Rome: Walk This Way By R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, March 5, 2000

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Bruno's statue presides over the noisy and chaotic Campo de' Fiori, or Field of Flowers, reputedly the oldest vegetable market in Rome. Slabs of wood set beneath large white umbrellas bear some of Italy's finest produce-crates of artichokes from Sardinia, broccoli from Puglia, cauliflower from Lazio, tomatoes and blood-red oranges from Sicily, radicchio from Treviso and small apples grown in the cool mountain air of Abruzzo.

A few tourists come and go, but mostly local residents move busily amid the stalls, negotiating their purchases. Occasionally, they are serenaded by a man in a wheelchair with a white shock of unkempt hair who sings of love and makes the words up as he goes. At night, the piazza remains in the grip of charming disorder as it becomes a meeting and drinking spot for hundreds of Romans, who spill out of the doorways of the vineria (wine bars) and pizza parlors lining the periphery.

Walk just 50 yards, however, and you enter the Piazza Farnese, a square as aristocratic as the Campo de' Fiori is proletarian. Projecting its magisterial authority from the south end is the famed Palazzo Farnese, the former 16th-century residence of Cardinal Allesandro Farnese, otherwise known as Pope Paul III.

Farnese spent piles of churchgoers' money decorating the interior walls of his palace with frescoes of male cherubs, but he also had the good sense to install a long stone bench along the Olympian facade. It's a wonderful place to sit and listen to the burbling from the twin fountains in the serene square, each made from immense granite baths once used by the city's elite.

A small church decorates one corner of the square, and on the opposite corner is the villa where the chief lawyer for Silvio Berlusconi lives. Berlusconi is the media magnate and former Italian prime minister who has been in and out of court on corruption charges, and local residents-probably from the neighboring Campo de' Fiori-have been known to signal their displeasure with the lawyer's activities on behalf of his powerful client by leaving piles of garbage at his villa door.

It's the subtle way of sending a message, Italian-style.

To walk through this neighborhood, or reside here as I do, is to step back into the 17th and 18th centuries and experience both the delights and frustrations of that era. The streets are narrow, having been sized for carriages, and are paved unevenly with sampietrini-replicates of stones from nearby St. Peter's Square. Electricity occasionally goes out, the telephone lines are frequently overloaded and shopkeepers rigorously follow the ancient Roman schedule of daily three-hour lunches and naps beginning at 1 p.m.

But if you take an afternoon walk-for example, down the Via dei Cappellan, named after the hatmakers who once filled the small stalls-you come to appreciate some of the neighborhood's timeless wonders. Classical furniture restorers now dominate the neighborhood, and they frequently work on wooden easels placed in the middle of the street, causing small clouds of sawdust to glint in the bright afternoon sun. None seems to work more than a few hours, making their daily routine a ritual celebration of the Mediterranean region's slower rhythms.

Turn south to reach the parallel Via di Monserrato or Via Giulia and you will soon pass gallery after gallery filled with Renaissance antiques and replicated Roman statuaries. The Palazzo Ricci, a newly refurbished villa along the first of these two streets, has extraordinary 16th-century frescoes of warriors in battle painted on the plaster facade by a student of Raphael. Also nearby is the Palazzo Spada, which houses a small museum of the art collected by the two cardinals who once lived there. Francesco Borromini, the 16th-century Italian master of accentuated geometric perspective, had a hand in designing a humorous gallery that appears much longer than it is.

The villa was recently cleansed of soot, like many structures throughout the city that have some past or present connection to the church. On the exterior corner of many neighborhood villas, at the intersection of the first and second floors, for example, you can find newly retouched, framed portraits of the Virgin Mary. Last year, city authorities used public funds to restore hundreds of these portraits by artisans who perched atop tall stepladders with small brushes in hand. The project was a gift to the millions of religious pilgrims expected to descend on Rome this year.

The neighborhood has few trees and virtually no grass. But it has dozens of cafes, and in the early spring, hundreds of residents huddle on sunlit chairs outside, warming themselves like the city's wild cats. Small, dark bars are spaced every 100 yards or so, ready to serve fresh orange juice, delicious shots of caffeine or something stronger.

A short walk to the north, across the busy Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, is the splendid Piazza Navona, dotted with Bernini's gaudily spectacular fountains depicting sea serpents, Neptune and personifications of the world's four greatest rivers. One of the city's more expensive and touristy dining spots, the square nonetheless offers a show at night, when crowds gather to watch lights play off the pools of water and witness street performances.

Just to the west of the piazza is the small, elegant Hotel Raphael, where former prime minister Bettino Craxi lodged for years-until he was charged with corruption in the 1990s. As he left the hotel to begin his exile in Tunisia, neighborhood residents pelted him with small coins, thus keeping alive the anti-imperial spirit of Giordano Bruno.