Sol supastar

Tube stops: Colloseo, Tiburtina FS.

It's August - hot, hot, hot, Summer-time.

The landlord, on one of his unexpected visits with his wife - the previous time, I came back from food-shopping to find him changing the light fittings with no shirt on: it took me a few seconds to realise I wasn't being burgled by a member of the Italian cast of Auf Wiedersehn Pet - warned me that in August, nothing happens. Nada. Purgatory. Thou shalt not find a single Roman within the city walls.

Posso avere uno cappucino...anyone? Hello....?

And he's quite right: everyone is on holiday. The streets, whilst not being void of civilians, have a strangely hushed atmosphere about them. As the streams of sweat run down my back, there are less quizzical stares as if to suggest I shouldn't, as a human being, be able to contain so much water in my body. I even felt moved to visit a shoe shop on the Via Corso to equip my feet with a more suitable form of footwear for the day-time - my trainers identifying me as legal alien in the first few seconds of contact with an Italian native. All that remains is my wild beard and the hair starting to grow longer on my head - soon, I could pass for bello.

But why this wild savage appearance, I hear you ask? Well, with my flatmates at home for the Summer - leaving the flat empty - I've become a hermet, filling my days with learning about Western Esotericism, Renaissance Magic and the Cabala. I'm not training to become a wizard (yet) but these are deliberate connections to what I love about Italy: a city that beheld one of the greatest leaps forward of our civilisation, when man decided to take a rational decision about what to believe, what to follow, what to study and analyse and how to be a sceptic. An intelligent, scientific, independent animal.

Primavera: "It's Spring time, for Hitler" ... and philosophical enlightenment.
These kids knew how to party.

Locked up in my ivory tower, writing for a website every morning to keep the euros coming in, days sometimes pass when all I hear are the echoes of a mildy abusive relationship taking place between a couple a few feet from my window, the (now melancholic) sound of Abba being played in a student's flat (if no-one's dancing, or around to listen to it - trust me, 70's disco can be sad) and the barking of the dogs belonging to the white-trash couple on the first floor. Maybe I'm becoming an ascetic monk, relying solely on internet music for inspiration. Maybe I'm wearing my bed-sheets around my person, pretending to be Giordano Bruno (not yet) or I might have found the time and peace to write the book I've been dying to, for ages. First though, a new blog, about esotericism. If I'm dreaming about it, I certainly need to be writing about it. Watch this blog space.

Go on, you can say it. The resemblance is remarkable.

So, half an hour from now, a good friend will be arriving in Italy to break the spell and much chaos will ensue. A trip is planned to the supermarket to stock up on booze as well as a trip to my favourite beach to sweat out those deadly party toxins. The silence will be broken with portable speakers and conversation. But just in case someone's curious as to what will be going on in my ivory tower, I'll leave my new curtains just slightly ajar for the neighbours.

I have a little too much privacy now, a gift from Mrs. Landlord.