Comment

Don’t ask me why, but the legend of the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, left to float as babies in the Tiber, suckled by a wolf, had a profound impact on my childhood. It was in a schlock Hollywood movie at the flea-bitten, now-defunct, Lido cinema in Juhu, that I first encountered them.

Sitting in the dark, my sweaty paw in my Goan ayah Alice’s, I was transfixed by the story of the twins. However, as my plane taxied into the Leonardo da Vinci airport on an unseasonably cold April morning recently, Romulus and Remus were very far from my mind.

You’ve probably heard the story of the Bombay model who was taken to the Coliseum for a shoot. “So far, to come to a building that’s broken down?” she is reported to have cooed; apocryphal undoubtedly, but then again all of Rome seemed constructed by an art director with a Michelangelo complex; the collective undulating of all of one’s history and art classes, as one negotiated the streets left me quite exhausted.

There were too many Romes to see, you see: ancient Rome, Renaissance Rome, Fellini’s Rome, the Rome of design and luxury, and of course, religious Rome.

Two days was all I had. Two cold, rainy, you’re-gone- before-you-know-it days, so I did what’s been my standard response in such situations: I took a guided tour and then I sat in a sidewalk café and let the city find me.

Here’s what I discovered: the city’s inhabitants, descended from one of civilisation’s better-looking races, still retain a long-limbed, well toned feline-grace and dress like models from an Armani catalogue.

Consequently, the streets are filled with what appear to be garrulous, heavy-smoking, exquisitely-styled actors from a film set. The Italians in Rome drive expensive cars — all in dire need of washing — very rashly.

They also manage to walk in impossibly vertiginous heels on the city’s famous cobblestones, and have little time for fuss or formality. The owner of one of fashion’s most enduring names, a lady whose creations adorn the backs of the international glitterati, left her studio, which is head-quartered in a palazzo in the city’s most expensive area, unaccompanied and on foot, at the dot of six, “to shop for clothes for my grandchild”, much like any ordinary factory worker.

Her right-hand woman, a member of blue-blooded aristocracy, stopped by at my café on a bicycle, her six-year-old son on her pillion, “on her way to buy him shoes”.
Basically, in Rome I did as the Romans do. I behaved like Nero, except Rome was not burning. I ate the simplest but most delicious local dishes — smoked artichokes and squids in a light tomato and herb sauce and braised water chestnut, bought off a vendor at the base of the Spanish steps. I drank full-bodied, young Roman wines. I immersed myself in the ebb and flow of street culture and I sat in its cafes watching the world go by.

It was only after I had returned, and was safely ensconced in the comfortable environs of my home in Mumbai that I remembered Romulus and Remus and my inexplicable connection to them. According to Roman mythology, they were the traditional founders of Rome, the twin sons of the priestess Rhea Silvia, and Mars, the God of war.

According to the legend, Romulus slew Remus over a dispute about which one of the two brothers had the support of the local deities to rule the new city and give it his name. Romulus had stood on one hill and Remus another, and a circle of birds flew over Romulus, signifying that he should be king.

Why had this story transfixed me as a child? What was the significance it had to my life? I will have to go back to Rome one more time to find out!
Email: s_malavika@dnaindia.net.