Christian

Christian Thomas has two lovers.

I met Christian in Cole Valley of San Francisco years ago.  Then we both moved to Silicon Valley about the same time and he invested in Smoke, as I did.  Now he has moved to Rome and we had dinner last night and walked around his neighborhood this afternoon.

His girlfriend, Claudia, is a lovely, bright, fun student of archeology who will soon get her Phd. from Brown University and then look for work in the academic world.  Christian is in love.

However, he has also developed a deep love of Rome.  He has developed a company here giving tours of Rome that focus on wine, food and the complex (chaos is my word) development of this great city.  Wine isn't really my thing, but food and municipal development are so I mostly listened to him talk about his great new adventure.

Last night I took a taxi to the restaurant that he suggested.  The driver was a 20 something guy with the look of a gladiator going into battle when we sped off from the hotel.  Driving taxi in Rome is serious business.  It's far more about attitude than knowledge.  Of course, like most of Southern Europe, traffic laws are not laws, not guidelines and only occasionally suggestions.

Driving taxi here is more about seizing opportunity and natural selection.  I suppose that is why people are so religious here.

We turned off a major street and I could see that he would stop at a small alley to let me walk the rest of the way.  But he was only slowing as he turned into the alley that just barely allow us through.   He had his game face on and was determined to navigate these "streets" with no names and get me to the restaurant.

Dinner with Christian was great--just a simple pasta with mushroom and tomato sauce.  We had gelato after and then just wandered through the small streets of Rome.  The place was alive with activity, with intensity.  We met up with Claudia and wandered further until I was ready to drop.  They took me to a bus station where dozens of people crammed into a bus.  It was quite intimate.

I walked about 6 blocks from the bus station and got to the hotel about 11:30.  I never felt unsafe.  I think this whole thing about safety in Rome is akin to the fear that Europeans have of coming to the US and getting shot, forcing their entire lineage into poverty to pay for the medical bills.  We cannot say that things are 100% safe, but the fears are WAY overdone.

Today I re-united with Christian and he gave me a brief tour of his neighborhood.  The complexity and the history is epic.  We visited the large apartment building that was once the compound of a great Italian family (that included a Pope), another building that had once been a theatre with capacity of 25,000 where Julius Caesar was murdered.

We saw several buildings that had been started in Roman times and re-developed in the Renaissance.  We saw lots of Michelangelo and other famous architects.  We saw the influence of Greeks, Romans, Popes, modern designers.  There were not too many buildings that were torn down to start again.  It was mostly adding on or repurposing an existing building.

In early August, Claudia returns to Brown University to finish up her dissertation.  Christian is going to have to choose.  But for right now, he has a pretty happy life.