The Romans thought of it as a sewer outlet and as a source of water for the city's surprisingly efficient water delivery system. Modern Romans do their best to ignore it now that it is carefully channeled between flood prevention walls. I decided to stop the scooter on a whim and take long look at this ancient and valuable waterway. Parking the scooter was easy even on a slope. I just walked it back in to the space between cars, engaged the front wheel lock and the hand brake and walked away.
A couple of Romans seemed to be on their lunch break meditating upon e river flowing in front of them. They sat apart, unspeaking and ignoring each other, sitting on their private piles of newspaper to keep their bottoms clean.
I discovered an absentee landlord's temporarily unoccupied bedroom in the corner nook of the river wall. Rome has it's homeless population too like any dynamic city. Here they call them barboni, which I find rather offensive as it refers to their beards as a term of derision. Barbarians were a bearded menace to Romans and the word is the root of a modern barber who removes your beard for you. But I digress.
The river rises in Emilia Romagna 250 miles to the north and flows though my home region of Umbria where I shall be motorcycling this weekend. It was a major waterway in Roman times but the river has a tendency to silt making navigation difficult or impossible without dredging which doesn't happen anymore.
It's an unattractive shade of green around here and you won't see many Romans amusing themselves on or in it. Italians aren't much given to watersports not least because the fiscal police (Guardia di Finanza) have the unhappy habit of assessing taxes based on assets and not just on income. So owning an expensive boat might be a bit of a give away...But some people get out on the water and enjoy it anyway.
I saw another dude possibly on lunch break enjoying the water after a fashion. He was probably on the phone but I at first thought he was doing tai chi of all things.
My wife asked me about whether people live on boats on the river but I have no knowledge of such eccentric behavior. I lived in a house in Italy and never even imagined people might live on boats. I only took the practice up myself when I moved to California. I did see a river fire house moored to the bank complete with satellite tv dishes.
Legend has it that the twins Romulus and Remus founded the city after the she wolf plucked the orphans from the river and looked after them as shown on the shield of the modern city. SPQR incidentally means Senatus Populusque Romano, which in English translates as The Senate And People of Rome, by whose will all things were done in the ancient Republic.
Naturally things went badly between the brothers and Remus lost the dispute to Romulus as to which hill to build the new city on, and with Remus dead it was an easy choice to name the new city after himself, Romulus. The bores of history tells us that the city was actually founded by Etruscans along their eastern border but as no one knows anything much about them the she wolf story gets more traction in our modern short attention span lifestyle. For modern Romans the river is a nuisance...
...requiring the rushing traffic to be funneled into narrow bridges running across the thick green water that is not unfortunately thick enough to support even a modest little scooter.
It is an ignominious fate for such a storied body of water.
1 comment:
I was disappointed that the River was so ignored in Rome. Not at all like the Seine in Paris of even the Mississippi in eastern Iowa where I grew up. They couldn't even agree how to pronounce it. Tiber with a long I or Tiber with a short I. Cuz Lynn
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