Roma

Rory here-

A city of hotels. We have seen the Hotel Halifax 3rd piano, as the sign says, which probably means the hotel is up three flights of stairs from the front door, as is our Hotel WRH and many other hotels in the area. And we drove by the Hotel Tritone today. I'd sure love to spend a night there, halfway between octaves. I wonder if it's three flights up, or maybe just three whole steps. I was reminded, as soon as I saw the name, of my deep, abiding love for the tritone, the devil's interval: two minor thirds, three whole tones, or a flat five. I was also reminded of the recent advice that tritones don't sit well with choirs so much. Hard to sing. All this because of a hotel which, in fairness, would be called Hotel Tree Tone Eh if written in English. And what if it was written from the top down and backwards. That is the ignominious fate of a surprising number of hotels in this wonderfully chaotic city. Last night it became suddenly obvious that something had gone drastically wrong on Via Nazionale. As we walked up the slight incline, we looked up ahead and saw any number of hotel signs -- the vertical ones, illuminated letters fixed individually to the outer walls to make space on narrow streets for extra-wide traffic -- and the folly was that they were all reading backwards. HOTEL spelled out vertically and backwards is fine for the first bit and after that only slightly deranged, but it was the names of the hotels that really suffered. I wondered for an instant about the reason for such a condition and figured we were just approaching from the wrong end of town, but no. We were on a one-way street and the traffic was with us. Presumably, the traffic in this one-way street once upon a time - and Rome is full of once upon a time - moved in the opposite direction. Perhaps a couple of bored or vengeful traffic planners decided one day to redirect the traffic for a laugh at the hotels' expense. Well we laughed. They all looked just slightly ridiculous. And we laughed again today to find that the same traffic planners had gone to work on a bunch of hotels on another one-way street in a completely different part of the city. It was, in fact, just blocks from Hotel Tritone, which, I can happily report, was spared.