Roman Quarantine – Day 15

Roman Quarantine – Day 15

Coronavirus, Trastevere

Tweet On the 1st March my husband and I went to Palazzo Corsini to see the Rembrandt self-portrait on loan from the Rijksmuseum. In those distant and halcyon days of three weeks ago, there were merely initial cautions about not getting too close to anyone else, and...
Roman Quarantine – Day 14

Roman Quarantine – Day 14

Caelian, Churches, Coronavirus, Rome

Tweet This morning I woke with a sinking feeling in my stomach. To be honest I have done most days since the enormity of this whole thing became apparent. I expect most of us have. In my case it doesn’t usually last long, but there is undoubtedly a momentary lurch of...
Roman Quarantine – Day 13

Roman Quarantine – Day 13

Coronavirus

Tweet Today is Sunday—the second of the quarantine—and, as I mentioned last week, on Sundays we have lunch. I love cooking and am passably competent. A significant part of my Instagram account is now food: sadly the blossom is blooming amid the glorious ruins of a...
Roman Quarantine – Day 12

Roman Quarantine – Day 12

Coronavirus, Rome, Villa Borghese

Tweet Words can’t quite express how glad I am I spent the couple of weeks before the closure of museums and the subsequent lockdown (but while I was already effectively unemployed following US travel restrictions) wandering Rome’s museums and streets in splendid...
Roman Quarantine – Day 11

Roman Quarantine – Day 11

Coronavirus, Rome, Villa Borghese

Tweet I’ve just realised it’s Friday. Who knew? Days have taken on an amorphous form, with an entirely unequal distribution of hours. Which, were it not for the underlying and palpable general anxiety, would not be unpleasant. I quite like the sensation of no...
Roman Quarantine – Day 10

Roman Quarantine – Day 10

Coronavirus, Rome

Tweet I spent today continuing to sort out our overgrown and neglected terrace. The potted lemon tree needed some heavy-duty pruning, and then I wiped down the leaves of the poor thing one by one with warm soapy water to get rid of the horrid black bug gunk they’re...
Roman Quarantine – Day 9

Roman Quarantine – Day 9

Coronavirus, Rome, Rus in urbe, Trastevere

Tweet Botanical Gardens, Rome. 28 February 2020. Three weeks ago (really, only three weeks?), and before this situation became a national emergency but after I’d already had all my work cancelled for what then then seemed like only a month, I went for a walk around...
Roman Quarantine – Day 8

Roman Quarantine – Day 8

Coronavirus, Legend, Origins, Rome

Tweet I haven’t been at street level since Saturday (definitely going out for a short walk tomorrow) and yet somehow at least at the moment time doesn’t drag at all. This morning I finally after months, maybe a year?, set to the crazy wildly overgrown terrace. One of...
Roman Quarantine – Day 7

Roman Quarantine – Day 7

Coronavirus, popes, Rome

Tweet Yesterday, the day after it was announced that Easter services in the Vatican would take place without a congregation this year, the Pope left the walls of the Vatican and visited two churches to pray for an end to this pandemic. The first was Santa Maria...
Roman Quarantine – Day 6

Roman Quarantine – Day 6

Coronavirus, Rome

Tweet Something very odd indeed has happened to time this week, but the calendar tells us that today is Sunday. And on Sunday we have lunch. So we had Sunday lockdown lunch with relatives di adozione, se non di sangue one might say in Italian, which somehow doesn’t...