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March 24, 2008
Religious Holidays, National Holidays, and Weather
Pasquetta, Easter Monday, is a national holiday in Italy. I warned the students to stock up on groceries, because they couldn't be certain that anything in their neighborhoods would be open. I haven't been out for a walk yet, but the centro storico is so shut down that there are open parking spaces on my street. That's just not normal!
Something else that wasn't normal - yesterday's weather. It's been rainy all week, but yesterday was a doozy of weird. It reminded me of nothing so much as Houston. I know that everyone everywhere says "if you don't like the weather wait 15 minutes," and people in the Finger Lakes say that a lot, but in Houston we regularly had an inch or two of rain fall in an hour framed by absolute gorgeousness. I occasionally took off my shoes and waded home to Hanszen College barefoot (aided by my militant refusal to wear socks with penny loafers). Once that happened while I was in a bookstore - I never even knew it was raining! A friend and I walked to the Village to buy books for the fall, spent an hour in a (mainly) used bookstore, and came out to streets full of water. I learned that day why the sidewalks in the Village were elevated about a foot off the street level.
Rome had that kind of rain yesterday - and in three bursts. It rained enough all morning that I carried an umbrella to 11 a.m. mass at the Chiesa Nuova (Gregorian chant, but Italian ordinary - the reform of the reform). During the sermon we started to hear thunder, and by the time we were leaving the streets were flowing streams. I dodged across the street relatively dryly. By the time I finished lunch it had cleared up - downright blue skies. I went out for gelato and a walk and got trapped by the next storm at the Pantheon. Things could've been worse - I could have been soaked in the streets or, for instance, in Geneva, where the predicted high was 24. Good people watching - and the canons had a row of reliquaries out on the altar, so there was something to pray about. So then I continued my walk (successfully procrastinating grading until today; I observed the glorious feast of Easter by refusing to do any academic work). The centro was bustling with tourists; I think every Italian with living blood kin who wasn't employed in the tourist trade was home fixing or eating dinner. While it was Spaniards everywhere you looked during Holy Week, the Germans seemed especially thick on the ground yesterday.
So I was strolling home around 4 and thinking of swinging a block out of my way for an espresso at Gerri's Bar (my current fave - on the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II and definitely worth stopping - on my side of the street between the Cancelleria and the Chiesa Nuova - good place to sit, even, which you can't say about most caffe in Rome) when it started to get darker. Much darker. So I decided to make my own espresso anyway (I need to use up the can before I leave, after all) and was rewarded by getting home just before an absolute gullywasher came down. It was raining so much and blowing so hard against the front of my building that the red paint (or whatever it is they use - it's really more like a whitewash, only colored) ran down over my windows. Really. Afterwards the marble windowsill was rosy. Streams of water were corkscrewing off the Chiesa Nuova - where the gutters were backed up by the flow the water was trying to cascade off, but the wind was so strong that the streams got blown back up into the air. Really amazing weather.
I'm hoping for a slightly drier week, since we're supposed to go to Ostia for drawing and photography (and perhaps a little impromptu lecture from me? you think?) on Wednesday! However, it's currently (9:11 a.m., Monday, 3/24/08) HAILING. If I were pope I might call for another round of penitential processions, even though we're supposed to be past that for awhile.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at March 24, 2008 9:11 AM
Comments
Patchy, too. No hail up here in Monteverde, but some big trees down in the Villa Sciara.
Posted by: Jeremy Cherfas at March 24, 2008 1:13 PM
A particularly vivid and enjoyable post! I can't lose the image of the red paint being washed over the windows: I would probably have assumed it was blood, and freaked.
Christos anestos!
Posted by: Kalynne Pudner at March 24, 2008 2:36 PM