The Girls of Rome

Rome is the oldest, and probably the greatest, of the world's capital cities. It has been the lodestone and fountainhead of Western civilization, the axis of a stupendous pagan empire, the capital of Christendom. It has stood while Babylon, Byzantium and Carthage crumbled. Yet Rome is young. After 2500 years of turbulent history it retains its magnetism for travelers of every faith and nationality. Borne on DC-8s instead of elephants, brandishing American Express checks instead of spears, bent on pleasure instead of plunder, they invade today's Eternal City in annual armies of 18,000,000 from every corner of the shrinking globe. Many, in the black, white, red and yellow habits of countless Catholic orders, come as spiritual pilgrims. Some, wearing expressions no less reverent, come to bask in the lambent afterglow of the Renaissance or to explore the world's greatest repository of antiquities from four millenniums of human history. A few, not unreasonably, come solely to worship at the altars of Bacchus and Lucullus in Rome's cornucopian array of restaurants. But most come simply to join the city's 2,500,000 denizens in that civilized celebration of the (continued on page 126) Girls Of Rome (continued from page 90) senses known as la dolce vita Romano. For the visiting American male in Rome, a single stride from the carpeted hush of his downtown hotel into the swirling slipstream of Roman foot traffic is sufficient to dispel any lingering doubts about the principal reason for and most eloquent embodiment of this suavely sensuous spirit: the girls of Rome.

As the male visitor ambles through the ancient streets -- clamorous with car horns, clanging trams, screeching brakes, clip-clopping carriages, tolling church bells, stentorian newsdealers, bricklayers whistling the latest Domenico Modugno hit, rock 'n' roll cannonading from open windows -- the girls swirl and eddy past in an endless stream, as oblivious of the din as of the florid compliments strewn in their paths by amiably impertinent Roman men. Conditioned -- and understandably partial -- to the Sophia Loren image of the Italian woman as an almond-eyed, widemouthed, bounteously beamed and bosomed sex symbol, the visiting American may be delightfully disarmed by the polyglot variety of Roman girls.

Like Sophia, the traffic-stopping, ebonhaired madonna strolling along the Tiber will have the satiny olive skin, the opulent endowment, and probably the colloquial dialect endemic to southern Italy. The willowy blonde emerging with a hatbox from a downtown dress shop, on the other hand, with her fine-boned features, luminously white complexion, wraithlike figure and ordinarily impeccable Roman syntax, is as likely to be an emigrant from northern Italy as from Scandinavia. Abhorring the machine-tooled precision of American and Parisian hair styles, they have imparted to the poodle, pageboy, bouffant and beehive coiffures a certain artful disarray, a studied carelessness which is peculiarly Italian and somehow natural-looking, despite the exacting care (and considerable quantities of spray net) involved in their creation. Many Roman girls, however, eschewing the latest fashions, elect to wear their hair luxuriantly long and flowing, achieving a spontaneity less contrived and equally engaging. Resisting the temptation to bedaub their faces with the cosmetic industry's vast array of rouges, powders and pancake makeups, they apply only the palest of lipsticks to emphasize already radiant complexions, plus a thin line of black to accent already enormous eyes.

Shopgirls and socialites, cashiers and coeds, stand-ins and starlets, maids and mannequins, B-girls and ballerinas -- all are enthusiastically engaged in Italy's second-ranking national pastime (after eating): the passeggiata. Everyone in Rome does it, and they seem to be doing it most of the time. More than a stroll, less than a promenade, it is a kind of purposeful wandering -- more for its own sake than with any fixed destination in mind -- performed with an indefinably theatrical air, as if all the city were a stage, and all its men and women players. As played by Rome's guilelessly unself-conscious girls -- unencumbered by girdles -- it ranks deservedly among the city's major spectator sports for male pedestrians. Unlike the demure walk of most American girls, it begins at the hips rather than the knees, generating the gently undulating sway which inspired a case-hardened visiting Hollywoodian to observe recently that the Roman girl in departure "makes Vikki Dougan look like Spring Byington." Not unexpectedly, this softly swiveling gait bespeaks a temperament both ardent and voluptuous. Like their city, the girls of Rome are essentially emotional both in allure and in orientation.

