Three Coins
The weather in Rome has been on the chilly side, but compared with Rockford in January, it’s positively balmy. Warm enough, in fact, to risk a charge of heresy (or at least philistinism) by capping the first full day of The Rockford Institute’s 2008 Winter School with, not a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, but a pint of beer. And not just any beer, but an unfiltered, heavily hopped light ale named ReAle, from the brewery of the commune of Borgorose, population 4,500, about 70 kilometers northeast of Rome. The ale is reminiscent of the best beers produced by the few remaining local breweries scattered throughout the Midwest. It takes a mass market to make a bad beer, and sadly, in the United States, very few local markets remain. For now, most of Europe has avoided our fate, but the E.U. bureaucrats in Brussels are doing their best to impose it from above.
The pint is hand drawn over the course of five minutes as the bartender attempts to balance the slightly cloudy elixir, more golden than brown, with the creamy white head of foam. No American bar, even a brew pub, would make a customer wait so long, for fear of losing a sale. Here, the wait simply adds to the expectation, since we have sampled the ReAle already. There’s far more to do and to see in Rome than in Rockford, yet life here moves at a much more human pace.
The bar is literally a hole in the wall in Trastevere, its name painted roughly over an unfinished wooden door. Inside, eight or ten barstools line the bar and the opposite wall, and the bartender stands in a galley barely large enough for him to turn around. With his thin face, light mustache, and long, curly locks flowing down to his shoulders, he looks like a more delicate version of Weird Al Yankovic. That, and the little lamp next to the cash register, with its decoupage lampshade featuring images of Liza Minnelli, briefly give me pause, until the only other patron of the bar, a native Roman, turns and introduces himself.
He apologizes for the heated discussion that he and the bartender have been having. “In Italy, there are only two things that men argue about. And since he—” (tossing his head toward Weird Al) “—doesn’t like soccer, you know it has to be a woman.”
“I like American football—the Chicago Bears,” the bartender tells us, and Mark Kennedy and I explain that our hometown is not far from Chicago. That’s all the prompting that the other patron needs to begin a long disquisition on the superiority of soccer—not just over football, but over every other sport invented by man.
“In all other sports, you can stop the clock and challenge the rulings of the referees. In soccer, the ref’s decision is final, and the play keeps moving. And we have only a limited number of substitutions. Then, if someone gets hurt, you play with one man down.”
All of this “makes soccer more a game of chance than of skill. A weak team and a strong team can end up in a championship game, and the weak team might win. It’s the unpredictability that makes it so exciting.”
There’s more—much more—and I listen politely, but my thoughts have turned elsewhere. Our Italian friend may be talking about soccer rather than roulette or craps, but I hear echoes of Andrei Navrozov. Andrei’s passion for gambling may be (as he suggests) a rebellion against the increasing monotony of the modern world, as exemplified by life in the United States, but I wonder if there’s not something more, something that only a European living in a still vibrant city or town can understand. The men playing the tables at Aspinall’s likely have a somewhat different outlook on their gaming than do the blue-haired ladies in lime-green leisure suits pulling the slots at Ho-Chunk Casino.
Today, my wife and I ate lunch at the Hostaria Farnese, a wonderful restaurant not much bigger than this bar, off of the Campo dei Fiori. We had eaten there twice on our previous trip in May 2000, and, other than now being denominated in euros rather than lira, the menu has not changed. Before lunch, we browsed the stalls of the daily market in the Campo, where the same woman gave us samples of the same prosciutto and bresaola that we’d tried over seven-and-a-half years ago.
Rockford’s downtown, over the same period, has been remade more than once, and some storefronts have housed two or three restaurants in succession. The monotony of life in much of America is a monotony of change. The stability of life in Rome is the very opposite of monotony, and perhaps that can make a game of chance more an affirmation of life than an act of desperation.
These thoughts are still inchoate a week later, as I stop in at the corner café for a quick espresso before the afternoon lectures. Quiet in the morning after 6:30 Mass, the café is bustling now, and I’ve finished my espresso before the soccer fan from the bar claps me on the shoulder and calls out, “Buona sera!” We chat briefly as we push our way up to the register, then fall silent as I pull out my wallet and fumble for change. The espresso is 70 eurocents, and I realize with pleasure that the three coins I’ve grabbed without looking make up the exact amount. A perfect espresso; a chance meeting; a random draw; and I walk out onto the cobbled streets of Rome a happy man.
Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles.
This article first appeared in the March 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
A bit of civilization in an otherwise uncivilized world.
