When in Rome…

And while the pub itself is hardly ancient, it’s famous in the Eternal City as one of its pioneering Irish hangouts.
The barman, Dubliner James McKiernan, explained: “The owners went to Ireland years ago and fell in love with the ceol and the craic.”
That was a quarter century ago; in recent years, the Druid’s Den (on Via San Martini ai Monti) and a couple of other long-established pubs have been joined by up to 50 more in Central Rome, or districts within walking distance of it.
They are inviting places, full of wood and mirrors, framed posters and stained glass that aim to evoke, as far is reasonably possible in a Southern European city, a pub in Guinness’s home town. They have taps for Guinness, Harp Lager and Harp Strong, but not much else in the way of beer, and Italian staff who speak just enough English to serve thirsty pilgrims.
They’re making headway in a culture where a bar is associated more with an espresso on the way to work than with a beer on the way home.
In contrast to the newer places, the Druid’s Den, near the Termini railway station, has layers of history in true Roman style — from that impressive, ancient wall to the euros, dollars and other paper currency pinned to the mirror behind the bar.
“About 60 percent of the people who come in here are Italian,” said McKiernan. He added that it’s a hangout for supporters of AS Roma, known internationally for its intense rivalry with SS Lazio, some of whose fans in the towns outside of Rome continue to celebrate their club’s links to fascism.
It’s also a popular port of call for visitors during rugby weekends, now that Italy is a participant in the Six Nations championship. And the rest of the year, it’s a place where Irish-born residents drop in for a couple of drinks after work.

Expat hangouts
The Druid’s Den and its sister pub, the Fiddler’s Elbow (Via Dell’Olmata), another of the original Irish pubs, have weekly traditional sessions with up to 30 playing, most of them Italian. “The Irish, English, Scots and Welsh don’t come here for the music. It’s a few pints and then they’re off to a restaurant,” McKiernan said.
“There are three types of Irish pub in Rome,” said Michael Kelly, president of Rome’s 3,000-member Irish Club. “First are those where the Irish, British and American people drink, such as the Druid’s Den.”
On a recent evening, Kelly was assisting with a table quiz at the Abbey Theatre (Via del Governo Vecchio), a pub that has established itself as a gathering point for expatriates of various nationalities and for those just passing through.
Like many of the new pubs, it’s located in the historic center, or Centro Storico, the network of cobble-stoned streets, off the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, that was the heart of Renaissance-era Rome.
Centro Storico, though, may be best known for the glorious Pantheon, a temple from 27 BC that was entirely rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian and finished in 125 AD, and consecrated as a Christian place of worship early in the 7th century. These days, the neighborhood – which is home to the Italian Parliament and is nestled strategically between Termini, on the city’s east side, the Vatican to the west and the most visited ancient sites such as the Colosseum and the Imperial and Roman Forums to the south – has some of the liveliest nightlife.
The Abbey Theatre is ahead of the game with a Roman owner who speaks fluent English and bar staff from Dublin and Birmingham.
“I come into the Abbey every once in a while, especially for the pub quizzes,” said Gabriel Radle, an Irish-American student at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and a friend of Kelly’s. “I love Italian culture, but it’s nice to hang out sometimes with other English speakers.”
“There’s an enormously relaxed lifestyle in Rome,” said Kelly, explaining the appeal of the ancient city to foreign workers.

