Well, it isn't snowing in Rome, but it feels almost cold enough to start, and it is raining. The city was sleeping-in today. I was waiting for the 90 Express Bus at 7:14 … but of course, it did not arrive because (as I found out) today the city is observing the orario festivo (Sunday/Holiday Schedule) means the buses come only every 30 minutes.
While I was waiting at Piazza Vimercati, which leads off Piazza dell'Ateneo Salesiano, I saw a man crossing the street with two empty soft-drink bottles. He went to the little fountain at the edge of the two piazzas and filled them both. Yes, that fountain has been giving good drinking water and has flowed continuously for decades … and before the neighborhood was developed in the 1960s, I'm told that there was a fountain in the same spot. So, let's be conservative and say that people have been coming to this fountain for a century. When I was a grad student, I used to stop for a drink there on hot afternoons when I'd get off the bus to return to university and the water was always refreshing and good. So why was I surpised this morning to see this man filling up his bottles of drinking water and bringing them back to his car? Maybe I've been conditioned to think that "bottled water" is something you have to buy.
And I thought: how wonderful that the water is still fresh and healthy in Rome in the middle of the winter, and the people, after centuries and millennia, can still fill their jugs and bottles for free. There is no reason to worry about commercialization as long as the water is accessible and free.
It was such a happy realization on this feast of Stephen, and I was humming "Good King Wenceslaus" when the 90 Express Bus finally arrived.
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