Lamentably, males who may be entertaining the intriguing notion of sowing a few oats are barking up the wrong libido. For despite her temperament, coquettishness, eye-popping fuselage and sensuous propensities, the average Italian girl, even in worldly Rome, is characterized by an equally passionate devotion to the spirit. She will almost always conduct herself around men with an unswerving propriety -- inspired and sustained by her deep-rooted dedication to family and Church -- which keeps her pure in fact, if not entirely in heart, until marriage.

In effect, then, the family fortress is virtually impregnable to any but those in search of permanent liaisons. Roman girls customarily respond to all but the most formal and diplomatic introduction with icy disregard, or with a paralyzing stare known locally as "the ray." In consequence, most of Rome's single men turn elsewhere for casual companionship and noncommittal diversion. Some surrender to the city's well-equipped infantry of approachable streetwalkers. But many more prefer to fraternize with golden hordes of foreign girls -- once a commodity borne to Rome by its plundering legions -- who now pour into the Eternal City of their own eager accord from Scandinavia, France, Germany, England, America, even from the Near and Far East. With its ambivalent ambiance of serene antiquity and vibrant modernity, the city almost always transcends their most extravagant expectations. And if the men, in their determination to exalt the memory of Giovanni Casanova, are sometimes direct in their overtures -- resorting less to the expected bonbons, poetry and flowers than to stage-whispered street-corner compliments and carefully administered pinches for an opening gambit -- there is at least no room for doubt about the nature of their interest.

Unlike New York or London, with their sharply delineated enclaves for every class and clique, residential Rome is a patchwork quilt of loosely interwoven socioeconomic threads: artists and white-collar workers, nobility and hoi polloi not infrequently share the same street, if not the same wall. Certain neighborhoods, of course, are more popular with one group than another -- not because they're currently "in" or "out" -- but simply because of common incomes, interests, occupations, architectural tastes and scenic preferences. Many of the city's landed and titled gentry, for instance, guard their well-bred and usually inbred future heiresses behind high ivied walls in the tapestried sanctuaries of monolithic Renaissance palazzi along stately, tree-lined Via del Corso in the heart of town, or nearby in the sedate elegance of Piazza dei Santi Apostoli.

On a somewhat less grand scale, Rome's more prosperous merchants and prominent literati -- daughters in tow -- occupy opulent niches in the ultramodern terraced apartment buildings of Eur, a parklike purlieu on the other side of town.

Middle-income families, and the lioness' share of the city's single girls, settle uptown and downtown, north, south, east and west -- wherever they feel most at home -- but mostly in burgeoning low-rent residential areas outside the 1700-year-old Aurelian Wall, whose crumbling battlements still enclose much of the old city and its old families. Some keep cats, read De Lampedusa in paperback, and listen to Frescobaldi on the radio amidst the antimacassars and beaux-arts decor of iron-gated 19th Century brownstones in Prati, a picturesque precinct just north of Vatican City's domes and spires.

The vast majority of Rome's artistically inclined are to be found vying with one another for damp basements, musty garrets and cramped studios within a tiny downtown domain -- far more compact in area and complex in constituency than Greenwich Village, its closest sociological facsimile -- bounded on the west by the staid mansions of the Via del Corso; on the north by the Piazza di Spagna, whose flower-mantled Spanish Steps the unattached young men and women of the city seem to have made their unofficial headquarters, winter or summer, day or night; on the south by the coin-tossing tourists at the Fontana di Trevi; and on the east by that spangled strip of high-rent real estate, the Via Veneto. A broad boulevard lined with bristling newsstands, chic shops, elegant hotels, colorful flower stalls and assorted sidewalk ristoranti, trattorie and caffès, it is Rome's mecca for the smart set, the movie crowd, the idle rich, the decadent aristocracy, the tourist legions, the bohemian settlement, the limp-wrist persuasion, the flesh peddlers and the omnipresent, flashbulb-popping paperazzi.

