In the fall of 1999, I started my sophomore year at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana. Except I didn't spend that year in Indiana. I fulfilled a lifelong fantasy of going to live in Italy for awhile. I had partly chosen Saint Mary's because of its outstanding study abroad programs, and the Rome program in particular. Rome was nothing like I'd expected, but it gave me everything I hoped it would and so much more. Not a day goes by that I don't still think about it, if even briefly. I've written lots of stuff about Rome, much of it experimental, which I've never shared with anyone, and my time there informs so much of how I am and the choices I've made that I can't even begin to encapsulate it in one little post. But I do want to speak to a particular part of it.
The young women on the Rome program stayed in the four-star Hotel Tiziano in the Largo Argentina neighborhood of Rome. (The men, from the University of Notre Dame, stayed at the Hotel Arenula around the corner. No co-ed dorms for us, even in the eternal city!) The Tiziano was a very comfortable place. My friend Gina and I shared Room 309, the smallest of the rooms allotted to SMC students. We had bunk beds (I was on top due to a slightly irrational fear of sleeping underneath the top bunk and having it cave in on me in the middle of the night). We also had a bathroom with a bidet that we didn't quite know what to do with, so we used it for doing laundry by hand (yes, I know how gross that sounds. In our defense, the bathrooms had recently been remodeled and I like to think no one had yet used the bidet for its intended purpose, but I really couldn't say for sure). We also had maid service once a week. Our room had a lovely brick-colored carpet and warm golden-yellow walls. My desk was in a little nook near the doorway, and I would place miniature monuments I'd collect on my travels on top of it. I was certainly the less-organized of the two of us, and Gina always graciously put up with my clutter.
All of the SMC ladies were on the third and fourth floors of the Tiziano, and so we lived in pretty close quarters. There were forty-two of us, plus two Notre Dame men, the first semester, and a few more in the spring. We became quite close, living in such close quarters so far away from our homes, families, and other friends. Rome defined our lives, and we had it in common. We lived, traveled, studied, ate, and prayed together. Most of us took full advantage of being in Europe, and in Rome in particular, and didn't do a great deal of sitting around at home. But the Tiziano was home, and every day we'd gather in the dining room at the appointed time for lunch or dinner, joined by the program staff and faculty, as well as the deacons from the North American College who ran our campus ministry. I'll never forget those meals - a chance to gather and regroup after a long day of studying, site-seeing, or just exploring. I'll never forget having the Saint Joan of Arc medal I bought in Paris blessed by Deacon Paul at dinner. It was for me a very special moment. I'd never asked to have anything blessed before, and somehow it felt right that it should be there in the dining room with my friends, rather than in the busy hustle of Saint Peter's Square for the papal blessing.
The staff at the Tiziano were always kind, funny, and adamant about speaking to us in Italian in spite of their fluency in English. They helped to make the Tiziano a welcoming and safe place, and helped us to better acclimate to life in Rome.
The lobby of the Tiziano
When I would travel to various places, which I did quite often, I was always glad to come home to familiar faces and my little room on the third floor. Over the Christmas holidays, I spent a month traveling with a friend, and on the last day, in London, I decided to join my friend in flying back a day early. I phoned the Tiziano from Heathrow, and they kindly agreed to give me access to my room, though we weren't supposed to have returned yet. It was such a comfort to know I'd be returning there. I hadn't gone home to the U.S. for Christmas, because I couldn't afford it. I'd had a good Christmas with my friend and her family in Florence, and had traveled around Italy and visited the U.K. But when I returned to the Tiziano that night, I felt safe and at ease in a way I hadn't realized I'd been missing since I'd left for the break.
There are so many little memories I have of the Tiziano. Hosting a wine and cheese party in our tiny room with Gina; talking late into the night in friends' rooms; sitting with my classmates eating gelato in the hallway the night before we left Rome for good in the spring; dragging myself up the stairs for six weeks when I'd given up the elevator as a lenten sacrifice; calling home on the payphone in the lobby using a phone card I'd bought at Pascucci (across the street, where we'd take the meals we didn't take at the Tiziano). And that's just inside. Outside, we could walk to the Pantheon in less than five minutes, and I know it's still the favorite monument of lots of us who went to Rome. We could also walk to the Forum, Colosseum, and Vatican, but closer by were Piazza Navona, Campo de Fiori, and numerous churches, statues, and fountains. There were also the four temples dating from the Roman Republic, which would have been, interestingly, the last temples Julius Caesar ever saw as he walked to his death in Pompey's Theater, a stone's throw from where we were located. Today, there is a cat shelter there. There were also of course our classrooms, library, admin offices, and the little church of Saints Benedict and Scholastica where we attended Mass. We had an entire little world in the heart of Rome.
