Sezane top
Zara jeans (similar)
Zara sandals (similar)
Mango handbag
Dior scarf (similar)
Celine sunglasses
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Location: Piazza della Rotonda – Rome, Italy
The words Roman Holiday, spoken together, invariably evoke visions of Audrey Hepburn with a pixie cut, ordering champagne in the middle of the afternoon and riding around the Italian capital on the back of a moped. I watched the movie for the first time when I was thirteen, during a summer sleepover with my grandma. It’s hard to know who was really caring for who, that night; although I wasn’t very old, Gram was in the mid-stages of Alzheimer’s, so it was me who settled her in for the movie and me who popped the VHS tape into the old VCR.
I remember thinking Roman Holiday was a bit silly, that night. I shook my head at the flimsy premise as I tucked myself into bed. Clearly, I had more serious things on my young mind, and a princess taking a holiday from her life wasn’t a heroine I could identify with.
But Audrey Hepburn’s lighthearted grace left an impression on me that I didn’t realise was there until the next year, when my ninth grade social studies teacher told me I looked a bit like her. It’s hard to feel good about yourself in your early teens. At twelve, I’d come to the startling realisation that I was unsophisticated and a bit uncool, but by fourteen, still hadn’t figured out what I could do to change that. To make matters worse, I entered a particularly complex period of my life in ninth grade. While not at its lowest, my self-confidence was, at best, barely floating above water. That compliment buoyed it, and I rode the wave for weeks.
Later that year, I cut off all my hair in a fit of pique. My pixie cut was no doubt indirectly inspired by Audrey and her fictional Italian adventure.
The Pantheon and Roman Holiday are inextricably linked in my mind because of G. Rocca Cafe, where Gregory Peck, as Joe, takes Audrey , as Princess Ann, to meet Irving (played by Eddie Albert.) My Roman adventures this year (and in years past) have little in common with the movie which, over the years, I’ve come to find charming in its silliness. But wandering the Piazza della Rotonda, I can’t help but feel a sense that I’ve escaped, albeit temporarily, from my everyday life into a magical adventure that is all the more wonderful because I know it can’t last.
Looking really niCee! 😘