When in Rome : On New Year’s Eve in the Eternal City, Stay in the Big Piazzas, Keep to the Curb and Watch Out for Falling Objects

Strolling around the city at the end of the day can be one of the more enlightening (and potentially dangerous) activities available to the traveler here. After a hefty spaghetti dinner, a long camminata calms the digestion, soothes the mind and reveals hitherto unappreciated aspects of the city: For example, dusk over the river, when the evening sky discloses sun-tinted mashed-potato clouds above the Tiber bridges.

But looking upward as you walk along Rome’s old streets can be a matter of physical--as well as spiritual--survival, particularly on New Year’s Eve, when the local populace tends to hurl cherry bombs and other explosive devices from their windows and terraces.

Not long ago, objects more substantial than firecrackers were landing in the streets as householders enthusiastically dumped furniture, crockery and appliances that had outlived their domestic usefulness.

Historians suggest that Romans first got into the habit of throwing things in a downward direction when the barbarians tried scaling the imperial walls in pre-Christian times. The Encyclopedia Britannica advises that New Year’s Eve became a universal festival of destruction and renewal as many as 5,000 years ago.

No one is sure when Romans first began throwing old furniture, broken appliances and plumbing out of their dwellings--mimicking the destruction of an old, ordered universe by way of making room for the new. It is known that the ritual tends to lose steam in times of social crisis.

During the last, harsh, deprived days of Fascism, for example, when replacements and parts for consumer-rejectables such as hair driers and radios were hard to come by, New Year’s Eve was comparatively peaceful.

Romans resumed throwing things out of their windows again at the end of World War II, and the annual defenestration was still going strong when my wife and I moved to the Eternal City 22 years ago. My diary of the time records our first New Year’s Eve in the city, in 1968:

“Dec. 31, 10 p.m.--Collapsed in the living room after the ritual cenone (big supper), featuring lenticchia (lentils) and cotechino (boiled sausage). A bottle of Spumante cooling in the frigorifero for the midnight toast. Neighborhood quiet. Traffic noise vaguely increasing on nearby Via Candia and Viale Guilio Cesare.

“11 p.m.--First firecracker cracks. Neighbor’s dog, Snoopy, barks in reply. (Note: When I arrived in Italy, “Peanuts” was the favorite comic strip and most dogs answered to the name of Snoopy.) Significant increase in firecracker and traffic noise, some car horns and occasional shouts of strolling revelers.

“11:45 (15 minutes to go)--From outside in the street below comes the unmistakable ‘clank’ of dinnerware encountering pavement. I rouse myself to see what’s going on. Terraces of apartment buildings across street full of Romans bundled in sweaters and overcoats against the cold. A female citizen lifts a busted wooden clothes drier over her railing and, with a cautious look down to see if anyone is walking underneath, lets it go onto empty sidewalk.

“On the terrace adjacent to ours--as architecture, the typical terrace in this neighborhood is no big deal, a sort of walled-in box hanging over the street--a middle-aged lady and her husband are locked in a struggle for possession of an old table-top radio. ‘Giuseppe, let me have the radio!’ Giuseppe’s wife cries. ‘You play it all day long! I’m sick of the noise! You make the house sound like a barbershop. Give it to me! It doesn’t work anymore anyhow!’ Taking violent possession of radio, neighbor’s wife hurls it into the street--cord, antenna and all. Radio free-falls five flights, bounces off our car.

“When I tell the agitated woman in my halting Italian that the radio has hit my car, she waves aside my objection. ‘You are an American!’ she exclaims. ‘You get a car any time you want!’ Before I can work out an answer to that--it’s a complex concept, to be sure, and not an entirely amicable one--the husband assures me that his mechanic brother will fix my car come nuova (like new) for practically nothing. I am disinclined to follow his suggestion that we go downstairs to examine the damage. I say it’s too risky to go into the street just yet.

