Snapshot: Piazza Navona, Rome

On this Sunday in Rome, day 2 of a quick sojourn from Milan where we were visiting family, it was to be a day of wandering and eating – seeing what we could in the short time we had. We – G’s father, Nonna and I – had been to Rome before, so we weren’t keen to stand in long queues with a 5-year-old and ‘do’ any big ticket items. (I have an irrational dislike of travellers saying they ‘did’ anything … ‘we did Paris, Prague etc’ or ‘we did the colosseum, Vatican etc’, as though they conquered these places by way of selfie, only to move hastily onto the next place to ‘do’).

Piazza Navona was one I had spent some time in as a young backpacker twenty years earlier, and again a few years after that. That first time, it had been empty of Romans, save for a few running the restaurants. It was around 15 August that time, and although I had known then that most Italians escaped their homes for a break when the summer heat peaked, particularly those in the big cities, I’d had no idea about Ferragosto on 15 August, a public holiday where the only place to be is the beach with family and friends. I remember wandering into that beautiful piazza several times during that first trip, feeling travel- and heat-weary, and taking solace in the sound of the water flowing steadily from the fountains and the shade that those monolithic statues offered.

I did not want this visit to Rome to be without a quick walk around the piazza, to see its light and magnificence in the September sun and take my son to sit by the Fontana del Moro to enjoy the same feeling of respite from the Roman heat that I had felt all those years ago.

We left Nonna outside the piazza – Nonna having a phobia of statues and this piazza being one of the no-go zones of Rome – and walked past the sushi restaurant and through the side entrance lined with palm readers, me sensing my 22-year-old self walking beside us as I felt that same anticipation at what would be revealed beyond the archway.

She was as beautiful as ever (for obvious reasons, she doesn’t change much, although the palm readers were new) and in that bright afternoon sun, although less intense than in that August of my first visit, the three fountains of Navona and their circling tourist crowds came into sharp view.

‘I’m not so impressed by this one. There are so many other beautiful piazzas in Italy’, said the father, words I could only accept from someone born in a country where piazzas were as common as sushi restaurants.

‘Perhaps if you come in from the southern end … it’s more majestic that way’, I’d said stupidly, as if to defend the rightful reputation of this piazza. He left us to go and sit with his mother and the palm readers.

G and I moved towards the quieter southern end of the piazza, and he found us a place to sit at the Fontana del Moro. It was in this very spot that I’d been hounded to buy a toy gun shaped like a fish that blew bubbles. Not the most useful item for a young backpacker. The man had been offended when I’d said so, after the several times I’d said ‘no’ had failed.

‘Who is that man’, G asked of the statue of a man wrestling a dolphin. ‘I believe it’s Neptune’, but I had no idea. ‘Who’s Neptune?’, was, of course, the next question.

We talked about what mythology was for a little while and how Neptune factored into all of this, then we discussed G’s missing tooth. It was back home in Melbourne, in a tiny toy suitcase, within a purse that hung from the ceiling of a small cardboard house he’d built and painted with his father. It was indeed, quite safe there.

He eventually lay down on the steel barrier, satisfied with our conversation and said, ‘Mamma, it’s so relaxing lying here … so nice listening to the water. You should try it, Mamma!’. I placed his head on my lap and tousled his curls, smiling.