As the old adage goes: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
That means rent a Vespa and rule the road.
Former New Yorker Annie Ojile runs a tour company called Scooteroma that offers cinematic, foodie, street art or general tours of the city (from about $158 per person). Ojile — who fell in love with Italy when studying abroad in Milan 20 years ago — turns heads on the ancient cobblestones, astride her fire engine-red Vespa scooter with a bright stars-and-stripes helmet.
Stopping at red lights, Ojile lays out 2,000 years of cultural history. On a hot day, as the breeze rushes past, a Vespa tour is one surefire way to see the Eternal City without breaking a sweat.
Ojile manages a team of expert guides who will safely squire helmeted riders around the city on their own rented scooters or on the backs of theirs (if you’re less confident about your chances against Rome’s other Vespisti, aka scooter fanatics).
I joined one of the movie-centric tours and hit the road. Accelerating up this via, down that corso, and around another piazza at 30 miles per hour, you could fancy yourself a reporter — say, Gregory Peck chasing down a runaway princess in “Roman Holiday” — or perhaps a paparazzo chasing an actress like in Federico Fellini’s love letter to hedonism, “La Dolce Vita.”
Our first stop was Piazza del Popolo, Rome’s biggest and most stunning urban square. Just off one of its many tentacles, film fanatics can sip Campari or cappuccino at Rosati, a bar and lounge where Fellini, who also directed “8½,” pondered street life.
He lived not far away on Via Margutta. At No. 110, his former home, we pull up our scooters to a inspect a tile bearing a cartoon of him in a hat and overcoat.
Also on Via Margutta is the studio apartment where Peck’s character Joe lived and the long, narrow staircase to his home where fictional Princess Ann skipped her way to freedom for a day. Opera virtuoso Giacomo Puccini and cubism pioneer Pablo Picasso lived down this quiet alley, too.
The street is still home to local artists. We met Sandro Fiorentini, who chisels away at marble plaques to inscribe cheeky or inspirational Italian idioms, in tiny art space Il Marmoraro (53 Via Margutta) packed to the rafters with paintings and art books.
The exhilaration of riding a scooter on Roman streets is like being in a movie scene of your own life. We revved past medieval fountains, Egyptian obelisks and Hellenistic-inspired temples. erected hundreds of years before the Romans fed Christians to the lions at the Colosseum.
Vespa means wasp in Italian — which is an appropriate way to describe how you feel buzzing alongside city buses, hovering for a moment ahead of bumper-to-bumper traffic waiting for the lights to turn green.
We exit the historic center, passing the Aurelian Walls that circle the seven hills of Rome, and accelerate towards a grittier Roman neighborhood, Pigneto — think of it as the Bushwick, Brooklyn, of Rome.
Finally, after arriving in Pigneto, we stop for a break in the middle of what used to be slums to dive into Italian film’s neorealism movement, which put documentary-style films about societal issues and everyday workers on the map during the mid-20th century. One of Scooteroma’s other guides, Jacopo, explains how the murdered director Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed the movie “Accattone,” or “The Beggar,” here. Pasolini is now a folk hero; Banksy-style street art painted onto buildings in the area depicts him carrying his own body.
Our four-hour tour is almost over, but we nudge our Vespa kickstands into park mode one more time outside Pasolini’s favorite bar, Necci dal 1924, which is something of a mecca for those looking to discover “real” Rome and the spirit of the golden age of Italian filmmaking. The café, in a celebration of Pasolini and other artistic icons, is lined with black-and-white photos of Italian movie stars. Necci, located on 68 Via Fanfulla da Lodi, honors Pasolini in particular with a giant poster outside the door showing him, arms folded, in his soccer kit.
Here, twentysomething hipsters sip Aperol, an orange aperitif. They look like they just stepped out of a Cinecittà — Italian Hollywood — film set. There’s an abundance of caffeine, nicotine and pastries, but no one’s in any rush to leave. All the patrons look impossibly cool.
And now — with your Vespa keys dangling from your wrist and your head full of cinematic insights — so are you.