They don’t care about the traffic, or about the people getting off the trains, eyes swollen with tiredness, and waiting for buses to take them back and forth from home to work and from work to home. Once seasonal, they would come down from the vastness of the North at the beginning of autumn, meet up in the skies of Rome and then fly together towards the mild African winters. Now they winter in the city and never leave. And that’s understandable. The life of a commuter is no great shakes. There are thousands of them. As they rise into the blue sky, they look like a blossoming rose made up of tiny lead pellets. They throw themselves on the fruit trees and plunder the vineyards. Then, having eaten their fill, they go back to sleep among the oaks and the palms, scattering tons of acrid guano on the benches at bus stops. The Piazza dei Cinquecento smells like one huge henhouse. The lights from the streetlamps have altered the birds’ cycle of sleep and waking, and they chirrup all night long.