Ties of affection
The Omagh, Co. Tyrone native, who himself works at Vatican Radio, said the Irish can be found in all sorts of jobs in the city, but he cited the two Irish embassies, in particular, as well as the local offices of inter-governmental bodies like the European Space Agency.
The second type of pub, in Kelly’s view, is one that nurtures its Irish ties, or is run by people with a particular affection for Ireland, even though it doesn’t count too many English-speakers among its regulars.
Four Green Fields (Via Costantino Morin), a few blocks above the Vatican, and one of the original Irish pubs before the current trend took off, falls into that category, Kelly said.
Eight years ago, Federica Orecchia, Roberto Di Candia and Claudio De Seriis approached their friend Carlo Calvo, when they heard the Irish place in their neighborhood was up for sale. Calvo, who’d had some experience running a pub, agreed to join them as a co-owner but he warned them it would be hard work. By agreement, none has a second job.
“It’s not a pub culture here; it’s not a beer culture,” Calvo said. “But that’s changing, slowly.”
Although Four Green Fields, which is on a quiet residential street, gets some tourists referred by hotels and guidebooks, 90 percent of its customers are now neighborhood regulars, most of them in their 20s and 30s.
Kelly estimates that there are eight expatriate and 10 neighborhood pubs that are supportive of the Irish community – three of the latter on the Via Capo D’Africa, near the Colosseum and the Irish College.
“It works well for us. They support our events like the Celtic Ball, and if we bring a band out from Ireland, they’ll publicize it. We have an established relationship with them,” the Irish Club president said.
The Celtic Ball donates its proceeds to two charities each year, one Italian and one Irish. (Last year, the Irish charity was Fr. Peter McVerry’s hostel for homeless boys in Dublin.)
“The Irish government is very supportive too,” Kelly said. “And we have two very good ambassadors pushing the Irish community.”
The third type, in Kelly’s view, is the Irish-themed bar that doesn’t fit either of the first two. “But these aren’t extremely rigid categories,” he conceded.
Although the staff at the Scene, on the busy Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, pride themselves on being able to pull a great pint of Guinness, it’s the least Irish looking of the new bars. Nonetheless, it lures Anglophones underground with a big Guinness sign and, during the soccer season, with chalked ads for live games. At night, it has a club-like atmosphere, with a doorman who, though affable, looks like he might have fitted in well in Mussolini’s Blackshirts.
More typical is an establishment called Trinity College (Via del Collegio Romano), which announces itself as an Irish pub, and even has a Dublin-style snug inside the door. Near Via Del Corso, Rome’s main street, Trinity College is a lunchtime favorite with local office workers, (and food is served on two floors as well as outside). Those with pints of beer and stout in front of them are clearly the tourists.
Another, on the southern edge of the Storico Centro, on the way to Roman Forum, is Mad Jack’s (Via Arenula). Like the others, it has plenty of framed Guinness ads from the past. It also has some ancient drinking paraphernalia in a glass case (elaborating on its theme in the way Trinity College has scholarly references and Abbey Theatre dramatic). It has pictures of racehorse legends with captions such as “Arkle (1957-1970)” and “Dawn Run (1978-1986)” and there’s an Irish flag and t-shirts referring the Six Nations championship pinned to the ceiling.
This eclectic mix isn’t at all jarring. The Roman approach contrasts with a least one over-the-top and unsuccessful effort in New York in recent years to create an Irish-themed bar.
None of this has happened by accident, said Calvo. Guinness has spread its empire south, offering attractive loans and even providing Irish carpenters to help build the newer bars.

Romance blossoms
It also helps these smoke-free pubs (Italy went the way of Ireland earlier this year) that they’re open late, sometimes until 4 a.m. at weekends.
“It was the only place we could find,” said a Greek tourist named Vicki, who dropped into Trinity College with her sister late one night. “I didn’t know it was an Irish bar; but it’s nice.”
The most important impetus, though, are the strong links between two EU countries.
“Ireland is trendy now. A lot of young Italians go there,” Calvo said.
He first visited Ireland many years ago, and became friendly with Irish visitors to Rome from the early 1980s on. One was Marie Keane, a student of Italian at University College Dublin. Keane, the daughter of garda, wasn’t new to Rome: she first visited the summer she was 15 as the guest of her aunt, a nun.
Then in the 21st century, Calvo and Keane, who’d moved in the same circles for years, fell in love. They got married in Ireland two years ago.
Keane gave up her job teaching high school in a working-class district of Dublin and now teaches a class of seven-year-olds in an international school.
They live in Prati, the quiet neighborhood that helped give Calvo’s pub its name. “John Paul II once said: ‘This area is called Fields, but there aren’t any,'” he recalled.
Keane said that Four Green Fields is not a “local” in the Irish sense: “The whole idea of going out and having several pints is alien to Italians.”
“Italians have very sensible drinking habits. They don’t go out to get drunk,” said Druid’s Den bartender Eve Kelly, a native of Leicester in the English midlands. “Not like Irishmen, Americans or Englishmen, who’ll have a drink every 10 minutes during a match here.
“The Italians will have one per half. Some even make one drink last the whole game,” she said.
“It’s a different philosophy. They’ll have their digestivo, such as grappo, after food,” added McKiernan, her colleague at Druid’s Den.
Even in the new pubs frequented by tourists, the Italian clientele have a different agenda. They are usually in the same peer group as staff members and are often their close friends
“People come in here to meet their friends. You wouldn’t go into a bar on your own,” Keane said. “It not a place where you’d pick someone up.”
Calvo, who has developed the basement as a music venue, said that his pub is also home to fans of AS Roma, a team he doesn’t support because like its rival Lazio, it has fascist tendencies. “The Celtic Cross [an ultra-rightist symbol in parts of Europe] is being seen more at games,” he said. “And Mussolini was a fan of Roma.”
Talk of politics brings the discussion to the economics of running a pub.
Calvo always votes for one of the many left-wing parties, by far the biggest of which is Democratic Left (the main fragment of the former Communist Party). He blamed Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for the economic downturn. “He won’t even acknowledge there’s a depression,” he said.
Media mogul Berlusconi got a drubbing in April’s regional elections, something Calvo hopes will be repeated at the next general election.
The return to power of Democratic Left, its Olive Tree coalition and other allies would be good for the pub business, he said.
In bad economic times, “people drink just one beer, instead of two,” he said.
However on a recent evening at Four Green Field, two young women, who were engrossed in conversation at the bar, ordered a pint of Guinness each, then a second round, and finally a third.
“That’s unusual,” Keane said.
It might just be a sign of things to come. In Rome’s 2,500 years as a city of significance, it has often changed very slowly. But change it does.