Yesterday was to be our “getaway day,” similar to when baseball teams play the final game in a series (usually a day game), after which the visiting team boards a plane to head to its next destination. Often the teams seem distracted and perhaps not as completely focused on the task at hand as during the first two days of the series. Yesterday, a day we planned to spend in Rome before heading north to Umbria with a stop in Terni for dinner with some business associates, promised to be a getaway day for us. No complicated or important itinerary, just following up on a few loose ends.

It turned out to be one hell of a getaway day.

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I had originally intended to write about yesterday under the title Barbiere, Brioni e Birra (barber, Brioni and beer for the Italian-challenged readers), touching upon the leisurely activities our day promised. It was to be a quick, surgical posting, a going-through-the-motions type of posting, a getaway day kind of posting. But the day turned out to be so much more.

Not that we did more than we intended. Not that we stumbled upon some new and great adventure that we now need to shout out to the world. It’s just that everything we did just felt right. Maybe just because it’s spring.

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Barbiere. I have written several times in the past of the magic of getting your hair cut in Italy by an Italian barber. And just last week I had the pleasure of taking my twins and their two friends to “my” barber in Rome, where this group of relatively hairless boys enjoyed their first straight razor shave (reputedly one of the friends has done this several times before, but it hard to imagine how or why). It was a little bit of magic. For them and for me. In the interest of saving time that day, however, I did not get a haircut but made a promise instead to return before leaving Rome.

So the most important task on this getaway day was to return to Silvano’s barber shop and get some grooming. We rose a little late in the morning and said our goodbyes to Erin, our travelling companion for the previous three weeks and with a little difficulty managed to head toward the center of Rome where Silvano’s barbershop, a single room shop strategically located on an intersection visible seemingly from miles away. It is as though a Hollywood movie set was built with sightlines and spotlights to highlight this place. More on that later.

We arrived much behind our self imposed schedule, worried that the late hour might mean that Silvano was either booked until lunch or closed for lunch. But instead, as we turned the corner and saw the familiar “Barbiere” sign above his door, we could see that he was sitting in one of the shop’s barber chairs reading the newspaper. His normally busy parlor was empty.

We arrived and opened the door, which always seem be sticky, the scraping noise announcing our entrance.  With this noise Silvano looked up, a big smile spreading over his wizened face. At nearly 80 years old, the diminutive barbiere is always impeccably dressed in his barber’s jacket, steel rimmed glasses and expressive eyes twinkling in the light that streams through the large picture windows that wrap around the barbershop.

“Avvocato,” he greeted me, “un piacere.” He greets all of his customers by title and with a smile, referring to me as “lawyer,” which was my profession in an earlier life. He seated me and began the long, leisurely process of cutting my hair, shaving my face and bestowing a little peacefulness to an overstressed soul.

Now most of my Italian friends would tell you that I can get by in Italian. They are mistaken. On my best days I can understand about half of what is said, and generally that consists mostly of prepositions, articles, a noun here and there and a swear word. It’s the verbs that give me the real trouble. But with Silvano, who speaks not a word of English, I seem to be able to understand most of what he has to say and I find myself suddenly articulate in his shop. Or at least relatively more articulate. Perhaps it’s because the experience is so relaxing. Perhaps because barbers are fine with long stretches of silence. There is no pressure to keep a conversation going in a barbershop.

So Silvano spoke on and on about how wonderful it was to give the boys haircuts and shaves. Their first shave, he gushed. A truly memorable time in a man’s life, he continued. And how proud for the father to be there and to be a part of it. You know, after listening to his melodic words, his sing-songy phrases I did feel proud. Proud and increasingly relaxed.

Snip, snip, snip. At the back of my neck he was going crazy with little snips, a veritable Edward Scissorhands sculpting the topiary. Each snip – more a distant wave of sound as the scissors opened and then closed – washed over my body, having a hypnotic effect like a magician waving a watch in front of his subject.

Then came the shave. Silvano has a ritual preparing his customer for a shave. Towels are laid out on the chest and tucked into the shirt, head is leaned back onto the chair’s headrest. Glasses are put in the barber’s jacket pocket and the badger brush is brought from the drawer. Water is run in the sink, the temperature adjusted and the brush soaked. The shaving soap jar is opened and a dollop coaxed out on index fingertip and inserted into the center of the brush. Then, with a little fanfare, the lathering begins.

Short strokes across the chin with the badger hair brush begin to leave a foam on the chin. Ten across the neck. Longer slaps back and forth across the cheeks. Return to the neck, then small painting motions above the lip. Back to the neck. Over and over again. For several minutes he is a Picasso, or more a Jackson Pollack, painting the face and working the canvass that is the skin. And then the brush is laid on a special holder and the blade is extracted from the drawer. The shave is about to begin.