“The magic moment arrives--I open the Spumante and toast the immediate future. ‘Buon Anno!’ From one corner of this densely inhabited capital to another, Rome erupts in full celebration--skyrockets, Roman candles, cherry bombs, Chinese firecrackers; car horns blare on the adjacent traffic-infested thoroughfares; church bells fill the air with clanging cheer; plates, cups, old brooms and flower pots rain steadily into the street. In the adjacent apartment, where he has been left alone, presumably to guard the fort, Snoopy contributes his share of agitated noise to the proceedings.”

My last diary entry for Dec. 31, 1968, is an admonishment to myself to find a garage for the car before this important date comes around again next year.

Outside the apartment house the next morning, I confront an alarming array of forlornly uninteresting objects. My neighbor’s radio has left a modest crimp in the engine cover of my Citroen DS--mild damage compared to the casual mayhem inflicted on other cars parked along the curb. A chipped bathroom sink has landed with deep emphasis on the roof of an Alfa Giulietta. The back seat of a Fiat sports convertible on the corner is partially occupied by a dusty old bidet that has plunged neatly through the canvas roof.

New Year’s Eve in Rome hasn’t been quite the same in recent years, I’m glad to say. Through the pervasive auspices of the economic miracle, the motor car has become an emblematic component of Italian self-esteem ( along with prohibitively high damage-insurance rates).

In their own self-interest, modern Romans stopped throwing big things into the car-filled streets 15 years ago or more. But habits die hard, and in many neighborhoods, junk that is not actually thrown out the window or off the terrace is moved down by hand during the last night of the year and left on the sidewalks for the bag people to pick over before the street cleaners arrive in the early days of the new year.

Superannuated dinnerware still gets the traditional heave-ho in some of the more exuberantly traditional neighborhoods such as Trastevere (possibly the oldest inhabited area of Rome, south of the Vatican) and Testaccio (a working-class neighborhood on the Tiber on Rome’s south). Launching firecrackers into the void and parading slowly around town tooting the car horn are, today, the principle ways residents (who do not bother to make timely reservations in the restaurants and nightclubs) celebrate the demise of the old year.

One hundred and fifty-three emergency calls were made to the police here during the night of Dec. 31, 1989, to report fires and personal injuries. And firecracker-related trauma has been on the increase since 1987, possibly reflecting a rise in enthusiasm for celebrating of this kind. During last New Year’s Eve’s festivities, a record 63 Romans checked into local emergency wards with charred hands and blinded eyes, up 40% over 1988. If the stats are any indication of what’s in store, Jan. 1, 1991, may see new records set in numbers of burning terraces and torched automobiles.

Suffice it to say, walking home from dinner in Rome is not advisable on New Year’s Eve, although an old umbrella might be useful, opened against the falling fireworks if not against the flowerpots. And if you do try to make it back to the hotel, it’s just possible you’ll find the protection you need lying in the street.

Waking up on New Year’s Day (given that he could get to sleep in the first place), the inquisitive traveler in Rome should hot-foot it over to the Cavour Bridge about 11 a.m. for the First Dive ( Il Primo Tuffo ) of the year, which, for years, featured a local citizen, the late Spartaco Bandini, the dean of a handful of extrovert males who inaugurate the New Year with an uninhibited jump into the Tiber River.

Bandini was 78 years old when he last shed his bathrobe and stepped up on the wall of Il Ponte Cavour to make what proved to be his farewell 18-meter swan dive into the cold, cappuccino-colored effluvia below (considered by environmentalists to be among the more polluted waters in Europe).

But the tradition lives on as other hardy types carry on his work. Usually, a fire department launch is on duty at the bridge, manned by lifeguards in underwater diving equipment, in case a diver gets into trouble.

Last Jan. 1, Bandini’s semi-nude, three-second flight through the sunny, midday Roman air seemed to evoke all the old objects that had been surrendered to gravity at year’s end in the past, and which, no doubt, will be surrendered again in the years to come.