Soccer is indeed a very interesting sport. A friend of mine claims he can learn more about a man while plying 90 minutes of soccer with him, than if he new the guy for a year on the street.
Mr. Richert,
I very much enjoyed this piece the first time I read it in your monthly magazine but failed to send a little note saying so. The second reading has been as enjoyable as the first.
We have a small group of men from around the midwest who meet from time to time to work, pray and converse but usually in reverse order. Sometimes we invite a dignitary such as yourself to speak on any topic that they love.
Given the times and since this is the only authentic requirement, we usually end up with men who have thrown caution along with careers to the devil in order to (supposedly) pursue the more lasting things written in the heavens.. Sometimes there are many in attendenc,e sometimes only a few unworthy, unhorsed, and broken-down knights like Don Quixote. Regardless there is always beer, wine, spirits and what Chaucer called "good cheer.". I hope someday you will join us and delight us with more of these "cheer--filled" stories. Until then, please keep writing about them.
Hi Scott -
I appreciate your insights and have recognized similar sentiments, particularly: "the monotony of life in much of America is a monotony of change." What a wonderful point and perfectly captured. Flying in the face of the libertarian weltanschauung, which seems to cause such folks to salivate at the monotony of change brought about by mass markets. Having too much of the very same thing or some sort of variation on the theme becomes very monotonous. We are inundated with this stuff. In fact, I believe this condition has made possible and fosters that adolescent mirage in the Nevada desert - Las Vegas: for it is a game of chance, in our current climate, which is more an act of desperation than an affirmation of life...these folks seem so numb that the act of gambling or seeing a show apparently brings them back to life...
Your musing highlights the importance of scale and connection, which unfortunately have been forfeited simply for the supposed convenience of a few more box stores. As always, thanks for the contribution...
@Judge Reavis:
I would be honored someday to join you. In the meantime, thank you for your kind words.
@MJK:
Thanks, Michael. And a happy Easter to you and your lovely bride. Christ is risen!
"Our Italian friend may be talking about soccer rather than roulette or craps, but I hear echoes of Andrei Navrozov. Andrei’s passion for gambling may be (as he suggests) a rebellion against the increasing monotony of the modern world, as exemplified by life in the United States, but I wonder if there’s not something more, something that only a European living in a still vibrant city or town can understand."
Was it Mr. Navrozov, or someone else, who did a piece several years on Dostoevsky & gambling?
It seems to me that the "something else" which occupies the heart of good living must have the simultaneous properties of A) making sense per some overarching limiting boundaries of reason, and B) Being spontaneous & not entirely predictable.
The growth & development of an organism, for example. There's no way of knowing in advance precisely, to the nth detail, what the butterfly which emerges from a cocoon will look like ... though one may assert with some confidence that it will not turn out to be, say, a platypus.
Such organic spontaneity juxtaposed w/ organic order is in stark contrast to both the mechanistic vision of the Cartesians on the one hand, and the random absurdity of postmodernism on the other.
"It seems to me that the “something else” which occupies the heart of good living must have the simultaneous properties of A) making sense per some overarching limiting boundaries of reason, and B) Being spontaneous & not entirely predictable."
"Such organic spontaneity juxtaposed w/ organic order is in stark contrast to both the mechanistic vision of the Cartesians on the one hand, and the random absurdity of postmodernism on the other."
Indeed, many of our most worthwhile memories arise from unforeseen circumstances, including and especially those that involve the thwarting of prior engagements--yet very rarely are they truly random. The only worthy civilisation is a reflection of the Divine: knowable and unknowable, organized beyond our finite understanding, self-conscious yet completely unselfish.
I enjoyed your reflection. I did think further on one statement in particular.
"The monotony of life in much of America is a monotony of change."
I've honestly experienced a kind of despair when I consider the demise of the American "downtown" however large or small its scale. We live in a time of rubberstamped 'experiences' in which every space and nuance is dictated by some corporate vision of success. In any given mall 85% of the store fronts are the same as in the mall 15 miles away and the host at a chain restaurant I lunched at in Dallas greeted me with the same phrase as the one in Des Moines.
In Rockford, is it the chains that fail or the single-storefront shops?
@COMEON427:
Thanks. It's primarily the local stores that fail, under pressure from the chains, but we've also had a number of chain stores fail as well. Rockford, like many Midwestern cities its size, reached retail saturation a while ago, and each downturn in the economy knocks out a few chains.
Combine that with NGPM's reflection that "many of our most worthwhile memories arise from unforeseen circumstances," and you get a further sense of how the homogenization of every aspect of life is destroying all that makes life worth living.