With short, light stokes of the blade, less cutting than scratching the whiskers from the face, he starts around the sideburns. A little scrape here, a longer, gentle swoosh there. A pinch of the cheek to stretch the skin and make the whisker more exposed and then a prod and a pull to do the same. Then an abrupt pause. He turns, one hand lightly but reassuringly remaining on the shoulder throughout, wipes the residue from the blade onto a towel laid out for this purpose and with an abrupt turn returns once more to the face.

I have been coming to this barber shop for five or six years, shortly after I wandered past it and took some photos, thinking to myself, this looks like the quintessential barber shop. The movie version with the little man in the white jacket and the white hair and the crowd of men waiting for their turn in the chair. On my next trip to Rome, sporting a mop of hair and complaining of the heat Suzy suggested to me that I find that barber shop I had seen before. Eureka. I had not even thought of entering it for the purpose of a haircut. In my mind it was simply a prop to be photographed.

So I spent the next hour looking all over the area where I thought the shop was located. Finally I came across that long street with the shop with “Barbiere” over the window. I approached but got cold feet. I couldn’t communicate with an Italian and would embarrass myself. Worse yet, he would commit some sort of travesty on my hair. But I found the courage to enter and have been coming back ever since. So often, in fact, that I consider Silvano my regular barber and the Italian brothers back in Bethesda as a backup in case I can’t get to Rome.

* * *

A couple of years ago when entering Silvano’s barbershop he greeted me (this was before I became known as avvocato) and almost immediately told me he had something to show me. There on the wall was a framed photo of tiny Silvano standing next to a towering Julia Roberts. I was not the only person who imagined Silvano’s barbiere a Hollywood set. So did Hollywood. So when Julia Roberts’ movie Eat, Pray, Love needed a barbershop in Rome to film one of the only good scenes in the movie, they came to Silvano’s. But not only did they use his shop, they used him to deliver one of the most important messages in that portion of the movie.

Watch my friend the movie star below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UQ0FyTkAl8

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Yesterday’s post, which I hastily titled Niente before posting, was about the joy of doing nothing (or very little). And coincidentally our good friend Edward, commenting on the post previous to that, which featured our new friend Elizabeth Minchilli (an old and dear friend of Edward and Paula), pointed out to me that

“. . . as for your lazy Sunday, it is called “il dolce far niente”, the sweet doing nothing. It is a hard thing for Americans to achieve, but it looks like you tasted Italian wisdom.”

Il dolce far niente. The sweet doing nothing. I have found this over and over at Silvano’s barbershop. I swear it is true. But don’t trust me. Ask Julia Roberts.

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Brioni. Part two of our getaway day brought us to Brioni, simply the best men’s tailor in the world. That’s according to me. I have written before about my love of Brioni, chronicling our attempts to visit the Brioni headquarters in a tiny village in Abruzzo. Getting to the Rome retail store was a lot easier.

But not quite as satisfying. I was on a mission to buy some new pants and from the moment we arrived our salesman seemed oddly distant, uninterested and disengaged. It must have been due to my clothing (although I was wearing a pair of Brioni jeans, I was also wearing an outlandishly unstylish polo shirt). Even my new haircut and shave did not seem to get this guy’s attention.

But with the patience borne from the realization that this was getaway day and that doing nothing was not so bad, we worked and worked our man. And after a half hour or so he was scurrying back into the hidden stockrooms (why they insist on displaying one tenth of their designs and in sizes only Silvano could fit in is beyond me) we had amassed a pile of possible candidates. With Suzy’s good and firm guidance we left an hour later with a shopping bag jammed with the crown jewels.

Mission accomplished.

* * *

Our final Roman adventure this getaway day would be lunch. Birra.

Two days earlier we had been touring the area around the Campo de’ Fiori with Elizabeth. As we wandered toward the ghetto, we passed a fairly new restaurant that Elizabeth had reviewed not so long ago. The restaurant, more properly a birreria is called Open Baladin and features dozens if not hundreds of handcrafted Italian beers and American style food. With an Italian twist. Like homemade potato chips with pecorino cheese and garlic. A hamburger on a homemade brioche with pecorino and sweet and sour Tropea red onions. A ground pork burger with jalapenos, grilled onions and some sort of peanut mayo. The food was out of this world. As were the beers.

We would hardly recommend going out for burgers and beer when in Rome. In fact, several years ago, when it was under different management and was an Italian bruschetteria, we stumbled into this very locale, and turned our noses at some Brits we struck up a conversation with and who told us that they had enjoyed the hamburgers and chips (and beer) so much that they had returned there every day on their weeklong trip. But there is something so authentic and so Italian about Open Baladin that we think it is worth trying, even if you forego a real Italian meal. It doesn’t hurt that it’s open non-stop from noon until 2am (kitchen closes at 1:15). That way you can add it as a fourth meal.

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So we returned to our Trastevere apartment to meet Wendy who would be driving us up to Terni for dinner with our business associates, thinking to ourselves, not bad for a getaway day.

Perhaps we should get away more often.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy