Italy: I’ve got Rome on repeat

My year was topped and tailed with trips to Rome. In March, as the blossom unfurled along the Tiber and the city’s churches prepared for Easter, I met four girlfriends from university, one of whom was working as a chef for the Rome Sustainable Food Project based at the American Academy. Then, in late November, I went back by myself and stayed at the Villa Spalletti Trivelli. It’s hard to say which was more pleasurable; Rome is Rome in every season.

In spring, we all crammed ourselves into a bedsit in an old pasta factory in the fashionable Trastevere district. During the day we pretended to be a bunch of young intellectuals studying Rome’s secrets as we lolled about in the gardens of the Academy, which is high on the Janiculum hill in the Villa Aurelia (built for Cardinal Girolamo Farnese in 1650).

Now a private institution, it is similar in concept to the British School at Rome. Each year a small group of American artists and scholars are awarded the ‘Rome Prize’ — an invitation to live at the academy for a year to pursue their work ‘in an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and innovation’.

Concerts, exhibitions and lectures are held there, some of them open to the public, and private tours can be booked. The place feels almost preternaturally civilised. In the library, academics sit about drinking negronis while reading the Italian and American newspapers. The walls of the bar are crammed with self-portraits of all the artists who have studied there over the past hundred years.

One sculptor created a series of pasta moulds based on Francesco Borromini’s dome designs from churches around Rome. The chefs used them to create their own pasta master-piece: ravioli stuffed with courgettes from the vegetable garden and fluffy ricotta.