After the dinner Giorgio’s wife made for us, we sat around in his drawing room sipping on Cynar. It was August and Rome was stifling hot, humid and deserted by all but the tourists and the stalwart Romanisti. It was nice, though, for it felt like family and was very familiar. Giorgio was sketching something near me or behind me, I don’t know what. But he was intent on capturing something in the light of the room. I was exhausted from a day of roaming around the city and had a few more days before I was to go back home and to college at Santa Clara.
Giorgio asked me if there was anything I missed from America. “About this time, when I’ve been here almost a month,” I said, “ I’m missing the American hamburger.” He raised an eyebrow, only one. And went back to his drawing.
“Well, I once went nearby to an opening the British consulate appeared at for an almost American burger place, I think they called it Wimpy’s.” I was a little intrigued, really more interested in the local interpretation of a burger than anything. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t eating well. In fact, my line about the burger was more of a throw-away line. As a young boy in southern California, one of the first McDonalds was very near to where we lived, and sometimes my mom would take me and my sister for a treat – a cheeseburger, with fries and a chocolate shake. It wasn’t something we did all that often, but I have fond memories of it. We usually stopped at our uncle Phil’s house on the way home and had ice cream if my uncle was there.
“So, what will you do tomorrow, young American?” Giorgio asked me. “I don’t have much I need to do; I want to take the camera out and shoot a couple more rolls of film – maybe just wander around. Why?” I asked.
“Come around lunch time, say 1 o’clock, and we’ll take a short walk over to the Via Veneto and see about this Wimpy’s, eh?” I guess he liked to have a young person around. He certainly livened up, so did his wife. I felt like a grandchild around them, and it was all so very familiar. Not creepy. Just family like feelings.
In reality I hadn’t thought much about fast food, save for the occasional tavola calda I’d encounter near the train station. There I could get cheap eats and fast, so I could continue on with my exploration of Rome. But the American version, it was so foreign to what Rome represented, as far as I could tell. Different worlds. Still, the American wave had been crashing on Italian soil since the end of World War II, and it wasn’t showing any signs of letting up. Progress, they called it then. Nowadays, we might see that movement differently.
The next day I arose early and walked for miles, shooting all kinds of scenes in a very quiet (and hot) Rome. Around 1, I stopped by the de Chirico home and studio near the Spanish Steps and rang the bell. Giorgio came down, ornamental cane in hand, and dressed like he’d just stepped out from Savile Row in London. “Andiamo,” he exclaimed. And off we were in search of an American burger.
This turn of events, whereby a young American who came to Italy to initially deliver an art package to the head of the Jesuit order in the Vatican and resulted in visiting my Sicilian family and roots and ultimately brought me back to Rome to spend time with an octogenarian Italian surrealist, offers a Bildungsroman in fable-like clothing. Did some of it happen? Of course it did. Is some of it straight out of the imagination of a once young and idealistic American youth? Without a doubt. But this young American was in search of an American hamburger, and this was years before McDonald’s arrived on the scene a few clicks down the road and activated an also young Italian youth, Carlo Petrini, to set into motion the Slow Food movement. Art imitating life while life imitates what? An uncertain future from which we are clawing back to revisit and reinvent? Isn’t that part and parcel of what art is? Who knew a burger could be a doorway into memory, imagination, time, and meaning? I asked my elder companion about things like that while we took the ten-minute walk in the unforgivable heat of a Roman August from the Spanish Steps to the Via Veneto.
In the end, we arrived to a place that did indeed serve hamburgers, albeit not like the ones I tasted as a young boy in my hometown McDonald’s. Inside we were greeted with a sign: “God bless this bar and all who frequent it.”
The hamburger — the “bun” was firmer, more like a traditional Roman Cazzotto bun. The meat also was thicker than the usual American patty found back home, less machine shaped and more hand shaped – irregular, beefy, almost like it lacked fat (grass fed?). And like many an Italian panino I have had over the years, there was a paucity of embellishments – no lettuce or tomato, no “secret” sauce, no cheese. It was not bad. But was it the hamburger an American grew up on?
We talked about that, Giorgio and me – about growing up and what one gets used to. And then as life goes on, how the changes that are thrust upon each and every one of us in the unique ways they are, how we adjust to those changes. Little did I know then that the next fifty years would be an endless tsunami of change and adjust, pivot and recalibrate. It’s quite natural if you look at the plants and animals around us. And to those who have the artistic bent? Well, my elderly companion surely pivoted through some of the most socially and artistic and tempestuous times in history. And he made it through. Boy, did he.
On the way back from Wimpy’s Giorgio wanted to stop for an afternoon caffé, at his usual spot, the Antico Caffè Greco. “Here we are two gentlemen of dubious Greek origin, have a caffé in Rome in a place called the Greek,” he laughed at the irony. I ordered a caffé freddo, an iced coffee. I was a bit overwhelmed, but also ready to head back home. This wouldn’t be my last time in Italy. It would be the first of many. But it has been a well-spring for my emotions and imagination all the years since. It’s been one hell of a journey, as the kids like to say, these days.
Post script: A few months after I got back to America, my mom called me. There was a package from Italy, from Rome. I asked her to open it for me. When she did, she looked upon a picture Giorgio had painted, along with a note, telling me that he enjoyed our little visit and he was sending along this memento of the time I spent with him and his wife. He told me the next time I came to Rome to come by, anytime. I wrote him a thank you note and told him I would be glad to see them next time.
