{"id":4291,"date":"2006-03-07T13:18:56","date_gmt":"2006-03-07T13:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html"},"modified":"2006-03-07T13:18:56","modified_gmt":"2006-03-07T13:18:56","slug":"behind-the-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Door"},"content":{"rendered":"

I found Roman commercial life fascinating, from the street vendors to the clothing stores with what seemed like 50 pieces of clothing on display, and that’s it. <\/p>\n

We wandered quite a bit, mostly intentionally, sometimes…not. Well, really, just twice on the latter, I think – once when we spent a great deal of time trying to find St. Peter in Chains<\/a> (we were coming from the San Clemente direction, which made it all very confusing), and once when Katie and I turned to soon in our quest to get back to Campo di Fiore to look for a place she saw jeans for 10 Euros. <\/p>\n

I found the presence, and, I’m hoping, flourishing of the small shopkeeper, the artisan, the small restauranteur on these back streets endlessly intriguing. You’d walk down these streets at some points in the day – say, during the siesta period or on a Sunday afternoon, and all you’d see would be rows of large metal doors – like garage doors – pulled down shut. See the first post on this page to see what I mean<\/a>. And then at another time, you’d walk by, they’d be open to reveal lovely fabric shops (lots of those in Rome), metal workers, furniture restorers (lots of those, too), and food shops.  Even on our own street – every time I walked down Borgo VIttorio, I discovered a new business. Actually my favorites were the little tiny garages dedicated to motorcycle repair – usually just big enough to fix one motorcycle at a time. But, of course, there was no lack of business.<\/p>\n

The ubiquitous, homogeneous doors did present a problem, though. On our first day, since I had left one baby bottle in the car and another on the airplane, we were short a bottle. (And no, MtheB doesn’t suck on bottles all day. They’re just good for getting a lot of milk in him in short order) So we went to this baby store not far from the apartment,  where I bought a bottle and asked the woman where a market might be. She spoke no English, but we thought, understanding her hand motions, as well as Italian for "Right" and "left", we could find it. No luck, even though I was pretty sure she was describing the same market the sister at the Daughters of St. Paul bookstore on the other end of the road had done earlier. For the life of me, I couldn’t find it.<\/p>\n

Then the next day, I found it. Bought stuff.<\/p>\n

Went back the next day to what I knew was the right street, but I couldn’t find it.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I figured out that without any obnoxious protruding signage, and with those anonymous metal garage doors pulled down, I had probably walked right by the place 5 or 6 times without even knowing it. And then, I never quite got the opening and closing hours straight in my head, so I missed out on the deal on the big block of Parmesan I was planning to buy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I found Roman commercial life fascinating, from the street vendors to the clothing stores with what seemed like 50 pieces of clothing on display, and that’s it. We wandered quite a bit, mostly intentionally, sometimes…not. Well, really, just twice on the latter, I think – once when we spent a great deal of time trying…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nBehind the Door - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Behind the Door - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I found Roman commercial life fascinating, from the street vendors to the clothing stores with what seemed like 50 pieces of clothing on display, and that’s it. We wandered quite a bit, mostly intentionally, sometimes…not. Well, really, just twice on the latter, I think – once when we spent a great deal of time trying…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-03-07T13:18:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Behind the Door - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Behind the Door - Via Media","og_description":"I found Roman commercial life fascinating, from the street vendors to the clothing stores with what seemed like 50 pieces of clothing on display, and that’s it. We wandered quite a bit, mostly intentionally, sometimes…not. Well, really, just twice on the latter, I think – once when we spent a great deal of time trying…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-03-07T13:18:56+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html","name":"Behind the Door - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-03-07T13:18:56+00:00","dateModified":"2006-03-07T13:18:56+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/behind-the-door.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Behind the Door"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}