On my last night in Rome, I didn't really sleep. I lay on my bed, still wearing the dress I'd worn to our farewell banquet, and just waited. I was happy to be going home, but I spent my last hours in Rome in room 309 reflecting on my year there.
In February 2004, I got to go back to Rome for a brief visit. I didn't stay at the Tiziano, but I did go and see it, and when I went into the dining room, it felt exactly the same. I'm generally a skeptic when it comes to things like psychic energy or anything of the kind, but that moment convinced me that places do hold on to memories and have an energy of their own, left behind perhaps from the people who lived and felt things there. I certainly sensed something good from that room when I returned, perhaps the build up of four decades of SMC students bringing all their joys and discoveries to share there. The experience left me both a little shaken and a little reassured, somehow.
Last August, I returned to Rome again for the final stage of three weeks of travel in Europe. I booked a room at the Tiziano for the last two nights. I hadn't been back to stay there since I left in April of 2000, and I wasn't sure how it would be, or how I would feel. It was good. Some of the staff was the same, and they were happy to talk to me about my time in Rome, and even refused to give me a map at first, because I was expected to know my way around! Fortunately, I did remember my way around for the most part. They were more forgiving of my language lapses than they'd been the first time around! And I got to have a TV in my room this time. Otherwise, the Tiziano was exactly the same. I stayed on the fourth floor this time, in 408, almost exactly above my old room, overlooking the courtyard. The layout of the room was slightly different, but in essentials everything was the same. The marble staircase, the elevator, the dining room (now filled with tourists from everywhere), the carpets and wallpaper, down to the keys that only kind of worked in the locks. My TV broke, and there were jokes about how now it could be just like when I was a student! I felt at home. I had a college friend with me, but we had our own rooms, and she left a day before I did. So I spent my last morning walking around Largo Argentina, and came back to collect my suitcase at the Tiziano before hopping on the 64 Bus to Termini Station, where I'd catch the train to Fiumcino Airport. I said goodbye to Rome and to the Tiziano, sad to leave but sure that I'd be back, if not too soon then not too far in the future, either.
Well, I'm sure I will go back to Rome. I've said goodbye to Rome three times now, once in 2000, once in 2004, and once in 2012. I tell myself that Rome will be out of my system after this and that I can leave it and explore other places (and I go lots of other places, as often as I can), but almost as soon as I'm back home I think I ought to have stayed longer or that I ought to have done this or that, or that I'd just like to sit in the Piazza della Rotonda and look at the Pantheon in the moonlight again. No matter how much I change and grow, my time in Rome will always matter to me. So I know I'll go back to Rome. But I won't be going back to the Tiziano.
Every year since I returned from Rome, my parents have received a Christmas card in the mail from the Tiziano. Two, in fact. This past Christmas, they didn't get a card. Perhaps that was the first sign. Yesterday, I learned from a former classmate and fellow SMC Rome alum that the Tiziano, originally an eighteenth-century palazzo and even once the home of a future pope, and most importantly for so many of us, the home of the Saint Mary's Rome Program since its inception in 1970, had been sold, and would be gutted and remodeled (you can read about it in the ND/SMC Observer here). Needless to say, "gutted" is more or less how I felt at hearing the news. So I had to write this piece, because I had to at least try to convey what the Tiziano, in its present incarnation, meant to me and to so many of us over the years. I know my classmates and friends will all have their individual stories and memories, too. So, I am sad.
But of course this is not the end. The Saint Mary's Rome Program will continue to flourish under the extremely capable and brilliant direction of Dr. Portia Prebys, the program director, whom I had the pleasure of running into in Pascucci last August. According to the article in The Observer that broke the news, the hotel that future students will call home will also be in Largo Argentina, and will even have in-house laundry. No more bidet-washing and bungee-cord drying, alas. And the new place will, I'm certain, be special for the new students. But I can't help but feel a little sad for them that they're going to miss the uniqueness of the Tiziano as we knew it. And it sounds as though the Tiziano will continue on, too, under new ownership, but it will look different, and it won't be the same, and I can't help wondering if it will lose something intangibly good in the process. But the building has had a long life, and I suppose it is simply moving on, as we all must. I'm glad I got to be there when I did.
I have lots of stories about my time in Rome - most of them aren't sad. I may post them from time to time.
Some photos of the Tiziano and Largo Argentina:
The area sacra at Largo Argentina, containing the ruins of four Republican era temples
One of the temples up close
Pascucci, another place I could write lots about. We took many of our meals here.
Another of the area sacra
The entrance to the Tiziano
Feltrinelli, bookstore located across the street from the Tiziano. Used to have a big selection of English books, though I didn't notice many when I was there recently. It is still a lot of fun, though.
The ceiling of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva
Largo Argentina by night
Here are some scans from 1999-2000:
Thankfully, this McDonald's facing the Pantheon no longer exists.
Tram 8 took us across the Tiber to Trastevere
