Petunias, pique and Roman temperament: Look out below

The first thing I did when I moved into an apartment in the Monti district of Rome last spring was to put in window boxes. My landlady installed the holders, and I chose the plants: pink and red petunias, plus a little basil for cooking. Later I stuck in an avocado seed just to see if it would grow.

It’s hard to believe how happy it made me to watch the little guys bloom. Of course, I had to water profusely, because plants need it in the hot summer sun of Rome.

One day while I had my watering can poised over the petunias, I heard yelling from the little old lady’s apartment below. We had met on the stairs soon after I moved in and, even with my wretched Italian, I must have made a good impression because she kissed me on both cheeks before we parted.

But at the moment, she sounded more like the Wicked Witch of the West than Mother Goose. Gradually, it dawned on me that, looking out her window, she had gotten splattered by the runoff from my watering. I am not in the habit of abusing old ladies, and felt terrible.

But when she came out on the landing and started yelling for me, I felt even worse.

“Signora alla terza!” (”Lady, on the third floor!”) she shrieked, followed by a lot of finger-shaking and dirty words in Italian. I apologized repeatedly, but she kept on. You’d think I’d doused her with boiling oil.

After that I made sure her shutters were closed before I watered, but the same thing happened again.

In the wake of another confrontation on the landing, the old lady’s son rang my bell. He explained that every little drop of water that seeped through my window boxes landed on her ledge and ricocheted into her bedroom. A longtime resident, she’s 90 and can’t get out, he said. I gathered, as well, that she has remained un-resigned to the neighborhood’s gentrification, much less to the advent of foreigners.

I solved the problem by buying plastic basins for the window boxes, but I still felt that the old lady’s reaction had been extreme.

Later I told my friend at the hardware store around the corner about what had happened. She said that the lady below me is an old-fashioned Roman who takes insult easily and screams at the slightest provocation, like Anna Magnani in old Italian movies.

A little light went on in my head. I loved the warm Roman welcome I received when I moved here a year ago, so different from the coldness of Paris, where I lived for three years before that. But the other side of that warmth is vitriol, it seems.

Anyway, a lull has fallen over the window box wars, though yesterday morning I heard more screaming and ran to look. A lady across from me was yelling at a street sweeper. I don’t know why, but it had nothing to do with petunias.

Ah, well, another morning in the Eternal City.

—Susan Spano/Los Angeles Times staff writer

[Photo: The offending window box at the writer's apartment in Rome. Credit: Susan Spano/Los Angeles Times]

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5, 2009 at 7:12 am by Susan Spano and is filed under Arts & Culture, Europe, Italy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.