Rome: Parting Words

A toothy love letter from an admirer in exile

For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that I would live in Rome.

That knowing wasn’t always clear, or nameable. Just your classic, low-frequency rumble beneath the surface.

It would creep through the cracks in curious little ways. I’d cling to every casual report of the city – squeezing my eyes shut until they were lemony and throbbing, desperately trying to see Rome through someone else’s memories. There was the pull I felt when visiting, where the simple promise of a steamed, oily artichoke (seasonally, of course) could instantly pacify even the most distressing lunch hour. Or the way I’d pass San Giovanni Basilica on the bus and fantasise about setting up camp in one of its slender gravel grooves, just to be part the city’s narrative, however minuscule and marginalised I would need to render myself.

The first time I said it out loud – I’m going to live in Rome – was in September 2021. I was at the tail end of a long-term relationship and about to begin my last year of university. I felt the sort of early 20s fear I miss over on the other side of 25 – the kind where I felt safe in knowing absolutely nothing. Still, in that moment, I knew, at the very least, that Rome would soon be mine.

Cut to 2025. I’m walking from my Roman basement past aqueduct fountains and sloshing buckets of Campari (on, like, a Thursday at 10am), pacing toward Matrem bakery in Piazza Bologna – as I’ve done countless times – to buy my last pangocciolo. Rome’s finest, in my opinion.

Nutella and mascarpone. Warm and squelchy.

I’m at a bus stop, Nutella/mascarpone concoction moving through me, waiting for the 62 to take me to Piazza Venezia for one last stroll. I feel the unmistakable pang of a breakup. Just don’t think about it, I urge myself, locking eyes with a chewing gum pancake on the pavement. And don’t fucking blink.

took this screenshot for Substack.

Don’t you know that Rome wasn’t built in a day,
hey hey hey.

- Morcheeba

Later, the cleaners leave my house with gleaming smiles, bellowing ‘good luck in your new chapter!’ down the hallway. I hope they’ll come back to say they accidentally stole a sponge – just so I have one last reason to stay. But all the sponges are intact. My work here is done.

The heat in my heart on Moving Morning is unbearable. It seeps up my throat, and I can hardly swallow. My dad asks if I’d like to walk in the shade. He knows how I hate the sun.

No. I need to feel her unforgiving glare one last time, because soon she will be setting, and so will I.

I feel a streak of panic – I want to tug on Rome’s ankles. I want to beg her to not give up on me. I’ll do anything. But, then, it dawns on me: Rome does not have ankles.

She is untuggable.

This time last year, it felt like Rome had been renewed for a second season. What new faces, places, and traces were waiting in the wings?

Why Rome didn’t get picked up for a third season - why I truly decided to leave - I’ll never quite know.

But I do know this: I rarely talk about why I love the city so deeply.

I so frequently lament the racism, the heat, the inefficiency. The terrifying existential void between August and September (and, don’t worry, I’m not done with all of that).

Still, I moved to Rome at a very strange time in my life. I was a puddle, heartbroken and alone, freshly embarking upon a quarter-life crisis (which I confessed to Lizzie while sobbing into a Whiteclaw at 9am in an Airbnb in York).

There are still things I can’t bear to think about – not saying goodbye to Acqua Paola. The coffee guy who still waits for me each morning (we assume for narrative purposes), not realising I am never to return. The pizza crusts I learnt to dip in stolen mayo – what happened to the jar?

Rome writes herself. My job has only ever been to not get in the way. She has already traced the bones of this story. Let’s hope I do her proud.

With this, I present to you Rome through my eyes: the faces, the places, the traces, et al.

spoiler: my favourite traces.

Faces

Emi was the first friend I made in Rome, and meeting her prompted the quickest I’ll-keep-her-forever I’ve ever said to myself. To me, she is proof that glowing parts of your heart – parts you didn’t even know were missing - can return to you when you least expect them to. She taught me how little we know of the love lurking around the corner, waiting for us to welcome it in.

This entire post could begin and end with Emi. Even if everything else had faded into shadow, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything - because on an unassuming Wednesday in January, the city led me to her. And, in doing so, it brought me back to colour.

I told Emi, very early on, that she taught me what it means to be a friend. And every day since, she has proven it to be true.

So, yes, I’ll be keeping her forever. I cannot imagine my life any other way.

