How well do you know your neighbourhood?

I can bet that quite well if you grew up there. As children we tend to run around our neighbourhood and discover new places. Each street and each curve further is being the more curiously conquered. Thus, we all have a kind of a map of the world of our childhood in our minds.
However, the answer to the question above would be ‘not really’ if we moved in later and didn’t have a chance or need to wander around curiously. As far as I’m concerned, I know all the streets and all the secluded places of Wygoda, but not many of the village I live in now. Every day I used to go from home to work and back and stayed lazily in otherwise. At least that has been so far. Now, when the best attraction of the day to look forward to is a walk (when my little son is fast asleep and silent in his pram and I can relax and listen to my thoughts), I’ve started learning my new neighbourhood. Not streets, but paths — paths through woods and paths through fields and meadows. Once I have learned one, I try another one. And when I get back home I ask my husband about yet more paths I have come across. He’s got the map of them in his mind as they are a piece of his childhood’s world, and he is utterly happy to share them and his memories with me. And I’m just as happy to learn about his world and the future world of my children.

Battelli Romana (Roman diary 4)

feeling light, left basilica around one; compulsively stopped in tiny Piazza Rondanini for al fresco lunch with perhaps too much wine; headed home to change; at the corner deli packed a sizable slice of pizza rustica, two cans of lager and some grapes into my rucksack for later; off to the river;

I stop at the boarding point for boat trips on the Trastevere embankment, the western side of Tiber Island. The city disappears in an instant as I carry my bike down the stairs to the water level, the lowest I’ve descended in Rome so far and I’m beginning to take life at its slowest pace here. Boats leave just about hourly and I have half an hour before the next trip starts. The pier feels empty, or rather quiet and real, without camera-armed tourists – the sleepy girl in the ticket office stares at the computer screen, indifferent to the man chattering beside her; a couple with a boy and his pram sit on the ground nibbling at snacks; three uniformed security men entertain themselves by taking in turns clumsy bike rides along the embankment. I no sooner sit on a dusty chair than a wiry, suspiciously neat, local wino comes up and offers me a fantastic sample of slurred Italian excuses and apologies, pointing out the can in my hands. There is an empty plastic glass on the table, a remnant of last night’s boat disco here, so I pour him a good measure of my lager, which of course makes him even more amicable. The man goes on with his insane staccato until one of the security boys wakes up to his duty and chases him off.

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