February in Rome; orange trees glow with fruit along the Via Settembre XX. I don't know what autumnal double-cross the street commemorates, but I do know that treachery of another kind occurred during our journey down the street, leaving one tree short of a single orange. Larceny on a Sunday morning requires a little more singlemindedness than you might think, immaculately attired Romans with their tiny, immaculately coated dogs gazing with mute disapproval as we prowled the trees looking for a lowly - and therefore pluckable - victim.
Its revenge was that eating it was like gorging on sloes, my cheeks puckering as if my teeth had been suddenly extracted and replaced with a vacuum. The city fathers had deliberately planted sour orange trees, for the same reason that brightly coloured insects taste terrible to their predators: I have had my first and last free-range orange on the Via Settembre XX, but I have not paid my last visit to Rome for the rugby. Instantly, it has become the venue of the championship.
Cheerful affability
You have no need to steal oranges in Rome, for every cafe sells fresh orange juice, squeezed on order, from delicious blood oranges. Romans take their appearance enormously seriously: even the man running a corner breakfast bar, dispensing tiny cups of coffee, croissants and exhilarating glasses of orange juice, wore an elegant uniform of green jacket and green bow tie, combining gravitas with cheerful affability. What the Italians make of the Irish rugby supporters, skewedly waddling this way and that in the incoherent, ruleless dresscode of the Irish abroad, I hardly dare think.
No matter. Rome is perfect for rugby. Despite the millions of tourists which the city attracts every year, the people are welcoming and friendly, there are vast numbers of restaurants and bars in an area which is manageably compact without being congested, and there is more paralysing beauty at every turn than the memory can cope with. The city is a vast open-air art gallery and museum and historical amphitheatre, with the great architectural triumphs of 2,000 years ago alongside buildings from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation, the heroic structural statements of 19th century unification, some fine Art Deco buildings from the 1930s, and some dysfunctional monstrosities from the 1960s, the decade when a generation of architects and engineers went barking mad.
But not the fellow who designed the Stadio Flaminio, the venue for Ireland's first match in the international championship. It is a pleasing place, light and open; and since rugby doesn't attract huge crowds in Italy, its relative smallness is hardly a disadvantage. But there are reports that the next Italy-Ireland match will be played in Milan, which has all the charm of the love child resulting from a one-night stand between Manchester and Birmingham.
Odious Twickenham
It's already a shame that we are fixed into the sequence of London and Paris being the away matches in the one season. Twickenham is a perfectly odious place, miles from anywhere, and the very antithesis of the culture of rugby which the English invented, and have now abandoned in their rugby capital. The last time I was there - last in every sense - soon after England went ahead, the stadium began to hum with a noise I had not heard before in a rugby ground. It was the bray of well-fed corporate guests enjoying the sight of yet another bunch of poor pagan Paddies being put to the sword. It was insufferable - smugness by the decibel.
The massacre complete, we had to walk about four miles in the rain to the nearest functioning Tube station, only to be swallowed up in the vastness of London, which so effortlessly conceals the presence of rugby visitors. Paris also swallows its guests, an aardvark licking up ants. The really splendid away fixture has always been Edinburgh, followed by Cardiff - cities which are always en fete for rugby matches, alas both in the one season; and now, added to that same season, comes Rome. Both liver and wallet insist: one away match per season, and I'm afraid the city on the Tiber rather comfortably wins that contest.
I suppose our rugby lords, the Irfucracy of Lansdowne Road, could negotiate a switch in the match sequence, if they were interested enough: but they get to see the matches anyway, regardless of cost, so perhaps they feel a little less strongly about the unchanging sequencing than the fans who pay their own way to the games.
Let us pray
There is another price for going to Rome; it is an intensive course in deep vein thrombosis which the two-and-a-half hour Monarch flight to Rome can expose you to, with seats designed for beasts with inside-leg measurements the same as their collar size. Turtles or terrapins would have loved the flight, waving their little leathery limbs around the place, and yodelling for more drink. The rest of spent the flight with our heels wrapped around the back of our necks, and we had to be peeled from our seats by the hostesses using special serrated blades.
Let us pray for a couple of things. Let us pray that Italian rugby can improve, so their rugby supporters do not experience too much humiliation. Let us pray that the seasons can be switched around, so that Rome, Cardiff and Edinburgh do not fall in the same cycle. And most of all, let us pray, devoutly pray, that the Italians wallop the English. It won't happen, but it's worth praying for. Viva Italia.