SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,10
of houses with my own eyes! No newly built house, no concrete disturbed this heavenly sight, and had I so far understood only in theory that here time was measured in ages, that it was sort of a horizontal sandglass, now I felt it. Of course the bus was still using the main arteries, where there were neither famous sights nor the artful bowels of the city viewable. Anyhow, side-glances inside some cross-alleys allowed me a good first impression of the esthetic adventure that was waiting for me.
The bus stopped at a station in one of the busiest streets. In the distance I could see a big junction. A gigantic sea of cars joined by a chorus of horns and ribald scolding was moving at a crawl. As the wrong fat guy was obviously related to the right one, he did the worst possible at the worst time and place: He left the bus in the middle of this inferno. What he expected to find here, was totally beyond me. Maybe a 1star hotel featuring a complimentary all day exhaust-shower. Me, I was done with both fat guys by now, and after he had crossed the street after what had felt like a small eternity, I simply jumped out of the backpack and onto the sidewalk. With my back tightly against a wall so I wasn’t run over by pedestrians, I gazed after my leaving involuntary carrier. Strange, I hadn’t even seen his face. Probably for the better!
I had a look-around the melee of crawling cars and hurrying people. The whole thing didn’t quite look like a glossy in a holiday brochure. Inside me panic slowly rose anew. Somehow I had expected a different start into the vacation. However, for all it’s worth I couldn’t just yield to despair because in a foreign country and without the belonging to the noble human race this could turn out as deadly luxury. I set worries of any kind aside and focused until my whiskers started to smolder.
In all these past years I hadn’t just been dreaming of Rome. When Gustav opened his books for research, I usually pretended to be asleep on his desk. In fact, screwing up my eyes I committed the locations of the famous sights, and even more so the complex network of the most important roads to my memory. This knowledge should come to my rescue now. I looked around for a street sign and found one right off the bat directly above my head: Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. Like a lost ghost the name flattered through the street map inside my memory in order to find the right spot. I thought and thought and thought ...
At some point it clicked. But this click wasn’t just satisfaction because I had partly won back some orientation, no, it almost felt like my body was trembling. I could hardly believe it. Should I actually have found such fortune in the middle of misfortune? Quickly I scurried to the left to take a look around the corner. If I didn’t see what I expected to see, I’d want to die on the spot.
My head slowly moved around the ledge – and had I been a great critic of God’s plan up to this point, now I abruptly turned back to orthodoxy and could only jubilate: Hallelujah! In front of me lay nothing less then the first address in Rome for my kind, so to say a drop-in center for members of the Felidae, who happened to have gotten into the awkward situation of being without a can-opener.
Like a blood orange the setting sun shone on a place, which one might expect in a myth painting from the nineteenth century when the masters, fascinated by classical antiquity, combined mythological themes from the Ancient World with European landscapes. But contrary to that art idyll, this impressive temple complex was bathed by heavy rush hour traffic; it was an oasis in the middle of noisy ugliness. The Largo Argentina within the so-called Area Sacra was famous, and I had heard so much about it. While I headed for it, behind barriers I only saw oxide red, ionic columns, which soared towards the sky like stumps with flutes and capitals that had been blemished beyond recognition by Barbarian hammers, but above all by the ravages of time. The Republican temple complex is one of the oldest ancient monuments in Rome, which is why it is located about 13 to 16 feet below today’s street level.