The Villa Borghese

Romans stroll about, smoking, or ride crazy on pedal carts – the sheer chaos of the place. Wild excess of the palazzo – every room decked in late Baroque frescoes, every niche filled with sculpture, the ancient, the Baroque, the merely kitsch. Italian Unification heroes on massive brass horses. Buses barreling down the avenues, dodging the pedal carts. The whole park is the massive grounds of the Borghese palazzo; really obscene wealth in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The equestrian grounds, the Piazza Siena, are a long oval filled with sand and some kind of fibrous fluff, wool or cotton, that keeps the sand down. At one end theater steps climb the hillside. As the sun sets, people sit on the stairs in the last rays and smoke, read newspapers. Children play baseball in the piazza, Ben joins in, it’s all Italo-American goofiness, surrounded by crumbling 17th century glory. Later, Ben rents a pedal cart that’s low to the ground, red, a go-cart almost, and races his new baseball friends down the paths, dodging giggling four-year-olds, driving each other off paths like squat chariot racers in Hollywood movies.

I go for a stroll, find myself on the edge of the park, a promenade on a steep cliff overlooking the Piazza del Popolo and the city. The sun is setting behind the dome of St. Peter’s, a military orchestra is playing something not very marshal, something quite charming, in the piazza below. The rooftops are tinged pink, and a murmuration of starlings is diving and weaving across the sky. We have decided to stay in Rome an extra two weeks.

- by Sarah