Then there’s Aloisio. I reflect on how much we gave each other. The endless nights where he made me feel protected. The (quite concerning) belly-aching laughs. The quiet knowing that we always had each other, when everything beyond our bubble seemed to unravel. What a strange and beautiful cosmic blip.

The popcorn we shared in the kitchen – the one that now may as well be covered in bubble-wrapped memory - hurts me to picture. I perish the thought. Let’s keep it light. He’s coming with me to London, after all…

I’ll speed things up now, for the sake of readability (/emotional stability).

There’s Lucas – and our oddly clandestine trips to Rome’s only known bagel dealer to snag a packet of pumpernickel from a speakeasy-style hostel in Esquilino. We’d oscillate from giggling like we were in Year 4, to taking night trains across Italy where I’d burst into tears and he’d pretend to have the faintest idea of what the fuck was going on.

Even in the most ridiculous of rituals – bagels and bawling – we were quietly building a world.

also, pickles.

I reminisce on lounging with Roberta by the pool after a tricky day at work, plunging only into the depths of our hearts. Feeling whole and held with every ‘baby, I had the exact same thing happen to me.’ Knowing she was special, knowing she was different, and not needing to know why. We’d curl up like cats in the late afternoon haze, peeling back the day together, bit by bit. With Roberta, loneliness felt less like isolation, and more like a key into sisterhood.

There was Giulia – and the renewed magic of The Sleepover. Her name would bounce off the calendar next to my bed. I’d feel a jolt of anxiety at the sight of ‘GIU EXAM’ plastered in pink across the page.

Feeling as though I’d always shared a city with her, and feeling that I always would. How much I loved her.

Samu and I laughed - a lot. Loyal readers already know about the guitar. I think of him asking me how my day went, softly, openly, and how I’d hesitate to tell him the truth, for fear of breaking his heart with my sadness. It’s rare to feel so considered by somebody so new, and I don’t take it for granted. To look at somebody who has their whole life ahead of them, and to feel equally seen by them. How grateful I feel that our stars aligned.

Marie-Hélène and Giuseppe wrapped me in warmth the moment I announced myself into their lives. Laughter-filled dinners where wine flowed freely (not into my glass – but you get the vibe), music played (finally the sort of stuff I could get behind), and I felt suddenly, and completely, at home.

We bonded over tennis and playlists, but mostly over a shared understanding of what makes life beautiful. They invited me into their world without hesitation. And somehow made it feel like mine, too.

Of course, there were also the familiar faces – those who were always to be stitched into the fabric of this experience.

Early Vespa rides with Daniel, and those assured ‘don’t worry, you’ll figure it out’s that meant everything to me at the time. He lugged me into his life – his friendship groups, the parties, the beautiful dinners in beautiful homes. I don’t think he realised how it shaped me, and gave me the tools to make my own way through the city. I’ll never forget what his kindness and grace meant – or how much I needed it.

Then there was Tiago. Singing Dancing in the Moonlight with him as we crossed Ponte Flaminio, mid-move from my first apartment to my second. Later, we rounded off my time in Rome with one last cornetto and a final Portuguese lesson at the tabaccheria.

He made me feel normal. From the moment I met him at a party when I was 21, and he told me he was from Rome, I knew he was to be so much more than just an emblem of the city’s locals planted in timeline. Somehow, he made me feel outside the city entirely. With him, everything felt afloat, which was oddly grounding. I was reminded that life was so much meatier than the tightrope I’d been tiptoeing.

I want to take a moment to mention Niccolò - while he didn’t actually live in Rome during my time there, he absolutely fucking rocked my world every time he was in town (which was, of course, never enough).

Places:

When a given city houses a wonder of the world, said wonder will haunt every sentence that you write, until sufficiently acknowledged.

For me, the Colosseum isn’t just a landmark. She’s the whole damn reason I moved here in the first place.

I’ve said I always knew I’d live in Rome, but for so many of those years, what I really meant was: I want to share a city with her.

I didn’t come for the food, or the fantasy. I came for the lesson.

I needed to learn how to carry ruin and beauty at once. How to make peace with survival. How to emulate a structure nobody fully understands, but still stops to stare at. To become, in my own way, unflinching and unforgettable.

That famous first proclamation – I’m going to live in Rome – took place in her shadow. I sat cross-legged on a tourist-laden wall and gazed at her, my summer thighs red and gravelly. How she endured. How she endures. Does tense even matter? Isn’t the whole point of the Eternal City that it doesn’t, like, at all? That she exists outside of time?

