Home to Italy

The wings of the Boeing tilted and there below me were the dome of St. Peter’s, the terraces of the Coliseum, the broken columns of the Forum and the swift brown Tiber. My heart lifted, as it always does at the sight of Rome. To men of my generation, nurtured in a classical tradition, Rome must be always the world’s first city. At the age of seven it was more real to me than my native London. I knew the outlines of its history. On my nursery mantelpiece was a statuette of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome were the first poems I read. My imagination was lit by the picture of brave Horatius seeing “on Palatinus the white porch of his home.” The Tiber, “Father Tiber to whom the Romans pray,” had a glamor that my own Thames lacked. To a new generation for whom Latin is not a required subject, Rome cannot have the same significance. Yet, surely even now it is “The Eternal City.”

On this trip I was not stopping in Rome, I was bound for Sicily for Taormina, where I had not been before, and in retrospect I am forced to admit that it was the least successful holiday I have ever taken. The weather was appalling. I did not swim once. Only twice in a couple of weeks was it warm enough for the hotel to set out its lunch tables on the terrace. During a two-day excursion by motor coach to Palermo over an atrocious road, it rained uninterruptedly. There is nothing to do, in Taormina, in weather such as that. There is a fine Greek theater, for which half an hour suffices. The town is a semicircle of houses set half way up a hill. During the twenty minutes that it takes you to walk from one end of it to the other, you will find several vantage spots from which to get a superb view of the coast and of snow-capped Etna. But that is all. Sicily needs the sun. The manager of my hotel assured me that there was no precedent for rain in May. “Why, it is so hot here that our season ends in June. Tomorrow, you will see; the skies will clear.” But the rains persisted. A rain- ruined holiday in fact. Yet, I returned to England, refreshed and restored; as I always do after a trip to Italy.

AW

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Alec Waugh

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The wings of the Boeing tilted and there below me were the dome of St. Peter’s, the terraces of the Coliseum, the broken columns of the Forum and the swift brown Tiber. My heart lifted, as it always does at the sight of Rome. To men of my generation, nurtured in a classical tradition, Rome must be always the world’s first city. At the age of seven it was more real to me than my native London. I knew the outlines of its history. On my nursery mantelpiece was a statuette of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome were the first poems I read. My imagination was lit by the picture of brave Horatius seeing “on Palatinus the white porch of his home.” The Tiber, “Father Tiber to whom the Romans pray,” had a glamor that my own Thames lacked. To a new generation for whom Latin is not a required subject, Rome cannot have the same significance. Yet, surely even now it is “The Eternal City.”

On this trip I was not stopping in Rome, I was bound for Sicily for Taormina, where I had not been before, and in retrospect I am forced to admit that it was the least successful holiday I have ever taken. The weather was appalling. I did not swim once. Only twice in a couple of weeks was it warm enough for the hotel to set out its lunch tables on the terrace. During a two-day excursion by motor coach to Palermo over an atrocious road, it rained uninterruptedly. There is nothing to do, in Taormina, in weather such as that. There is a fine Greek theater, for which half an hour suffices. The town is a semicircle of houses set half way up a hill. During the twenty minutes that it takes you to walk from one end of it to the other, you will find several vantage spots from which to get a superb view of the coast and of snow-capped Etna. But that is all. Sicily needs the sun. The manager of my hotel assured me that there was no precedent for rain in May. “Why, it is so hot here that our season ends in June. Tomorrow, you will see; the skies will clear.” But the rains persisted. A rain- ruined holiday in fact. Yet, I returned to England, refreshed and restored; as I always do after a trip to Italy.