Mango dress
By Mumico sandals
Celine sunglasses
Vintage necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Piazza di San Salvatore in Lauro – Rome, Italy
Originally recorded by Mario Lanza in the late fifties, but most famously sung by Dean Martin, who included on his album of Italian love songs in 1962, Arrivederci Roma is a song I’ve always known without really knowing at all. My Dad, who doubtless heard it often in his childhood in the sixties, parodied it often when I was growing up. (Why he would spontaneously belt out, “Arrivederci Roma!” while vacuuming, I truly don’t know. But I vividly remember him doing it.) And it seems a fitting tribute today, as I come to the end of our Italian holiday photos.
We didn’t plan to take this last set of snapshots. But I woke up on our final day in Rome with an idea in mind, searched the city for a dress that would allow me to bring it to life, and actually found that dress at Mango. “Is it Max Mara?” the owner of Ciao Vintage asked me, when she saw me wearing it.
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “No, Mango.”
“Well, on you, it looks like Max Mara.”
It’s a beautiful dress, whatever the brand name on the tag. And it was the perfect dress for one last set of photos to say arrivederci to Rome, while doing what we love best in the eternal city – wandering around in the afternoon sun, stopping at the first cafe to catch our eye for a cold aperol spritz.
I don’t have a hard time with good-byes, except when I have to say farewell to a European city. It felt like we were finally settling into our Roman life and, just like that, it was time to leave again. I wanted one last everything before leaving – one last romantic photoshoot in a beautiful dress, one last bowl of pasta, one last spritz… as if enjoying all the things I love in Rome in a single day would somehow make it easier to let the place go the next day. It didn’t, of course. But I did it all, anyway, and I’m glad. We enjoyed our time in the Italian capital thoroughly. There was no opportunity to that we missed out or passed on. The arrivederci was still a sad one, but one without regrets. We did everything we wanted to do while we were in the city – in fact, we did most of it twice.
And now, it’s time for another good-bye to Rome. This time, it’s just good-bye to photos from our trip, because there are no more to follow these ones. We’ll be back to what I’ve worn in Winnipeg this season later this week. The place we call home in nothing like Rome, nothing like dream-like cities that Calvino describes. It’s an ordinary city, a place where people live and work and shop for groceries… including me, most of the time. But it’s the fact that it’s ordinary that makes me appreciate places like Rome, with their history and elegance and attention to every architectural detail, so deeply.
We’ll be back again someday soon, I home. But for now, it’s time to say a fond good-bye to Roma.
