"Never mind the long tradition of lounging on the fabled spot — a scene perhaps best evoked by Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in the 1953 film 'Roman Holiday' — sitting on the Spanish Steps is now subject to a fine of 400 euros..."

"... or about $450, under new municipal rules that ban a variety of activities in the city’s historic center. The regulations are intended to 'guarantee decorum, security and legality' by prohibiting actions that are 'not compatible with the historic and artistic decorum' of Rome’s center, according to the city’s website.... Dozens of startled people, most of them presumably tourists, were reprimanded on a broiling Wednesday afternoon by a small force of municipal police officers — this reporter counted at least eight — who admonished step-sitters by blowing twice on their whistles and gesturing stiffly to stand up.... A tired-looking father with a stroller in his hands and a toddler on his shoulders, was coming down the steps when he was stopped by a cry of 'Hey Mister.' The stroller, an officer said, cannot touch the steps. The father grudgingly complied.... 'You see one stroller — we see millions of them. This is a historic monument that has to be preserved,' [the police officer] said, declining to give his name because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. He asked to be identified as 'a municipal police officer who loves Rome.'... The Rome newspaper Il Messaggero said Wednesday that photographs of empty stairs 'were not an image of strength, but of desolation.' The newspaper accused the mayor of trying to apply 'Swiss rigor' to what was a quintessentially Roman spot for relaxation."

From "Rome’s New Rules: No Sitting on the Spanish Steps (and No Wading in the Trevi Fountain)" (NYT).



Famous tourist attractions are too crowded these days. You travel to see something, and it's full of people, and way too many of them are taking pictures of themselves. It affects who travels, and I suspect the city would prefer the travelers who spend a lot money, the people who stay at that hotel at the top of the steps and not the people who'd like to lounge on the steps eating street food.

ADDED: Audrey Hepburn totally littered that ice cream cone!

I've never seen "Roman Holiday," but, boy, does it look bad. Is Gregory Peck a bad actor? I see that the role was originally offered to Cary Grant:

Grant declined, believing he was too old to play Hepburn's love interest (though he played opposite her ten years later in Charade.) Other sources say Grant declined because he knew all of the attention would be centered around the princess. Peck's contract gave him solo star billing, with newcomer Hepburn listed much less prominently in the credits. Halfway through the filming, Peck suggested to [the director William] Wyler that he elevate her to equal billing—an almost unheard-of gesture in Hollywood.

I'm just noticing that Hepburn's character, a princess, is named Ann. Ann, with no "e." Strange! I wonder if I'd noticed that years ago, I might have eventually gotten around to watching this movie. I have seen the other Hepburn-as-Italian-tourist movie, Katharine Hepburn as an aging spinster in "Summertime." Generally, I'm not big on the cliché movie idea of woman traveling and finding herself by getting into a sexual relationship. Oh, I don't know. It could work on me. I love "A Room With a View." The Italian city in this one is Florence:

Goodbye to Sam Shepard.

"Sam Shepard, the celebrated avant-garde playwright and Oscar-nominated actor, died at his home in Kentucky on Thursday of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a spokesman for the Shepard family announced on Monday. He was 73," the NYT reports.

One of the most important and influential early writers in the Off Broadway movement, Mr. Shepard captured and chronicled the darker sides of American family life in plays like “Buried Child,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and “Curse of the Starving Class” and “A Lie of the Mind.”

I remember sitting in the front row for “Curse of the Starving Class" at the Public Theater in 1978. I got hit by water and an artichoke. From the Wikipedia article (artichokicle) on the play:

Act I... Weston enters, drunk, with a large bag of groceries. Weston talks to the lamb briefly, and then begins putting the groceries, which turn out to only be desert artichokes, in the refrigerator. Wesley enters and they discuss Weston’s laundry and the best way to help the lamb with the maggots.

Act II... Wesley and Emma then argue over who is going to go add water to the artichokes that are boiling on the stove. Wesley doesn’t want to do it because he is making the door and Emma doesn’t want to do it because she is remaking her posters. Wesley says that Emma doesn’t want to do it just because she’s “on the rag,” so she throws down her markers and gets up to add the water.... Ella returns with groceries that Taylor has bought for the family and throws out the artichokes....

I remember a lot of throwing of artichokes and one rolling off the stage and into my lap.