As with their choice of pad, Rome's signorinas couldn't conceive of approaching the matter of job-hunting armed with the Manhattan girl's scientifically weighed appraisals of status values and opportunities for advancement. Those who work are less likely to pick one job over another because of its fashionability than because of economic necessity and personal predilection. They tend to regard their jobs as little more than a promising, socially acceptable environment for meeting eligible men, and as a useful and usually enjoyable source of interim income to cover costs between adolescence and matrimony.

For girls of every lineage, income level and educational background, the city's most sought-after profession is its proliferating motion picture industry, currently engaged in a Roman orgy of moviemaking -- 200 features last year -- which has restored Italian films to a role of electric worldwide importance which they have not enjoyed since the postwar genesis of neorealism. Like Schwab's drug store for aspiring Lana Turners of bygone days, the chic sidewalk caffès of the Via Veneto have become hangouts for the would-be Lollobrigidas and Lorens of the Continent. They preen and promenade, sit, cross their legs and sip cappuccino at conspicuous sidewalk tables, all in the hope that one of the architects of Italy's cinematic renaissance -- Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Ponti, Rossellini, De Sica, De Laurentiis -- will stop for an aperitivo, notice them, and sign them up on the spot for a bit part.

The brightest, and some say the most fragrantly enduring, of Rome's infinitely varied crop of blossoms are those nurtured not in the overrich, underproductive soil of Roman nobility, but in the fertile intellectual earth of its upper-middle income families. Along with the city's colony of misses, mesdemoiselles, Fräulein and flickas from abroad, they are virtually alone among their contemporaries in knowledge of and concern with the worlds of art, music, literature, theater and cinema. Though they often chafe about not being able to live in bustling, prosperous Milan -- hub of Italy's theatrical, operatic, art and publishing worlds -- most are content to make the best of opportunities offered in the capital, which arc very good indeed. A goodly number from these two groups become executive secretaries for Rome's assorted industrial or ad world panjandrums; or bi- and trilingual interpreters for various international corporations, travel agencies or even in Italy's diplomatic service. But most of these cultivated creatures gravitate to the arts, fine and otherwise.

Most of Rome's working girls, however, can ill afford the considerable college and tutoring tuitions which qualify the daughters of better-fixed families for skilled jobs in the upper-middle echelons of the art, fashion and communications worlds. An abundance of no-less-enjoyable, if somewhat less-prestigious, positions is available to the majority possessing only secondary school diplomas and a pocketful of dreams. The qualifications include little more than friendliness, courtly manners, good grooming, quick intelligence and a sense of humor -- a description which fits more than enough of Rome's remarkable girls to create a waiting list for almost every desirable post.

Many of these signorinas work as salesgirls and cashiers in the exclusive emporiums of the Piazza di Spagna or the Via Condotti, Rome's 300-yard-long Fifth Avenue. Others labor as manicurists, Alitalia desk clerks, nurses' aides, dental assistants, receptionists, typists, switchboard operators and the like.

Perched on a lower rung of Rome's economic ladder are a group of girls who have known few of the social or scholastic advantages enjoyed (and in some cases, ignored) by the daughters of well- or even modestly heeled families. Some are self-supporting emigrés from the provinces, but most are native Romans who live at home and take jobs to supplement a meager family income: as salesgirls in trinket shops; cashiers in neighborhood movie houses; maids in hotels and well-to-do homes; seamstresses in the workrooms of big couturiers: waitresses in small caffès and trattorie; cigarette, hatcheck and sometimes B-girls in the downtown night clubs.

Imported and indigenous, several thousands of these girls also drift across the social barrier into an age-old vocation pioneered under the arches of ancient Rome. Evicted in 1958 from the pillowed and mirrored comfort of numerous bordellos, the city's flourishing strumpet population -- even larger, some estimate, than that of pleasure-oriented Paris or London -- energetically espouses the tenets of individual enterprise in the maze of side streets surrounding the tourist-thronged Via Veneto. Most, in the time-honored tradition of the trade, offer their familiar wares -- for prices ranging from $5 to $30, according to the nature and duration of services required -- in dimly lit doorways adjoining no-luggage transient hotels. But a few of the girls cruise up and down the avenues in white Alfa-Romeos -- following the example of Milan's renowned "Klaxon girls" -- scanning the pavements for $100 passengers with a yen for diversions in secluded parking areas.

