After wine and truffled cheese in a colleague's apartment overlooking the Tiber, plates of saltimbocca and creamy spaghetti carbonara in Trastevere, and another day and night in this ancient and hectic city that makes us both feel like we're swirling in dust and traffic and a million strangers, we got into the cab.
Just a cab in nighttime Rome. Just a ride back to the hotel. Until I asked the cab driver what was playing on the radio. And the cab driver asked me if I liked it... If I thought it was really music... And if I wanted to hear something better.
He turned instead to opera and the taxi was engulfed in waves of deep tenor. The driver turned up the volume on cresting passion and melodic despair. The windows were down and Rome was blurring past. The night air was still warm from an unseasonable October day and the music filled our breezy space.
We passed bridges and monuments edged with golden light. And the Museo dell'Ara Pacis with its lines of postured ladies in red dresses standing tall in the dark. So dramatic these ladies. So perfect as our opera roared past.
I had to go back to them the next night. To see them in their glory. And it was certainly glorious: the Valentino exhibit and the dresses lined up like an army of good taste marching into the distance.
But it was far better the night before. When we saw it from the outside with the opera soaring and the cab driver yelling, insisting, with his thick Roman accent that this was music. That this was real music and didn't we agree?
Si, si, certo. Now can we stay in your cab forever?
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