ROME — A summer Sunday at the water park can be a revelation, all you need is imagination. Even those arriving early in the morning from Rome’s outer peripheries know this. They’re mostly teenagers, flocking off public transportation after their long rides to the slides and pools. For a day, they escape the scorching Italian capital, trying to imagine themselves in Neverland.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
At Hydromania, if you close your eyes inside the wave pool, it’s easy to imagine you’re in a crystalline sea, rather than forced to slalom between masses of floating coliform bacteria, tanning lotions, armpit sweat and sewage effluent, ladies applying too much blush, gentlemen gulping down another Spritz.
The clichéd idea is that the water park is something cultured urbanites avoid at all costs, where suburban rowdiness reigns. Yet if you imagine it as a concrete version of the most overcrowded city beaches, you are mistaken.
The difference is marked the laws of physics, as the water park is built with whirlwind descents on slides, requiring extremely steep climbs on foot up endless steps, like those the master imposes on his students in Kung Fu films. Where there are no stairs, one must trudge along paths with slopes approaching 45 degrees. This is the primary factor determining the scarcity of adults or elderly people, those with shortness of breath, overweight, or worn kneecap cartilage.
No place for old folks
It becomes quickly clear that the water park is no place for old people, nor for old-fashioned thinking. Here, without ideological constraints, we see the potential of the society of the future. Perhaps it won’t just be the harbinger of the apocalypse we imagine, especially if we can manage not to fixate on the images we have of the far too young influencers, the compulsive gamers, the OnlyFans followers.
At 9 a.m. on a Sunday, it’s a different crowd stepping onto the Lazio regional railways to the nearest station, “Roma Aurelia,” from which it’s a 47-minute walk to their destination. Those who are more confident hop on a Cotral bus or take the 906 bus to the Casal Lumbroso Magarotto stop. Those who bring a sandwich, in theory, get through a day with the thermometer at 40 degrees Celsius on a reasonable budget.
There are the pines of Rome, there’s movement. Here, a boy for whom even Ostia, with its locked-down bathing establishments, would be beyond his budget, has the real sensation of being transported beyond all confines, with the exhilaration of speed and the ecstasy of the sensory annihilation of plunging into that crystalline water.
Vertigo-inducing fun
Every attraction in the park is actually an extra-dimensional escape machine; for a few intense seconds, all space-time dimensions are erased, allowing us to savor what fantastic things might exist beyond the city’s periphery roads, something not already polluted by Roman degradation.
Long live the Toboga, which produces vertigo as you descend for 120 meters, the six-part undulating track for sliding competitions, and the Black Hole, for those who don’t suffer from claustrophobia, which is a leap into the dark of a “150-meter adrenaline rush” tube clinging to a rubber dinghy.
The bravest dive into K2’s two 20-meter-high tubes, their screams unleashed before they slam into the pool like cannonballs. It all feels like a test of courage for young saplings, an initiatory test that establishes them as warriors.
And yet it is nothing that even remotely recalls somber tests of virility: it is instead the explosion of the most naive and primordial sense of euphoric liberation from the bonds of gravity.
They let loose, but with order and discipline. It seems paradoxical, but it’s true: signs reading “No diving” and “No running” are posted everywhere. Lifeguards with whistles appear from every corner, nipping in the bud any pranks and limiting excessive noise, succeeding more often than not to maintain an order that teachers in schools would envy.
View this post on Instagram
Bathing suit communion
Nowhere like this water park have I had the impression of a young, vital, and unsuspecting community growing tenaciously and fearlessly like grass among the rubble. I saw boys and girls, all on the verge of adolescence, laughing happily as they raced down the slide. Male and female, in natural physical shape, without any ostentation of pumped-up muscles or surgically enhanced breasts, without any concern for the brand, for what they were wearing, for the latest accessories.
You don’t need an extensive vocabulary to play in the water.
A bathing suit makes everyone look the same, phones are put away as soon as you enter, locked in the combination locker, along with documents and change to get home.
At a water park, you rarely see kids taking selfies or filming their adventures on their smartphones. To me, they didn’t even seem to take notice of the many shades and races and countries of origin of their peers. I saw girls in burkinis racing on the slides with their peers in thongs; no one paid attention to such differences.
Most spoke in local Roman dialect, some Arabic, slightly older girls an Eastern European languages, many in Spanish, but they all understood each other. You don’t need an extensive vocabulary to play in the water: the slide quickly blurs differences, skin color doesn’t matter.
Anyone who still imagines it’s necessary to safeguard some kind of societal model consistent with the Italian lineage, anyone who fears ethnic substitution, anyone who is convinced that young people are either weaklings or budding criminals, should take a trip to one of Italy’s many water parks. Perhaps this summer, they’ll find peace of mind.