ADDED: Sam Shepard co-wrote a song with Bob Dylan, "Brownsville Girl":

It’s... an 11-minute narrative... [about] a long-lost love and his standing in line to see Gregory Peck in a classic Western film ["The Gunfighter"]. No one knows who wrote which lines in the zany masterpiece... but the tale fits squarely within Shepard’s canon with its use of Old Western themes, Mexican-border drama, mysterious women, and general disenchantment as an understated rumination on the myth of the American Dream.... At one point during the song, Dylan shifts from nostalgic reverie to directly inserting himself into the very film he’s standing in line to view. “Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head / But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play,” he sings, almost as if to suggest he is unable to separate his own unparalleled fame from that of Peck’s character Ringo, the fastest gunslinger in the West deeply troubled by having become a magnet for every two-bit desperado looking to make a name for himself by besting the top gun....  The song was performed only once by Dylan and is rarely, if ever, mentioned in retrospective analysis of his most essential works.

Here's the text of the lyrics. Excerpt:

Well, I’m standin’ in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck
Yeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind
He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about
But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line

I can see why he was vague about Peck's next movie. It was "Captain Horatio Hornblower." Try writing a quatrain about that.

Quick, find a TV!

Aaron Rodgers is on "Jeopardy!"!

Today, at 4:30 Central (that is, in 20 minutes).

Double exclamation point intended.

UPDATE: Spoiler:

Aaron won, despite his Daily Double loss on an easy question. He connected the name Steve Wozniak to IBM, rather than Apple. He knew the name of the actress who was in "The Princess Bride" — Robin Wright — and both Meade and I thought the look on his face suggested that he knew her... perhaps... really well. One of the other contestants was the husband of Gabby Giffords, and Giffords was in the audience, which made me feel like rooting for him, so she'd enjoy things, but I rooted for Aaron nonetheless. I realized early on that Aaron had an advantage: great hands. You know that buzzing in is key to winning on "Jeopardy!" None of the 3 got the Final Jeopardy answer, which required some lateral thinking. The category was "Business," and we were asked to identify 2 men from the early 20th century. It was a mistake to try to recognize them or just to name 2 important businessmen from that time. The key was that they were in motorcycle sidecars. If they'd just been on motorcycles, I think people would have gotten it, but I guess the show thought that would be too easy. They were Harley and Davidson. None of the 3 could identify Gregory Peck from a photograph, nor did any of them know the comic strip "Dilbert," or the 2 actresses in the movie "The Breakfast Club."

On being bored watching movies.

We were talking about movies last night, and Henry said:

I hate movies.

It's not the movies, so much. It's how long they are.

After one hour of predictable complication, the second hour of predictable resolution is unbearable.

I sympathized, mostly. Not that I find everything predictable. Actually, I don't. My boredom takes the form of viewing each scene as something to be gotten through, to be tolerated. I have the feeling that nothing will happen, even though I constantly tell myself, it's a movie, something always happens, in every scene. But it's just going to be one of those movie things, that happen because something always has to happen to make it a movie. Two characters are having an ordinary time, and my usual boredom kicks in: Nothing will ever happen. I realize: But this is a movie, so it must. I reach a new level of bored: Yes, something violent will happen or be revealed or someone will get very concerned or upset for some reason.

For example, "Spellbound," which I watched last night: People would be sitting around talking about a swimming pool, and Ingrid Bergman would draw the shape of the pool on the tablecloth with a fork, and Gregory Peck would get all upset. That's not a good example of the way movies bore me though, because there's a cool little mystery about why parallel lines freak him out, which is what you remember if you haven't seen the film in a long time and decide to give it another go. But there are many unspiffy scenes with actors pretending to be psychiatrists, gliding along gloomily through a shadowy house that you're supposed to believe is a mental hospital.

Ingrid Bergman is either in her glasses, with her hair pinned back, and icily fending off what today we'd call sexual harassment but was apparently the daily norm at this place, or she's got the glasses off, her hair is mussed, and she's hot for her new boss -- Gregory Peck -- so that she'll get up in the middle of the night, put on a gorgeous bathrobe, and glide on up the shadowy stairway and right into his bedroom, in search of sexual harassment. I'm complaining about movies, but I loved that scene. Not only did icy Ingrid's sexuality emerge, depicted by a surreal sequence of opening doors that really felt like emerging sexuality, but her bathrobe had parallel lines on it, so Gregory Peck got another chance to subtly freak out. And poor icy Ingrid wasn't going to get to float through the doors quite yet.

And on to more scenes, scene after scene, with shadowy stairways and fusty, harass-y psychiatrist/actors and windblown outdoor shots to get your hopes up about Ingrid's sexuality and Gregory getting all worried again and when is that Dali dream sequence going to show up so we can turn this off and go to bed?