Alec Mouhibian

Walking just about anywhere in Italy at 1pm will put one in a philosophical mood, prompting such questions as…What would happen if everyone was out to lunch at the same time? Who would there be to serve it? This is a conundrum that mysteriously works itself out. Four hour lunches are an Italian custom, as are the apparent visits from ghosts who died between courses.

We visited a tiny island off Venice called Lazarus. The island, once home to lepers, is now inhabited by Armenians. Owned by the Armenian Catholic Church for several hundred years, it consists solely of a monastery that contains a museum of interesting artifacts, as well as an Egyptian mummy and the house where Lord Byron lived for two years studying the Armenian language. The mummy actually resided in Lord Byron’s study room and did not look unaffected by the experience.

We found a priest as he was ushering out a group and asked him for a tour.

“Can we eat?” he asked desperately.

Pay attention while strolling through Rome and you are bound to see a Virgin Mary on any given wall. Over 600 Virgin Marys are painted very randomly throughout the city. A tour guide informed us of the fascinating, spooky, quintessentially Roman story behind this phenomenon. I promptly forgot it, and continued on my way. We were then informed of the “SPQR” symbol, omnipresent on Roman busses, cabs, buildings. SPQR is a Latin abbreviation meaning, essentially, “Rome.” Seems a redundant thing to have everywhere, but I guess it’s a sort of city seal. I asked the guide about RSTLNE.

“Which one is that?” he asked.

“You know,” I said, “RSTLNE. The bonus letters in the final puzzle of Wheel of Fortune.”

I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on there, considering how superstitious Romans are. Many proceedings in their history attest to this. Quirkiest of all is that every house in the city used to be built with a “death door”—an oversized doggie-style door specifically for the deceased, as it would be bad luck for any living person to cross a doorway once crossed by a corpse. Those death doors that haven’t been renovated into windows are still very visible toward the bottom of building structures.

I learned of all these grisly matters from a Dark Side of Rome walking tour. It was actually entertaining for 14 euros. I recommend it. If your guide is Simone, tell him Alec sent you and you might get an awkward, confused look followed by an attempt to pretend that he remembers who you’re talking about.

I chatted with Simone for a while after the tour. He told me he’d been to college in Ireland and gotten his degree in economics. I asked him who his favorite economist was. He got uncomfortable.

“John Maynard Keynes,” he stammered, in a hesitant, whimpering, clearly embarrassed tone. I shot him a severe look.

“But—but—I—I—economics is really not my field, my interest is in the business and corporate management side of finance.”

“Oh, well in that case…” I lowered the chair I had hoisted over my head.

Simone, a native Roman, turned out to be a nice guy. He was twenty-seven years old, business-minded, and fed-up with the stale Italian economy. He said Italian girls are definitively the hardest in the Western world because they’re consciously stubborn and do not get drunk, to which the trademark aggressiveness of Italian males is a reaction. He was fed-up with this too, and thus itching to leave Rome for a more opportunistic Anglo city like Sydney or London. In this sense he was similar to me. In the itching sense, that is, not in the desire to exodus.

The effect of the Tuscan mosquitoes had by now reached the point of ostentation, and I was being made fun of. I realized there is only one thing to do in a situation like this—namely, turn the tables on your companions by creating the best possible nickname for yourself and forbidding anyone else from using it. Ergo, Flamus Anus.

Rome is a great city. So much history, as they say. For example, the colorful Maestro Titte. His name may not be pronounced as one would hope, but he is the most famous executioner in Roman history, a man who took great delight in his work, turning each execution into a spectacular event. He detailed his obsessive, sadistic preparations in his published diary. Of course, since only ten executions happened in a good year, he had a lot of free time. Needless to say, he spent it making umbrellas.

Then there is one of the most notorious women in modern Roman history. She made her name, which I can’t remember, by serving women who, no doubt with the best of intentions, poisoned their husbands. Inventing a singularly undetectable poison involving arsenic, she became very wealthy throughout her career helping over 650 wives become very wealthy overnight. Only after she had retired and left the business to her daughter did the authorities get wind. Over fifty women—including the daughter but not the mother—were convicted and sentenced to execution, a one-shot record.

I saw the homes of these two infamous infidels. On the same walk, I passed by the church of the Fellowship of Death. The Fellowship’s history goes back to the Renaissance period, when peasants couldn’t afford proper burials. Fellowship monks would go out to collect the littered bodies from the countryside and bring them back to headquarters in Rome—storing them, making shrines of them, decorating with them, making crosses and emblems from skulls, doing who cares what. Theologically, they are just another Christian denomination. Carved above the church entrance was a slogan roughly akin to “truth lies with the dead,” or something similarly banal. In the 19th century the government put an end to the body-collecting, but the Fellowship continues to be privately active, consisting of twenty-six monks: normal professionals by day who lead secret double-lives at night.

Like most death-dwellers, these people are probably attracted to its non-threatening stillness. They find comfort and security in the shades of darkness, whose fear-numbing monotony invites an unconditional sympathy that can be so soothing to offer. Above all, they find meaning in the permanence. What they don’t realize is that this is all too easy; in itself hardly enough; that superficiality is no less vacuous in permanence than it is in breezy motion.

That, and they’re necrophiles.

If there’s one place I don’t like, it’s the Eastern hemisphere. But summer means one thing for young people: the conversion of an already dreary noun into an even drearier verb, and the pairing of that verb with Europe. This has always been a dangerous ritual. Eurotravel often leads to Europhilia, which in turn encourages Eurothoughts. The latest victim I’m aware of returned to our shores a Turkey-loving vegetarian.

I know of no vaccines. The only thing I can do is offer entries from a journal I kept during my trip to Italy three summers ago. Here is the first.

My first location was Begegno, one of many quiet villages that lie sloped down the foot of the mountains surrounding Lake Como. Most famous of these is Bellagio, an entire village dedicated to the grandeur and magnificence of the historic hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, which goes by the same name. These charming little towns on various points of the lake are mostly in full picturesque view of each other. One imagines seeing them from a distant satellite perspective, as in a computer game, and thinks of how cool it would be if they were to have an all-out war. Villagers would hide behind the walls of their already fortress-like territories. Missiles would glide in gallant arcs from one end of the lake to the other, leaving trails of gleaming sparks to decorate the dusk, supplemented below by the white sails of modest battleships. But I digress.

A romantic simplicity characterizes these places. Days are spent licking gelato and playing by the water. Couples bike in from the city to lazily goof off. At night people sit and chat outside a limited number of cafes. That’s the simple part.

What with all the tainted windows and craze for privacy going around, these are generally bad times for voyeurs, but European village-life provides an agreeable respite. Thanks to a lethargic economy most Italians live at home until marriage, which means all the sex in their entire lives takes place outside of a roof and, if one is lucky, under a lamppost. Herein lies the romance.

It behooves me to report that young Italian couples “work” in the sense that they inconspicuously match—neither striking flair nor weirdness being common among them. Nothing offends my aesthetic quite as deeply as the sight of a lop-sided couple: one in which either participant is significantly better-looking than the other. The moon revealed no such ghastly pairings, and for this I am grateful.

(Summer 2005)

My lament of Washington’s pitiful new baseball stadium is up at American Spectator.