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When in Rome...
Our overnight flight arrived early. Rome airport is pretty dingy for a world-class city. The carpet in the arrival gate should have been cleaned and/or ripped up and replaced 5 years ago. Customs/passport control could not have been easier. There are lines for Italians, for EU Passports, and everyone else. Even being in the "everyone else" category didn't make the process difficult. I bought an Italian phrasebook while waiting for our cab driver, a purchase which proved nigh-on-useless as time went on, as it lacked many of the phrases we really needed. If nothing else, it served the purpose of arming us with the ability to speak Italian with sufficient ineptitude to convince the Italians we met that we were sincerely trying not to be ugly Americans even as the conversation almost invariably ended up changing over to English whenever possible. Lillie sat patiently with the luggage while I paced around, scanning the sea of cabbies holding placards with their fares' names written on them. Granted, we were early, but as time wore on, I started looking closer at the same cards, looking for mis-spelt versions of our names. We really hadn't figured on getting to our rental apartment on our own power and I was worried that our sleepless state would complicate navigation, were we to attempt the trip on public transport. There were a lot of signs for people with the Ford motor company. I thought that was interesting, given that - when we left - Fiat was talking about buying one of Ford's competitors. There were also a handful of cabbies waiting for some "Prince.... al Saud" or other. Later on in the trip, we talked with friends in London about someone they knew whose whole job it was to set up shopping excursions, accommodations, and travel arrangements for the 100+ members of the royal Saudi family and their small armies of minders and bodyguards. That sorta sounds cool, if you like traveling EVERYWHERE with an entourage. This is one reason why fame and fortune have never had that much appeal - they just seem like a gilded cage to me. Our driver arrived after what seemed like an hour in my excited state (but was probably right on time). The drive from airport to our rental loft apartment provided multiple object lessons and warnings about Roman drivers. Boston and Chicago drivers have nothing on Romans. The only driving style that even comes close to the level of road chaos we saw was perhaps Queens, NYC, when (mercifully) my sister Alyssa was driving, or maybe Central America. It didn't help that the driver was listening to call-in talk radio. For some reason, excited chattering on the radio in another language is NOT soothing. He eventually switched to classical, but probably not soon enough. Given the route from the airport to our apartment, neither Lillie nor I were very impressed with Rome at first sight - until we passed by the Colosseum. Fortunately, our lodging was within walking distance of the Colosseum, so we were encouraged that our immediate surroundings would be more picturesque. I suppose that - since our fare was pre-arranged at a fixed price - we were not being taken the "scenic route." We were somewhat taken aback by the amount of graffiti we saw on our drive. Graffiti is an Italian word, so I suppose it follows that we'd find some in Italy. It reminded me of Lillie's and my visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, when we looked at the Egyptian temple that had been moved in its entirety to the museum. All over it was graffiti in Italian, and I remember thinking to myself: "Thank God, American ne'er-do-wells aren't the only jerks who see something impressive and then want to write all over it." Just as we approached our destination, the driver answered a cell phone call which distracted him long enough to pass our stop, whereupon he started cursing out the person who called him. Lillie and I both thought that was kind of funny. Our instructions were to pick up our keys from the owner of the coffee shop next door to the loft. Of course, having done absolutely NO language preparation for our trip, we quickly realized that this small errand in and of itself was going to be a minor epic. We sat down at one of the tables outside the cafe and tried to cobble together some combination of words that would get our keys for us. Naturally, our recently-purchased phrasebook lacked the appropriate verbiage to say "To whom do we speak to get the key for the place next door?" We could, however, have asked if they had contraception, since that WAS in the book. I was nominated to go and try to pronounce the phrase we'd assembled like a linguistic Frankenstein's monster, and I made a stammering mess of it to the woman behind the counter. Thankfully, she figured out what I was trying to say and pointed over to the older guy making cappuccini. I also ordered 2 cappuccini in my caveman Italian, so we'd have something to drink while we waited. Apparently our efforts to speak Italian were appreciated enough, and he communicated this through the capuccini we ordered.  