On foot or wheels, the company of these amiably audacious signorinas is difficult to avoid; but the discriminating traveler, in the Eternal City as else-where, prefers the challenge of the chase -- which the infinitely varied, irrepressibly vivacious girls of Rome manage to make a merry one indeed. It can end in thorns or clover, depending on the persuasiveness of the pursuer; but it always begins in sunlight. In the benign flush of spring, summer and early autumn (the most salubrious and opportune seasons for a Roman holiday), they adorn the parks and squares of the city as ubiquitously as the oleander and bougainvillaea which line its boulevards. Lounging on the Spanish Steps, window-shopping along the Via Condotti, sipping espresso in sidewalk caffès, they offer the urbane visitor a unique opportunity for a field survey.

Whatever his preference, the accepted icebreaker is an invitation to share an aperilivo (the closest Roman facsimile to the cocktail, which is virtually unknown) in some nearby caffè or bottiglieria. At such occasions -- before lunch, between 1:30 and 2:30, being the best time for making friends -- the universal drink is Italian vermouth, served on the rocks, with soda, or with bitters. After an hour of slow sipping and casual small talk, most Italian girls will excuse themselves for a dutiful luncheon at home with their families. If one's companion is a self-supporting emigrant from abroad or rural Italy, however, the acquaintance can often be pleasantly prolonged with a repast in one of the city's epicurean array of restaurants. And afterward, a leisurely passeggiata -- arm in arm, if the liaison is going well.

The unhurried Mediterranean pace flows on into the evening as the girls -- with escorts and without -- repopulate the canopied tables of the sidewalk caffès for a lingering pre-prandial Cinzano or vermouth cassis in the gathering twilight. And then, with a ceremonious pleasure which Anglo-Saxons often fail to fathom, they begin -- around 9:30 or 10 P.M. -- that protracted Italian ritual known as cena: dinner. Heirs of a 2500-year heritage of Lucullan cuisine, Romans lavish more time and love on the preparation, consumption and discussion of food than perhaps any other people in the world.

Most of Rome's formal entertainments -- theater, opera, concerts -- begin after 9:30, or feature late performances. Few Roman girls, however -- apart from the college-bred and the foreign settlement -- can be expected to relish the intellectual wit and satire of the Roman stage, to know a basso from a coloratura, or even to stay awake through a moonlight performance of Gregorian chants by the renowned Academy of Santa Cecilia in the Roman Forum. Native girls, for the most part, prefer their amusements light, active, contemporary and American. In the city's clamorous, crowded cabarets, they seem to enjoy nothing more than squeezing onto postage-stamp dance floors to pay homage to the latest dance fad from the U.S.A. Beneath the pleated silk ceiling of La Cabala, Rome's most elegant and exclusive club (upstairs from the Hostaria dell'Orso), they will implore their escorts to join them in grinding out the Pachanga. Rugatino, scene of the historic Anita Ekberg incident, has since achieved an even higher destiny as a red-white-and-green-striped version of Manhattan's Peppermint Lounge; in the velvet murk of this basement boite, patricians and proletarians mingle freely sipping two-dollar drinks and performing the Twist. Those more progressively but less gymnastically inclined make the cool scene in the Grotto dei Piccoioni, just off the Piazza di Spagna. In open cars with their hair blowing, unabashed Old World romantics often spin out to posh Palazzi, an opulent colonnaded mansion overlooking the entire sweep of the city from Monte Mario, where they can drink toasts Viennese style and tango on the terrace until dawn.

The single-minded single male, however, finds his way into the cavernous neon pleasure palaces off the Veneto -- II Pipistrello, Jicky Club, the Florida and their ilk -- frankly pick-up spots for pros.

Embodying the somehow compatible contradictions of Rome's turbulent past and peripatetic present, the Roman girl is a paradoxical creature of myriad mingled bloods: serene yet volatile, sensual yet spiritual, naive yet worldly wise, eternally alluring yet eternally elusive, inviting the admiration of the transient traveler, often -- but thankfully not always -- only from afar.