A Roman Holiday in My Grandfather's Slippers
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When I tell my granddad that I’m going to Rome to stay in the gut-renovated Hotel D’Inghilterra for work, he says, “Give me a minute,” and goes into his bedroom. We are in the foyer of the carriage house he shared with my grandmother until her passing two years ago—the bedroom is just to the left of the front door. I stand there for a minute not thinking of anything much at all, expecting nothing and enjoying, as I often do, the black-and-white tile on the floor and the robin’s egg blue runner (my grandmother’s signature color) that crawls up the stairs. He returns holding a pair of slippers. Once white but now a dusty gray, the terrycloth set is not quite tattered but definitely peeling in places, and there are stains. Emblazoned on the top lining, the cursive text a faded gray, is the logo of Hotel D’Inghilterra.
He and my grandma stayed there once. When I push him for details, he asks to think about it because he can’t remember and then sends a “necessarily vague” email: “Late in the last century we planned a trip to Rome and discovered the D’Inghilterra, which had proximity to one of Rome’s most fashionable shopping streets, the iconic Spanish Steps and, important in those pre-cellphone days, an American Express office. We spent an idyllic week there and when we left I took with me the complementary bathroom slippers which I wore at home for many years and then saved to remind me of that special time and place.” In his memory, the hotel was utilitarian and serviceable, white and gray.
To say that my grandparents lived a blessed life would be to put it lightly. They were two people well-matched in ambition and values, who through a combination of hard work (he running the family construction business, she as a formidable educator) and good fortune were able not only to travel extensively but also make sure their grandchildren could do the same. Italy was a regular destination of theirs for the obvious cultural reasons, my grandmother having studied art history, and the first time I left the country was not with my parents but with them, age 10, to see Rome, Florence, and Venice. My grandfather describes my twin brother Jack and I as “copacetic travel companions” and generously makes no mention of my wetting myself in my sleep on the flight over. (My grandmother, anticipating such an accident, had packed a change of clothes for me in her carry-on.) I did my first travel writing on this trip as we were each assigned to record accounts of each day in black leather journals after dinner for us to show our parents upon return (who, in turn, lost them.) When I returned to Rome with my grandparents six years later, age 14, I found another first favorite in that I drank limoncello and was drunk.
And so I became even more excited for my own impending trip. I packed the slippers, with the vague idea of making some sort of TikTok with them, everything being copy. My trip would be different from those of my grandparents’ in that I would be there for work, the hotel would look nothing like it had, and I would be by myself. A lone traveler, something neither grandparent chose to be after they got engaged in Paris, on the Eiffel Tower in 1963, age 22.
I fly to Rome alone and stay alone for the better part of my three night stay. The streets are swollen with tourists—in a previous visit to the city in August, I had observed that the steps around the Trevi Fountain resembled the bleachers at SeaWorld, so well-populated they were, and found the same to be true the next March and now in October. With the impending Jubilee (wherein millions of Catholics make a pilgrimage to Rome to receive their universal pardon), scaffolding and construction cut through almost every street.
When I see the big suite that I'll have to myself—walls painted light teal between stretches of white plaster moulding, long velvet couch beneath gargantuan gilded gold mirror, king bed in the next room all by itself—I don't want to leave it. I think (hope) that I’ll meet someone, a lover or whoever, just someone to share in the absurd beauty of my situation (my grandparents, being measured Protestants, would likely have said little more to each other than, “Well, isn't this swanky?”). I unpack everything into the built-in closet as though I've got a new apartment, and place my granddad's slippers beside the new and complimentary pair waiting for me wrapped in plastic. These, too, are terrycloth mules but jet black ones with the hotel's name scrawled in gilt. The look almost sexy and young in comparison.
And yet I do not meet anyone, nor do I contact any the handful of friends I’ve collected over the course of previous travels here. I am isolated and choose to be so and yet, like many a solo traveler, lament it, too. When I leave the hotel, the staff wish me well and when I return they wish me well and they teach me in a burnt orange room how to make martinis and Negronis and I drink these and more. I am jet lagged, it’s manifesting nauseously, and so with no chance of getting over it, I submit to the insomnia and stream Italian cinema—Marriage Italian Style with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastrioni and then La Dolce Vita—onto the TV from my laptop.
I also make the TikTok with the slippers, toggling between old and new while step-touching to Filipino disco. Watching it back, I feel like a loser. And so, I turn to the ritual my grandparents instilled in me and turn to my journal. It is now bright red, It's raining and raining so I wrap it in a sweater to stop it getting wet—rainy Rome is a beautiful Rome, in no small part because the throngs melt away and the wet cobblestone goes largely untrodden by hoards of Asics. I take a hotel umbrella and march the forsaken streets all the way to the Jewish Ghetto and Giggetto where I eat artichokes and veal marsala, scribbling a primitive version of what you've just read. When you're alone, you can journal at dinner.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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