Journey of a bottle of wine

“In the evening, bottles of wine are defiled around Rome. Habitual for the observant eye picture. Some are neatly wrapped in thin paper, others are hidden in plastic bags from supermarkets, and even in bags from some ready-made dress store, grabbed at the last second before leaving home. The nudity of the bottles is simply not covered by anything, they are firmly held in the hand of people getting out of cars or walking along the sidewalk, carefully studying the numbers of houses in search of the right address.

In the evening, dinner parties are held in Rome. Those invited to dinner bring a bottle of wine. Everyone strictly follows this tacit agreement, and yet the prudent owners of the house themselves buy wine for the table: firstly, they do not know what kind of wine the guests will bring, and secondly, one cannot frankly count on the wine that others will bring …

After dinner, two or three bottles remain unopened. And if the owners of the house are honest people, a diabolical thought cannot but flash in their head, which they drive away from themselves, but which, drive it away, has already arisen, and it sounds like this: we will take this one when we go to visit.

My bottle is one of those. One evening I brought it to Alice’s house in Monteverde. She was at my house. I was late, and, running away, grabbed her at the last second. Alice looked at her curiously. Alice is a sweetheart, and when we all left, I did not regret that my bottle was left with her in the company of another: both, for all their shyness, were probably pleased with the neighborhood.

Renzo, who at this time is choosing bottles to put on the table, asks me: what is the matter with you? I look at my bottle as if asking permission to tell our story. And I tell you that my bottle has been in small but tastefully furnished apartments, in multi-room apartments, in houses in the center with their white sofas and magnificent lamps, in apartments with children who miraculously did not break it, in apartments in Piazza Vittorio with tall ceilings and mezzanines in almost every corner. My bottle, I tell Renzo, has seen a lot of mezzanines and bottles of beer in these six months, seen all kinds of furniture from Ikea and a bunch of little things from the same Ikea, including a corkscrew that tried to rape her; she saw Indonesian-bought tables, custom-made bookshelves, hardwood floors, and freshly polished sixties floors.

A good six months later, to my great surprise, she returned home. I recognized her immediately, Rossella’s husband was holding her in his hand, although Rossella and her husband were not at Federica’s then and did not even know her, just as they did not know Alice and her closest friend. Tonight, among my other guests, Alice is also with me, and so she also looks at the bottle for a long time and, at the first opportunity, she will definitely come up to her in order to make sure that it is she. I introduce Alice to Rossella and her husband, whose name I do not know, and after waiting for him to name him himself, I snatch the bottle from him and press it to my chest, as if to say that she is safe here, she has visited many Roman houses and now returned here, to her home, to her place.

Read more:

• The trip will take place in any weather

Then for a while I lost sight of her, my bottle, but then she appeared, recognizable, in Frederica’s house, on green street, in one of those apartments in which you would dream of living and never get tired of repeating to Frederica that if she ever decides to move, she should tell you about it, although you are unlikely to be the only one to whom she will tell this: in one evening, five more people managed to ask Frederic about the same thing. My bottle, which seemed to me a little haggard and untidy, was brought by my best friend Alice, who, when she listens to you, smiles as if she has no greater pleasure in life than listening to you. Frederica grunted to her: thank you, put it there. There I saw her. Well, of course, it was her, I recognized her: it seems she has resigned herself to her fate and now stands modestly on a chest of drawers, in the far corner (the dinner is standing – therefore, there are many guests, and therefore there are many bottles).

She spent many summer evenings on balconies full of flowers, next to crumbled fried potatoes and pistachio shells, she saw men who, after spending the night with a woman, weaving in the morning, before fleeing, utter nonsense. She saw coats piled on the beds when it was still cold, and rows of cell phones on the table that vibrated from time to time, which made her tremble too – and she liked it; she remembers the nights after the guests left, and the depressing traces of parties, and someone’s words, each time the same: we’ll clean it tomorrow. She heard talk about politics and the last film of the Coen brothers, heard gossip about people in whose house she ended up in a week, heard a thousand times that apartments have risen in price, and a million times – that someone no longer wants to live in Rome and sooner or later will leave it. My bottle wandered from region to region, either dressed in tight-fitting paper, or in a bag from a supermarket, or even completely naked, and I think I finally guessed that when she hears: what will we carry? maybe a bottle of wine? – the last words are directly related to her, and if she knew how to bark, she would jump in front of the door with an impatient bark, like a dog who understands that now she will be taken for a walk. My bottle, I say to Renzo, knows Roman houses and our friends better than you and I.

Renzo smiles, looks at the bottle, strokes it affectionately. And, before moving away, he says: this is not your bottle, but mine.

Are you saying that you brought it to me? .. “

Pass the tests

• Why are you traveling