André Aciman's guide to Rome: Contorno, supplì and Trastevere

I have returned to Rome at least once a in the memoir — late-Renaissance and baroque year, usually twice, for the past 20 years, Rome, what I like to call My Rome. Mostly especially after the publication of my narrow streets and cobbled lanes, representing books. I have my “haunts” and these still my itinerary from one bookstore to another. I take me back to my first year in Rome. I fell in love with books because they screened like evening scenes when the shops the world of Rome that I still wasn’t sure I liked, close and the Romans head home.

I still love the gleaming cobblestone as the city starts to empty a bit on streets such as Via Frattina and Via dei Condotti, which I discovered on my second or third day in Rome as an adolescent. I love that these streets are now closed to traffic so that you can amble about in the middle and not think of cars. But I also love the city in the early afternoon, when the sun pounds the streets and the narrow lanes bask in light, emptied of people. Now that I think of it, I like Rome when fewer people are about. Then, when it’s quiet, my mind wanders and I begin to think that it is my home forever.

Ambling through, trying to fathom what Rome and I shared in common. Initially the answer was nothing at all. I was a stranger and Rome was no less strange to me. At best we’d learn to be patient with each other. I put up with its antic ways of doing things, with its strange smells, with its people, with their quick temper and impatience with my foreign accent, while it put up with my refusal to accept that I was probably going to live in its midst for the remainder of my life. Eventually, we learned to come to an understanding, which is called tolerance at first, then appeasement, and in the end, just when you least expected it, love.

There are areas I walked in the evening in the historic centre of Rome, and I mentioned them in the memoir — late-Renaissance and Baroque Rome, what I like to call My Rome. Mostly narrow streets and cobbled lanes, representing my itinerary from one bookstore to another. I fell in love with books because they screened the world of Rome that I still wasn’t sure I liked, but also because books revealed another world.

I like Rome before the busy day starts. I’ll walk to Piazza della Rotonda where the Pantheon is, then head towards Piazza di Spagna, which has always been my “centre of gravity”. Then, after watching the buildings of the Keats-Shelley House, walk quietly down Via del Babuino that leads to Piazza del Popolo. In the Cerasi Chapel are two of my favourite Caravaggios, The Crucifixion of St Peter and The Conversion of St Paul.