very low as well, concealed by magic from ordinary people and wizards alike. The result? Nothing whatsoever. Granted, I hadn't covered the entire city, and it was entirely possible that the wizarding quarters here were hidden not like London's — reasonably close to the centre — but somewhere on the outskirts. Still, it was dispiriting.
I didn't return to my room until around two in the morning. I washed up and went to bed — morning was wiser than evening.
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