I could be mid-tirade about the corrupt bus schedule or the absence of a single reasonably structured indoor space - and then I’d turn a corner, and there she was. Looming. Terrifying. Unapologetically stubborn. A deafeningly silent monument-turned-message, unwilling to dignify my petty complaints. She’s endured far worse than heartbreak. Who is she to take my shit?

And that’s exactly why I needed her.

She isn’t relatable, like Circo Massimo (yikes – sorry, Circo). Her heart is stone, yet somehow warm. You can almost smell the blood she drew. It still feels fresh.

She taught me that I can take the bits of me left behind and turn them into a wonder of my own. A reminder that survival doesn’t have to mean erasure – it can mean spectacle.

At her very finest

Then there was Pigneto, which encased me in a thick layer of loneliness. Just me, cooped up in my little room for six months, burning holes in my bedsheets with every consolation joint I sought out. I don’t smoke anymore.

Pigneto was my place of work, and of play. But I turned it into a palace. The dreariness, the desperately-trying-to-hold-myself-together-ness of it all made it feel more like home than anywhere else I experienced in the city. It was a mirror.

I certainly don’t talk enough about the feeling of relief walking through Villa Borghese every morning, wrapped in Madeline’s grandmother’s lilac cashmere scarf, spilling coffee on it with every conscious inhale performed upon seeing the peace pooling in the park like salvation.

An abundance of coins would jingle at the bottom of my tote bag – 75 espressos-to-be, soon to fund the unknown versions of myself staring up at me from the puddles of coffee left to rot at the bottom of ceramic cups.

I can’t believe I won’t have all of this at my fingertips anymore. I wonder who I will be with, who I, myself, will be, the next time I am to experience it.

Traces:

And then, there are the traces.

The little threads of meaning and feeling that wrap their tails around my ankles – Rome, in all her untuggability, could never relate.

The moment we knew.

There was the rise of Jannik Sinner (him winning his first Grand Slam) upon my arrival – that really felt like something, too. Feeling tennis sweep the country, and watching Italy claim its first world number one under my supervision, made me feel like part of something.

There’s also that specific fear-outside-a-pasticceria feeling - what if I order the wrong thing? What if I pronounce it wrong? What if I’m seen? Better to go hungry.

Then there are the trees. There is something almost scientific about them. They don’t surround me gently, but, rather, factually. They are so certain and stretchy. So confident in how they are snubbed in tourist discourse. I don’t understand them, but I do adore them. Really, I do. They just are. They have always been.

I know that these traces will follow me for the rest of my life. When I return to Rome, of course, but who’s to say they won’t sing through the bubbles of a New York cappuccino, or dance to the rhythm of a swaying Parisian pine?

The true beauty of the traces is this: for the most part, I am not meant to meet them yet. Not all of them. The rest will appear to me when they are ready. When I am ready.

As Emi taught us: magic is often only a stone’s throw away.

Coda (most likely alla vaccinara)

Dear Rome,

Will I now be just a twinkle in your eye? Another forgotten admirer forced to hold you only through anecdotes and aftertastes?

Will your streets recall the distinct rhythm of my tentative 5am scurry? Or will they flinch the next time they receive it? My perfect little foreign arches gently kissing your cobblestones back to life, bit by bit.

You housed my grandparents when they left Cagliari. My nonna’s 26th Easter was spent in Rome - as was mine. You’re splayed across both of our diary pages, recorded seventy years apart, in equally besotted, cursive letters. In all that time, you never budged. It’s nice to know that, by your metric, she and I are barely separated by the blink of an eye.

I don’t remember much about nonna - just the way she spoke. Will you remember me the same way? The way London remembers her? How I never quite ‘got’ the accent? Will you hold onto my strained vowels, too? I like to think they’re tucked somewhere in you - behind a shutter, maybe, or buried beneath a pebble in the Tiber - waiting to rush back to my tongue when I return.

You are the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Eyes full of stars. Mouth full of truth. You taught me the beauty of building around the broken parts, instead of hiding them in shame.

You are full of ice cream.

And you are full of ghosts.

And I adore you, but you are not my home. But you were, without question, my soft place to land.

Thank you for letting me rest. Thank you for bringing me peace.

I hope I didn’t let you down.

Yours truly,

Aysha

(a.k.a. americano-da-portare-via)

final pic of me in Rome (this time around). Fiumicino airport 31/08/2025, 14:22