Prepare the Way of the Tribunes!

Aug 6

Since I’ve been blessed to spend so many of my summer in Rome, since so much of my family are Italians, since we love the place so well, and since next-to-none of our suburban guests had likely ever had a wood-fired pizza from a brick oven, let alone one that began its life of service in Napoli having then been carted over brick by brick to Queen Anne, we felt we were required—almost as though it was fore-ordained—to hold our rehearsal dinner at Via Tribunali. It’s one of the few things we knew, agreed upon early, going into it. There was the small problem of its likely being impossible, but that could be handled.

Via Trib, in the tradition of most Neopolitan pizzerias, is tiny: one row of banquets along a wall and three booths opposite. It is spare, decorated mostly with a row of wine bottles and candles, and its ceiling soars, due to the accompaniment of a loft, up whose winding, tight stairs waitresses dutifully trudge, and where we, impressed and almost always joyful, usually sit. The table tops are cool white marble, the floor octagonal tiles, and the place—importantly for our purposes here—usually packed.

Into this small, often-crowded, spare interior, my then-fiancee and I walked one day, wondering could we rent more or less the whole place in the middle of a Friday night?

No trouble, as it turns out, for Colleen the manager, and would we like a salad and a glass of wine while we sit talking specifics? We would indeed.

And how good it was to walk there on the given day, perched as it is on the crest of the hill my own building clung to!

I don’t remember much about the food, which I’d had so often all the separate iterations run together into one sense impression, but the company and conversation were food enough. I remember the light: higher than usual for a Seattle summer, and gauzy, due to the recent spot of rare humidity. I remember Amber’s bright blue dress and thinking to myself whether I’d ever seen anyone look better in anything.

My parents were the picture of grace, having hosted the whole affair with the quiet dignity that is the mark of their collective character and having received the limoncello toast I offered in like spirit and due course.

Following the dinner, itself a kind of reunion as the guests finally assembled, we took a passeggiata about which I was dubious, but which turned out to be a highlight. We made our way, women in heels, children trailing down the hill, to Highland Drive and the lookout at Kerry Park. En route, I spoke mainly to my future father-in-law, himself impressed with my groomsmen, as indeed we all were.

In some ways (and as has often been the case), Mr. Hopkins was the hero of the evening. He offered last minute to watch all the children that the adults might convene in peace. [he took them out to see the sun setting over Puget Sound, lifting them up one by one to glimpse it over the trees, while the young ones complained, aphoristically: I want to see the beauty! We never get to see the beauty!] We missed him and his wife, the delightful Mrs. Hopkins, at dinner and also our friends the Bashaws, but for whose company this sitting would have been the very congress of my affection.

We had cigars (who brought them?) overlooking the spread of that majestic city—Hosebob charming the women, my sisters growing close to my bride, parents beaming as the last natural lights extinguished over the Sound, and all of us mouthing, My God! and How is this a real place? My God.