‘Rear Window,’ Roman style — but without the murder

Susan Spano’s Postcards From Rome

Who lives in my apartment building in Rome? It’s not a just-popped-over-to-borrow-a-cup-of-sugar kind of place, but I’m slowly figuring it out.

My desk is against a big window overlooking the internal courtyard, so I see everybody come and go.

There’s the man on the floor above across from me. He has a terrace with a ping-pong table and an upper deck where I once saw him sunbathing in the nude. Then he saw me and went inside to put on shorts.

Some American students live in one of the apartments below. They hang their T-shirts on the railing around the courtyard and come out to talk on their cellphones, which don’t work inside these old walls.

Above me is a mechanical engineer from Sicily who likes hot peppers. I know this because a few months ago, hanging laundry on the line on the roof, I saw some old, seemingly abandoned pots. I added soil and some strawberry seeds, just to see if they’d grow.

Later, I ran into the engineer up there. He asked me what I’d put in the pots, because he’d already planted Mexican pepper seeds there. When he saw the strawberries come up, he thought it was some kind of strange miracle.

Lastly, there’s the constant gardener, a middle-aged woman who comes out like clockwork three times a day to tend to her beautiful terrace flower garden, though she never sits there to simply enjoy it.

Last night she knocked on my door, clearly distraught, and asked me to come into the apartment to help lift the elderly lady she looks after, who had fallen on the floor. I’d never seen her charge, but after following the constant gardener through a long chain of dark rooms, there the old lady was, sprawled on the floor. We each took an arm and lifted her to her walker. She seemed shaken, but otherwise OK. So I said goodnight and left.

This is starting to seem like “Rear Window,” though I trust I won’t witness a murder.

– Susan Spano, Los Angeles Times staff writer

[Photos: Susan Spano]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 2:00 pm by Susan Spano and is filed under 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.