I found Roman commercial life fascinating, from the street vendors to the clothing stores with what seemed like 50 pieces of clothing on display, and that's it.
We wandered quite a bit, mostly intentionally, sometimes...not. Well, really, just twice on the latter, I think - once when we spent a great deal of time trying to find St. Peter in Chains (we were coming from the San Clemente direction, which made it all very confusing), and once when Katie and I turned to soon in our quest to get back to Campo di Fiore to look for a place she saw jeans for 10 Euros.
I found the presence, and, I'm hoping, flourishing of the small shopkeeper, the artisan, the small restauranteur on these back streets endlessly intriguing. You'd walk down these streets at some points in the day - say, during the siesta period or on a Sunday afternoon, and all you'd see would be rows of large metal doors - like garage doors - pulled down shut. See the first post on this page to see what I mean. And then at another time, you'd walk by, they'd be open to reveal lovely fabric shops (lots of those in Rome), metal workers, furniture restorers (lots of those, too), and food shops. Even on our own street - every time I walked down Borgo VIttorio, I discovered a new business. Actually my favorites were the little tiny garages dedicated to motorcycle repair - usually just big enough to fix one motorcycle at a time. But, of course, there was no lack of business.
The ubiquitous, homogeneous doors did present a problem, though. On our first day, since I had left one baby bottle in the car and another on the airplane, we were short a bottle. (And no, MtheB doesn't suck on bottles all day. They're just good for getting a lot of milk in him in short order) So we went to this baby store not far from the apartment, where I bought a bottle and asked the woman where a market might be. She spoke no English, but we thought, understanding her hand motions, as well as Italian for "Right" and "left", we could find it. No luck, even though I was pretty sure she was describing the same market the sister at the Daughters of St. Paul bookstore on the other end of the road had done earlier. For the life of me, I couldn't find it.
Then the next day, I found it. Bought stuff.
Went back the next day to what I knew was the right street, but I couldn't find it.
Eventually, I figured out that without any obnoxious protruding signage, and with those anonymous metal garage doors pulled down, I had probably walked right by the place 5 or 6 times without even knowing it. And then, I never quite got the opening and closing hours straight in my head, so I missed out on the deal on the big block of Parmesan I was planning to buy...
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