Too bad the red, white and green fade so fast. Festa della Reppublica, Rome.
I spent most of June 2 -- Italy's "Festival of the Republic," celebrated each year for the 1946 referendum in which Italians voted out the Fascists -- chasing a piece of luggage around Termini train station.
This was partly the fault of my dear friend Glenton, who had, in a jetlag-induced stupor, left his bag on the good old Leonardo da Vinci Express. He called me frantically. "I'm having kind of an emergency," he said. "I can't find my bag."
After going through the usual suspects -- was it lost by the flight carrier? snatched by a Gypsy? -- I found out that, no. He'd just left it on the train, and the train had left. Oops.
Over the next three hours, we proceeded to turn Termini upside down. We checked every new train that came in from Fiumicino. Asked every ticket-seller and train conductor we could. Went to the customer service office, where we were told to go to the police station, and to the police station, where we were told to go to the customer service office. The saga ended, somewhat anticlimactically, by filling out a "police report" and trying to ignore the large American man who was, for some reason, insisting on giving us the 30-minute epic of how he lost his cell phone. (Hint: It started with his divorce.)
By the time we emerged back out of Termini's hellish halls and into the daylight, Festa della Reppublica was over. The crowds outside the Colosseum were gone. The last traces of tricolored smoke had disappeared from the air. The enormous Italian flag, while still hanging, looked lonesome. And given the state of, well, the state these days, the atmosphere seemed more than a little bit fitting.
Even so, I remembered how, just that morning, the people had packed the streets with such patriotism -- and how the sight of planes shooting overhead, trailing ribbons of red, white and green, had induced a little spark of pride, inexplicably, even in American me.
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