Rome in August is a lot like New York in August: everyone leaves. You get that lovely, quiet feeling of having the city to yourself—and a slightly smaller handful of out-of-town visitors. In New York, you can be seated much more quickly—or at all—in your favorite restaurant, or one you’ve always wanted to try.
But in Rome, when I say everyone leaves, I pretty much mean it. EVERYONE leaves. Just about every Roman escapes to his/her requisite and hard-earned two-to-four weeks by the sea. The businesses they run are left behind, metal gates pulled down and padlocked, and, peeling in the summer heat, hastily scribbled signs informing of reopening dates. Our favorite restaurant, Ditirambo (yep, that’s Italian for Dithyramb) is, at the moment, closed. The butcher shop downstairs, where we buy not only meat, but also wine, eggs, bread, and cheese, is closed. The pet shop where we can find Iris’s mature-indoor cat food and clumpy kitty litter: closed. (Happily, they will open again on Monday.) The neighborhood “bar” where you get your mid-morning shot of caffè macchiato: also closed. Even the smaller supermarkets close. The other day we needed to buy matches, and managed to find a tabaccaio that stays open during this period. These are the small shops where you can buy not only cigarettes, but bus tickets, Kleenex, gum, and sometimes small Catholic knick-knacks for your home as well. All of the above were available in abundance, but the store was out of matches. The tabaccaio shopgirl joked that the driver of the match truck must also be on vacation.
So, though it’s slightly harder to find what you need (or want) in Rome in August, it’s oh-so much quieter. We live right on the ambulance path of two major hospitals, so we still get the scary loud Mweh-MWEH Mweh_MWEH of the sirens, though, for now, less frequently. But the politicians who careen through town, speeding through traffic lights guided by their escorts of six carabinieri cars with sirens on full-blare: they’re on vacation. Fewer buses are running, many many fewer cars: ah, it feels like a month in the country. Well, almost. And for deeper quiet, the churches of course are still open, maintaining their regular-season hours of approximately 8-12 in the morning, and then again 4-7 p.m., or so. It’s always nice to sit in the cool and visit with the likes of Michelangelo, Bernini, Caravaggio, Mattia Preti, et al.
You might well think that another way to stay cool and enjoy yourself in August, and maybe even learn something, would be to go the movies. And during the rest of the year, there are at least two or three
movies that are being shown in the original language with subtitles. But alas! at this moment in Rome, if you don’t know Italian, you’re out of luck; any movie that you might want to see will be only be dubbed into Italian, or it will be an Italian movie. Today, for example, you could see (pardon me if I get some titles wrong; I only see the Italian signs): Get Smart; Cous-Cous; Gomorra; HellBoy 2; The Kite Runner; The Dark Knight; Into the Wild; Irina Palm; Prince Caspian; even Last Tango in Paris. And there are more – but all of them are dubbed. (With the exception of Gomorra, most of which is in the Neapolitan dialect, so it’s being shown with Italian subtitles.)
Now, in most Western European countries in which I’ve spent any time, they show films in the original language with subtitles. It’s nice to be able to hear the actors’ voices, but it’s also fun to listen to what’s going on, while at the same time reading it in the language of the country where you are—or the language that you are trying to learn because you live there now. I have learned many surprising and useful colloquial phrases in subtitles, and then have been able to use them in the appropriate or inappropriate situations on the street. But sadly, in Italy, Dubbing has been decreed the state movie religion; that’s the way it is and the way it’s gonna be.
So imagine how much worse it is to try to figure out what’s going on in Italian. Not only do you have the severe disjunction between lip movement and sound. Worse, this beautiful, mellifluous language, whose praises I will sing this week (not that it needs me), well, it’s just so damned polysyllabic. So you’re watching a movie and the dialogue in English goes like this (with numbers after the lines of “dialogue” are the syllable counts):
-Hi, my name’s John. (4)
-I’m Susan. (3)
Nice to meet you. (4)
-You too. (2)
And this is what it would sound like in Italian:
-Buongiorno, mi chiamo Giovanni. (9)
-Sono Susanna. (5)
-Piacere di conoscerti. (8)
-Altrettanto. (4)
Now it’s one thing to sit there and read all of those lovely rolling vowels and consonants, enjoy them on the page. But when the dubbers are fitting nine syllables in Italian into the time it would take to utter four syllables in English, and then the response comes back at you before you catch on to the previous sentence, well, it’s like they’re speaking an already fast-paced language on speed: yikes. Headspin.
And so, while in English, I might say,
until next time (4)
in Italian I will say
alla prossima volta (7).