Page 81 - NOMADS_NO4_2015

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arlo, yet juggling the four oranges, doesn’t wear a ring. For several years now has gone every summer to circus school in Spain. His understandable dream is to dazzle crowds, taking away— at least for a little while—all their sorrows and worries. Jugglers and acrobats entertained the rich ancient Romans when they threw big parties that they called banquets, always ending with drinking games.
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I open the cobbler’s door and stick my head in. “Remember me?” I say. Wearing wire-rimmed glasses halfway down his nose, he sits at a table with his old and worn hammer tapping a tack into a sole. He glances up, searches my hopeful eyes, and starts tapping again. A couple of taps later he looks up. “I framed the photograph,” he says, “and hung it by my mother and father.”
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a dying breed of men. He’s in his eighties and cobbles shoes. In ancient Rome some women had high heels for special events but most people wore soft moccasins. When they arrived at someone’s elegant home they removed the moccasins and put on leather sandals. Legionaries, on the other hand, wore shoes with metal cleats for better traction and you could hear them marching before you saw them. Romans didn’t wear socks.
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juice into my adventure through Trastevere, but here the fruit trees of life are plentiful and I have only to take a few more steps until I taste more. On my left is a barber shop with three men in their seventies who cut hair or shave heads with razors sharp enough to slice open a melon, in the beat of a human heart.
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bronze crescent-shaped knives to shave men. And get this: They didn’t have soap and the only way to soften whiskers was with water. The barbers then used tweezers to pull the stubborn hairs from a man’s neck. What did the barbers do to stop bleeding from nicks? They could use spider web soaked in olive oil and vinegar.
ncient barbers, however, had only
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in my life one season in Rome. I had the luxury of having a street level apartment with massive, black, barred, wrought iron doors. It was across the alley from the Cinema Café that was a bookstore celebrating film. Directors and writers often gave evening lectures there and those that attended sipped wine, ate cheese and chewed the fat about the art of making movies or growled over the bones life had thrown them: They felt they had brilliant ideas for stories that would WOW the world, but without money to produce them they were but kernels of un-popped corn on the floor of some dark movie house.
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