The Mosaics And Karaoke Bars Of Ostia Antica

A day in the country (and out of the congestion of Rome) is a balm, a benediction, a blessing. The bus delivers us to the seaport town of Ostia Antica about fifteen miles outside of Rome. Once a bustling city center, Ostia’s buildings now lie in ruins among trees and tall grasses brushed by fragrant, fresh winds blowing inland from the Mediterranean Sea.

The students burst from the bus singing. They remind me of zoo animals allowed outside on the first temperate spring day after being confined in their cages all winter. They whoop, they holler, they swing from the branches of the trees like monkeys, they do somersaults, headstands, they play leapfrog, they hug one another, they do wild, unrestrained dances of joy.

The moment Nicoletta buys tickets for the group and we enter the grounds (still empty due to the early hour), the students disperse to the first visible ruin, originally an amphitheater, now a rubble of bricks, broken columns, cracked stones, and high jagged walls. They arrange themselves around it as if enacting a ballet.

Some leap upon the edges of the walls, some upon the columns, others climb into what must have been a fountain. Two of them, the ones I am now sure are lovers, the ones who at Halloween sat talking on the bed in the light of the Duomo’s glow, take each other by the hand and climb up to the highest point of the wall around the arena.

Nicoletta warns them to be careful. She has heard of students who have fallen from that height and have had to be airlifted home by ambulance. In silhouette, the lovers seem majestic and mythical to me, she tall and thin in a long black dress, and he even taller, handsome as she is beautiful, a prince and princess surveying their kingdom to come. They fling their arms toward the sky as if supplicating the gods, or thanking them that they are here, young, strong of limb, and free to court and adore one another under the sun in the Italian countryside.

Or so it seems to me, who would also like to fly to the top of that wall and look far over this ancient creation, testimony to other souls who once walked here, laughed here and lived here. There is something undeniably sad about the vast silence and absence of movement as far as we can see. More than anywhere else I have been in Italy, I feel the immediacy of time past here, of real lives lived and deaths died.

Though Ostia is said to have been a city of poor people, laborers, sailors, fishermen, shop-keepers and fishmongers, as well as those who worked transferring materials from seagoing vessels to smaller boats on their way to Rome via the Tiber River, it seems, as we begin to walk along its rocky paths, to reveal itself as a sun-drenched resort.

The community boasted a lighthouse, tavern, wine shops, public forum, theaters, synagogue and temples of worship, not to mention the elegant and elaborate bath houses, each comprised of the calidarium (the hot baths), the frigidarium (the cold baths), the laconicum (the steam baths), and the apodyterium (the dressing rooms in the thermae, the edifice containing the baths).

Below the baths are elaborate mazes of channels and pipes, to bring water to the baths and then to drain it, as well as places for the furnaces and boilers required to heat the water.

Our students spread out in all directions, now and then passing us on a path or calling to us from over the broken walls of a domus (a Roman villa) to say we must not miss seeing the latrines, those amazing rows of stones with holes in them. (They wonder if the Romans used the bathrooms as a social meeting place!) Have we discovered the huge earthen pots that once held oil? And we must be sure to see the tombs and the columbaria where the ashes of the dead were stored in terra-cotta containers.

Our students have suddenly become mini-anthropologists, creeping over and under mysterious structures, conjecturing about the uses of various artifacts, holes and hiding places, musing on symbols and icons. They seem, finally, to be interested in Italian history, as if some magical wand has opened their eyes.

Everywhere underfoot we find the most exquisite mosaics, depicting gods, sea serpents, mermaids, musicians and their instruments, horses and chariots, bulls, birds, sailors, sea-going vessels, various tools and utensils.

These mosaics are there for us to walk upon, to bend down and examine, and—unlike everything in Rome that is covered, protected and “in restauro”—these ancient works of art are unguarded and close enough to touch. I am grateful for this freedom (and for the trust it implies; after all, the mosaics are tiny stones, easily pried up and taken home for souvenirs. Their presence is testimony to the respect of visitors who have allowed the stones to stay here, almost in their original wholeness).

In front of the theater (large enough, says the guidebook, to hold 3,500 people) are three pillars with the open-mouthed masks of drama on them. Eight of our students have laid themselves across and upon these pillars, with their friends crouching beneath or climbing atop them. They all open their mouths to imitate the ghoulish expressions on the masks while the cameras click in the hands of whichever of their friends have been designated to immortalize this moment.

Several of the girls have begun weaving garlands of flowers and vines from the greenery growing everywhere underfoot. One of them comes to me and lays a wreath upon my head.

“Why don’t you kiss her?” cries Marta to my husband. To everyone’s surprise, certainly mine, and perhaps, most of all, his, Joe takes me in his arms and kisses me while the kids with cameras are quick to capture the moment.

Being together during these long adventures has humanized all of us, made us feel more like family than teacher and class. Some of the girls have come to me with their problems, and, missing my own daughters, I comfort them and advise them as if they were my children.

