The Mediterranean was still and blue in the early afternoon light. Floating on my back and looking up at a sandy bluff, I had the perfect view of a Roman imperial villa in almost all its glory. What, today has been reduced almost entirely to its foundations, and to the rather ill-informed observer, might seem like not much more than a few crumbling walls and broken arches, was once a truly otherworldly edifice. Many moons ago, right before my eyes, stood eight hundred metres of cliffside imperial audacity. The Villa’s imposing facade sported boundless arcades, perfect to be aimlessly wandered around, and philosophised in. Beyond its outer boundaries shaded loggias wrapped around lush, leafy gardens that breathed perfume into the seaside air. There, if I had to guess, Nero himself once basked in that all-too-familiar shimmer of afternoon sun.

Nero — who, like any traveller of the time, knew ancient Roman roads were slow and bumpy — stood on a gleaming marble balcony, gazed out at the sea, and realised that the perfect site for a secure deep-water port had been staring him in the face all along. Below his villa was the opportunity for a direct, smooth passage from Rome to the ends of the empire for him and all the excesses of his imperial entourage. For the assignment, Rome’s finest minds bent to his will, and their design was a masterstroke. It was adaptive, even empathetic in its quiet genius. To prevent the harbour basin from building up silt, engineers built breakwaters with open archways that let the tide flush the sand back out to sea naturally. This proved to be more effective, cheaper, longer-lasting, and infinitely more elegant than any run-of-the-mill brute-force barrier could ever hope to be. 

Drifting still, I opened my eyes. In front of me was the undoubtedly much less imposing current version of the “villa,” though I was also, in a sense, floating within what had once been its great harbour. As far as the harbour goes: it went. Not much remains but a small modern rock jetty leading out from some sandy, sea-washed ruins of the once-imperial complex. 

Flipping over, I swam slowly for shore, my mind still drifting. I was technically supposed to be in Rome, writing a story about the city’s urban gardens. Floating like a piece of driftwood off the coast of Anzio didn’t exactly feel like a productive step in that pursuit.

Luckily for me, I had all my questions regarding urban gardens answered an hour ago. Dr. Certomà and I sat on her balcony, surrounded by her own lush urban garden, where she showed me sources and potential contacts while we snacked on Taralli. I meanwhile nursed a large, cold Peroni given to me by the professor with a refreshing matter of course. The balcony’s green canopy made the afternoon feel blessedly suspended, and it seemed as if the summer heat had forgotten about us entirely.

When I finally waded ashore, Dr. Certomà was long back on the sand, chatting with a cluster of local beachgoers. Despite being mid-chiacchiere, her conversation with them seemed to dissolve behind us as she simply fell into step beside me. We walked eastward along the beach, along a boardwalk dotted with ice cream shops and tabacchi and passed a restaurant or two jutting out onto the sand, staking their prime seafront real estate claim. We reached the harbour along a street of seaworn buildings, then turned down one along the sea. Jetty rocks piled between us and the water, we walked further until we came across some limestone markers, subtle and pretty easy to miss, commemorating the Roman harbour that once stood before us. 

With an unglamorous, yet seafront parking lot as my backdrop, the professor pointed out the elephant in the room. Centuries after Nero’s engineers had perfected their adaptive masterpiece, a pope — Innocent XII, but it hardly matters — decided to rebuild the port on the eastern side of the peninsula. A new harbor for a new era, or so it seems the thinking went. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it was not nearly as dynamic or ingenious as the ancient Roman design. Instead of working with the sea, the pope’s builders tried to impose their will upon it. As a result, nowadays, the Port of Anzio fills with sand every year.

Across the parking lot and through some warehouses, we made it to the modern port’s interior. Walking along the water’s edge, we passed fishing vessels of varying sizes, where weather-beaten seafarers moved about with the quiet competence of men who had no use for notebooks or journalism. Dr. Certomà explained that she does participatory research with the fishermen, and it isn’t easy. They’re wary of outsiders and skeptical of academics. The sand buildup that chokes the harbour is a daily reality for these men. The seasonal sandbar either cuts off their income, or, for those willing to test it, enacts its toll in the form of scraped paint and a keel that will need a weekend’s worth of patching. A bad season of silting can truly mean the difference between a livelihood and a loss. 

We left the fishing vessels behind, passing a row of sailboat houses. We ducked into a time-honoured sailing club building and after a quick word from the professor to a woman at the entrance, we were shown inside. First up some stairs and then through a big glass hall on the top floor, where a cluster of elderly locals were engrossed in a game of dominoes. We passed through somewhat awkwardly, though they barely looked up anyways. Slipping past them and out onto the outdoor rooftop, we saw the whole operation open up before us: the marina, the fishing boats, the jetty, the water stretching out toward the horizon, and faintly, even some small islands in the distance. 

With the dominoes clicking away in the airy hall behind us, Dr. Certomà pointed at the eyesore of a sandbank. The great ugly mound of sediment had no business being there and didn’t seem inclined to leave. In an attempt to address this, she explained, the regional government launched a ninety-million-euro coastal maintenance program. This seemed like a costly ritual of submission to forces the Romans had long learned to befriend.

There was something wonderfully Italian about it: pensioners playing dominoes while millions of tax money was poured into a losing battle with the sea — with them in the best seats in the house to watch it all unfold. Dr. Certomà turned and we walked back through the domino room, and down the stairs toward the exit. As we descended, she mentioned an aperitivo at a friend’s house. And after a short walk back through lively squares and quiet backstreets, there I was, packed neatly into the passenger seat of Dr. Certomà’s red Fiat Cinquecento, an Italian cliché if ever there was one, heading for the neighbouring town of Lido di Cincinnato.

The unhurried evening brought us to a charmingly decorated apartment with large forward-facing windows and an open balcony. The door opened to the smell of good food and laughter, and I was swept in as if I’d always been part of the scene. After helping myself at the aperitivo, I took a seat in a green chair. As we ate, children darted between the adults’ conversations.

The topic of my article eventually arose. As I began to explain what I was doing here, talking of urban gardens, Dr. Certomà quickly elaborated on our earlier interview. The room seemed to catch the gist. Then her daughter, deadpan, said: “I don’t even know what you do for work.” The room laughed. I laughed too, thankful she hadn’t asked what I was doing for “work”. I was supposed to be in Rome covering urban gardens. I was doing anything but. 

On the train back to Rome that night, I sat on the staircase of a double-decker car, in the only spot left, conveniently wedged between the handrail and a bathroom with an overflowing toilet, the door swinging open and shut with every lurch. As people kept needing to pass, I kept needing to awkwardly get up and let them. And somehow, between this and the fluorescent glare, I felt myself settle. The city began to seep back in: Rome, beautiful and grimy, glorious and slightly off-kilter. Somewhere in it, the gardens were waiting.

I never did publish that article. The urban gardens of Rome would have undoubtedly encompassed their own lessons, but this afternoon had led me nowhere near Rome, to a lesson that revealed itself as soon as I stopped trying to find it. My day, as has my article, yielded to the unplanned. The engineers of ancient Rome worked with their surroundings, harnessing the currents. The pope’s builders, to the demise of posterity, were blind to such a way of doing things. And the sea, year after year, makes its point. Turns out, I floated trustfully into a story much juicier than the one I’d come to write.