Terry Prone: Being mistaken for Mary Street in Rome isn't a bad start to Christmas

Getting lots of hugs from the clientele in Pope Leo's favourite restaurant is a great way to begin the festive season, writes Terry Prone

St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where processions are sure not to lose any of their members.

When a bunch of total strangers suggest that you are Mary Street, you know that you’re missing a crucial connection. Up to that point, things had been pretty good. 

Once I’d dumped my case, I was walked nearly a kilometre to a restaurant. But the company was good and the weather even better, so walking didn’t seem as bad as it would at home, particularly since I wasn’t in heels.

Rome is made up of cobblestones which, unlike the ones remaining in Dublin, don’t have anything between them. No cement filler. Each is a little black standalone, the gap between it and the next just aching to trap a stiletto heel and cause its owner to face-plant. 

Absent heels, I strode out confidently, noting that up the middle of the road leading to St Peter’s was a sort of fenced-off area. For processions, someone explained. Processions? Yes, if you were part of a procession, you wouldn’t want to fall off and be adopted by a quite different procession, so you stayed between the banisters. 

Rome at Christmas

Which an obliging case study procession promptly did. They looked amazingly happy, not just because they were unlikely to lose some of their members, but because — well, because they were in Rome on a warm Sunday afternoon and they were going to see His Holiness, Pope Leo, conduct a ceremony.

But they might have been happy, anyway. Rome and the Vatican City/State within it are a haven of religious happiness. Sisters and priests go out in full regalia, expecting to be smiled at, in sharp contrast to the predictable reactions in a more secular state like Ireland. 

There’s always something going on in Rome, always something for sale, always an atmosphere of somehow being in the right place at the right time. 

And that’s even before the Christmas accoutrements: the gigantic Christmas tree at the edge of St Peter’s Square or the 18 cribs nestled into the colonnade. Lights everywhere and even a few Santa Clauses, although the guy in the red hoodie doesn’t have quite the purchase in Rome he has elsewhere. 

People of all nationalities, all ages, all ethnicities, smile at you and nod as if to confirm your wisdom in being there at that time. Nowhere else in the world will you hear quite so many different languages being spoken all at once.

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But then, nowhere else in the world will you see quite so many varieties of cop in the one urban area. Some of them female and in black sitting atop black horses. Some of them male, having a colloquy at a crossroads, their little FIATs pointed in, nose to nose. 

Some of them in larger cars on the move, beeping and lowering their windows to tell you to get the hell out of their way. Or that’s what I thought, mainly because the vivid loudness of Italian discourse always sounds to me, the first two days I am in Rome, as if the speaker is furious with me and needs restraining from executing me right there and then.

The particular cop who yelled at me from his car turned out to be doing me a favour, pointing out that my wallet was poking up out of the outside pocket of my wheelie bag. “Irelandese,” the guy with me told the officer with a resigned one-shoulder shrug.

“You must beware of pickpockets,” the guy in the squad car warned me in impeccable English. I obediently shoved the wallet further down, zipped the pocket and got an acknowledgment that — in its collusive glance at the shrugging guy who had given my nationality — suggested that all Irish people needed minding in Rome. Maybe in other places, too.

Pope Leo’s favourite restaurant

They had told me that the restaurant to which we were going for lunch was Pope Leo’s favourite, so I assumed posh. As it turned out, it couldn’t have been less posh. Called 'The Island of Pizza' it’s just down a bit from the Vatican. 

Contradictorily, everybody in the restaurant seemed to be eating anything other than pizza: steak, pasta, pork. Which was good because I loathe pizza. We threaded our way through little tables jammed together to accommodate families, sat and shoved bags and jackets on the floor at our legs because there didn’t seem much alternative. 

We ordered. Wine appeared. Bread appeared. Olive oil appeared. I — in common with another person at the table — had chosen ravioli in pumpkin sauce. It arrived first. 

Then the head waiter arrived and shouted at me. I looked at him in terror until one of the diners explained that in Rome, waiting until everyone has their main course is not regarded as polite. In fact, it’s seen as an insult to the food. If your main course has arrived, dig in.

We did just that. The pumpkin sauce in which the ravioli swam was indecently delicious. As the other mains arrived, they seemed to deliver matching customer satisfaction.

Almost every crowded table held at least one, and in some cases, several small children. Ours was a nine-month-old boy so sweet that the Irish people at the table ended up defining the word “dote” for the Italians, Portuguese and Spanish around us, plus the man from India who speaks six languages, plus Guinness. He LOVES Guinness.

The meal may have lasted for three hours. The dote was passed from parents to folk he had never previously encountered. This pattern seemed to apply at every table which included a youngster, with occasional breaks at ours for breast-feeding.

The whole thing cost less than €50 each, including tiramisu, sorbet and chocolate mousse. Plus coffee. Eventually, we were ready to exit the premises — L’Isola Della Pizza, Via Degli Scipioni, if you want to visit the Pope’s favourite eatery. 

'Are you Mary Street?'

We went sideways through the jammed tables filled with shouted conversation, and when we came to the third row, the family on the left seemed to be having a debate across the narrow aisle with the family on the right, which required much pointing at me.

They shouted a question at me, which I thought was “Are you Mary Street?” The man behind me — the Indian who loves Guinness, laughed and explained. “They want to know if you’re Meryl Streep,” he told me, before telling them that I was Irish (an explanation of wide-ranging applicability) and therefore not Meryl Streep. 

One of the women pointed to my white hair, which she clearly thought gave me a look of Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada. Another, in an effort to console me for not being Meryl (or even Mary Street) made a speech which, translated, seemed to convey that she was sure I was really famous in Ireland.

It would have been ungrateful to disabuse her of this notion, so I let her hug me although that provoked others to do the same and created even worse traffic congestion between the tables.

What a beginning to Christmas…