In the Key of B-flat

The walk home has been different the past couple of weeks. I first noticed it two Mondays ago. Piazza Navonna, usually a beehive of activity, was quiet, well, relatively. A dozen African drummers and dancers were taking a spirited lap around the oval but had only gathered a handful of followers. The usual gang of living manikins and other “performers” were all standing around, a collective expression of “What the F&#@?” on their painted faces.
A few blocks over, the Pantheon square was even quieter. The bad mime had gone home and that woman in the evening gown was playing her synthesized accordion for the sparsely filled late night diner’s tables.
I didn’t give it much thought at the time. Nothing particularly odd about a quiet Monday night . Maybe it was just one of those chaos theory things. I just kept walking but as I was entering the home stretch , an unfamiliar nose started to fill the evening air. Actually, it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar. It sounded like a swarm of bees or, more accurately, the constant droning of the 17 year locusts. But, locusts? In Rome? Then I turned the corner and realized that what I was hearing was the sound of thirty thousand or so vuvuzelas blaring from a couple of flat screen TVs hung outside of Druid’s Rock, a British pub a block or so from the backside of Santa Maria . Gathered around those screens were a couple of hundred British soccer fans (or were they fans of British soccer. Whatever they were, they were certainly getting their World Cup on.
I’ve never followed soccer, well, at least not since my godson graduated to peewee lacrosse, and that was a much different game. (As I recall, everybody but the goalie, and sometime him too, would swarm to the ball, occasionally kicking it towards whatever direction had the most open sky). Todasy, I can’t say that I understand the game but I over the past few weeks I have come to admire the devotion that the game is awarded over here.
I’m not just talking Italians either. Druid’s Rock seems to be a soccer Mecca in town, regardless who’s playing. Monday it might be Brits and Tuesday the Cameroons. Last night Argentineans held sway. The strongest showing has far and away been the South Koreans who showed up with drums and organized chants. Their cheers were constant. A simple successful kick from one player to another was met with barely controlled bedlam. When the ball got within 20 meters of the goal, it got absolutely scary. I wandered off, only to collide with scores of young Koreans running down to the bar. It looked like something out of an old Chef Boy-Ar-Dee commercial (except it was dark and they were Korean).
Everybody is following this, walk down the street and every radio is tuned in. Walk down the street and the televised green pitch glows through the door of a café, the window of a hotel lobby or the curtains of an apartment. (Hey, I’m starting to sound like a Peeping Tom here.) One night I did hear some guy rocking out to Eat A Peach but I think he was quickly deported. Besides the great viewer ratings, the number of kids playing soccer in the parks seemed triple. My Italian is still pretty meager but it seemed that it was all anybody was talking about.
And then…the dream ended. Italy, the defending champs, failed to make it out of the first round, they were defeated by Slovakia. One friend, who had watched the game in a bar with a couple of her Slovakian friends, said that the scene got ugly, Italian men were trying to trip the Slovak girls on their way out the door. Still, there wasn’t the violence that would accompany a similar loss in the states. Mostly people just looked sad, a little wistful (I imagine it didn’t help that the US was still in it, clearly an indication of the end of days. Of course, that curiosity has since been righted.) The next morning while walking to work, I passed through a park to see a couple of kids tossing around a soccer ball, with their hands. Clearly the actions of the broken hearted.
By the next day, however, things were getting back to normal. Crowds were still gathering around the TVs. I don’t know if it’s because the town is filled with tourists , or if, for the Italians, any kind of soccer beats no soccer. Either way, the fever is still high. I hear that they have set up a Jumbotron at Villa Borghese which continues to draw a solid crowd. The Germans were whooping up their win over England yesterday. Even the kids were back in the park this morning, and using their feet.