I wear the wreath in my hair the rest of the day, feeling like Flora in Botticelli’s Primavera. At least as young and beautiful as she, I walk smiling in the forest, strewing flowers from my basket, accompanied by amorous zephyrs cavorting in the grass and Cupid, floating overhead, inoculating me with love. Looking up, I see Botticelli’s blue skies shimmering in the heavens above me.

As the sun moves higher, the students call to one another over the stones and fountains. “Lunch time! Meet at the tombstones.”

“Mrs. Pedrini says we’ll all have a picnic.”

“Everyone meet at the tombstones. We’ll share.”

Joe looks my way. He is thinking of our empty larder, I’m sure, after the slim pickings in the salumeria last night in Rome. He is embarrassed, perhaps, that we will have to take alms from the students. He is carrying our bottle of wine—at least we can offer something in return. I swing my backpack carelessly: little does he know what it contains.

When we get to the tombstones, long flat cement sarcophagi on which we can sit and spread our picnic lunches, Mrs. Pedrini has already distributed paper plates and cups. (She is always prepared for any contingency.) The students begin to unwrap their portions of meats and cheeses and coarse Italian bread. Nicoletta confesses that she will need donations; she admits she bought nothing in the salumeria last night.

When I open my pack and set out my jar of Skippy peanut butter, a gasp goes up among the students.

“Peanut butter! Where did you get peanut butter!”

“Oh, have I missed peanut butter,” Marta cries. “Peanut butter and enchiladas. I’d give my right arm…”

“Grape jelly, did you bring grape jelly?”

“Wait,” I say, and now I withdraw my little loaf of “pane bianco americana” from my pack. White bread and peanut butter: we are at least a drop closer to home and heaven.

I carefully lay out upon a napkin the bread, the jar of peanut butter, and a little plastic knife; I invite everyone to share in a taste of home. Joe is astonished at the reception of this small contribution. Had he known I was carrying a heavy, breakable object all the way from Florence, he would surely have told me to leave it behind. But now he is proud of my resourcefulness and the response my peanut butter has elicited.

“Everyone have some,” he calls out. “And we have some wine to share, too.”

Now, with Mrs. Pedrini’s corkscrew, we open the Chianti and pour tiny amounts in everyone’s paper cups. The students generously offer us slabs of cheese, slices of prosciutto, containers of salty black olives while they happily make themselves little hors d’oeuvres of peanut butter on white bread.

With the blue sky above, the golden bricks and stones of Ostia all around us, we spread our bounty here in the place where the quiet spirits of the dead once reposed, and join our histories with theirs.

After lunch, we have an hour more before we must board the bus for the terminal in Rome and our train back to Florence. Happily fed, peaceful and relaxed by the portion (though small) of lovely wine, we make one more exploration of the ancient city, stopping in what seems to have been a bar or outdoor tavern. We see a counter, benches, shelves for food, and even a painted fresco, faded but still clear on the stone, of bowls with fruit in them, and wine glasses with beverage painted within.

Marta and Mrs. Pedrini find us sitting there on the narrow benches, and Marta says, “I think this used to be a Karaoke bar! There are lots of bars here. The Ostians must have loved to hang out, eat pizza, drink wine, make music.”

She reaches down into the tall grass and brings up a bunch of weeds that she holds in her hand like a microphone. “Let’s see. Let’s get things moving here. What shall we sing?”

Mrs. Pedrini is partial to French love songs. “La Vie En Rose?” she suggests.

“It’s not my usual,” Marta says, “but you go ahead, I’ll join in.”

Mrs. Pedrini finds herself a microphone also, fashioned from one of the paper cups left over from lunch, and begins to sing in French.

The sound of her voice carries across the open fields. It’s tremulous and quite passionate. Some tourists, now also wandering the great spaces, come closer to investigate, and soon a number of our students arrive, in twos and threes, for the concert.

Mrs. Pedrini sings slowly, expressively, sensually. She’s very beautiful, a promise to us all of what growing older can mean: grace, enthusiasm, wisdom, generosity, energy. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t stood in her aura and benefited from it.

Marta joins in with her, and soon everyone standing around is humming and swaying, including the busload of Japanese tourists who have just arrived. I have never seen to many smiles in one place.

When Mrs. Pedrini has taken her bow, Marta sings one of her specialties, the song “Crazy,” in the mode of Patsy Cline.

“I’m crazy…crazy for feeling so lonely…”

From so small a girl her voice is shatteringly big and resonant. In the fields of an ancient Italian ruin we are hearing the song we all know from the records made by a woman from the American South. We have indeed mixed up the countries and centuries here, mixed up who we are with who we used to be, mixed our faces with stone masks, braided our hair with garlands of flowers—and yet not one of us—I would venture to guess—feels crazy or lonely right now. Not Joe, not me, not the students, not the Japanese visitors.

We are all residents of time and history, partaking of music and company in the presence of one another. Whoever we are and whatever our personal histories, we have put that aside for the moment to be here together, living this shared life in real time. I’m easily moved to tears in our last days in Italy; my vision blurs, clouding and softening the edges of the stones from which this lost city was built.

When the song ends, the applause echoes from the hollows of the shattered clay vessels and fades away in the gentle wind that blows over Ostia from the sea.