The street was fairly lively and we took in the passers-by and people meeting for their morning coffee and made our plans for the day while we waited. After a while, the owner brought out the keys and led us to our room. The apartment is in a courtyard building. The street entrance was through very solid 3" thick oak doors with an electronic lock system we admired throughout apartment buildings in Italy. Naturally, our loft apartment was nowhere nearly as spacious as the pictures and description made it look, but it was a relief just to know it was there and ours. The full bathroom featured a shower stall too small for any reasonably broad-shouldered adult to stand in, so we assumed that we would be showering with the stall open, figuring that splash from the shower onto the toilet would simply keep the toilet washed off. The mini-fridge was unplugged and smelled kinda funky, so we left that alone. After a little bit of tidying up and sunscreen application, we set off for the Colosseum with the intent of pushing through jetlag until a reasonable bedtime. We'd divined that we only needed to head a little ways down our street (Marulana) to the corner, hang a right, and we'd eventually hit the Colosseum. As we walked along, the heat became apparent. If late May and early June were the last of the good travelling weather in Italy, we had NO interest in July/August. Apparently, we arrived during campaign season for an upcoming election, as we would see repeatedly in the cities we visited. There was either a seemingly impossibly large number of candidates, each with their larger-than-life-sized face on the poster, or perhaps every single person running for every office included their photo. I thought that was kind of an interesting thought, since I have no idea what (for example) our City Clerk looks like in Chicago. Every day, we would pass by boards where posters were pasted up, and they would be different from the day before. We walked up stairs and around a ruins site near Colosseum called Esquilino, which I believe also had Nero's Golden Palace. There were no placards with information on what it was, but the remains are impressive. We found in several places in Rome that informational placards were in short supply. The various ruins were fenced off, so it was obvious that there was some significance to them - but nothing to explain what they were. Finding our way from Esquilino down the hill to the Colosseum, we realized that we had flown into Rome on the weekend when they were hosting a soccer championship between Barcelona and Manchester United. It looked like a set-up for a concert, and - indeed - there later would be one. My recollection was that it was a classic rock cover band and that they did some Who. I began fantasizing about touring Italy as a musician, rather than paying for it out of pocket. It would be cooler with Tautologic, but I'd do it with a cover band if necessary. Arriving down the hill and dodging traffic, Lillie and I looked at the line to get in at the Colosseum, got dismayed by its length, and vowed to come back at a quieter time. Proceeding eastward, we thought we saw a way to sneak into the Forum from the back, but ended up ducking into a nice cool shady church to get out of the sun, which was now beating us down. Walking back out of the church and into a wall of exhaustion-inducing heat, we decided to get some food and a nap. We ate our first pizza in Rome within view of the Colosseum, on a street that abutted still more excavation, which we were to learn was still very much ongoing. From what we read in the Colosseum the next day, it appears that it has only been relatively recently that Rome/Italy have had the interest/wherewithal to do serious excavation and preservation work on some of the ancient Roman sites.  We walked back to the apartment and crashed for 4 hours. We knew we weren't supposed to do it, if we were to beat jetlag - but we couldn't help ourselves. I woke up with the alarm, but was in a fog for quite some time. As it was now late afternoon/early evening, we decided to go on the night walk described in Rick Steve's Italy, and that we would walk to and from said prescribed route. We walked again past the Colosseum, taking a gander at the soccer trophy on display near the Arch of Constantine, guarded by Rome's finest (see the cop scratching his behind in the photo?).  We continued onward, looking onto the Forum from Via Dei Fori Imperiali, taking in the Monument to Vittorio Emmanuelle, some form of political rally featuring nuns and singing children at Trajan's Column, and Area Sacra Argentina - where dozens and dozens of cats laze around the fenced-off excavated ruins - on the way to the Tiber River at Ponte Sisto.  Aside from the sites, the route also provided a healthy "trial by fire" in Roman street crossing. It mostly just takes nerves, eye contact with the drivers, and enough other pedestrians to form critical mass and thereby insure that the drivers will in fact stop for you. The Tiber is not so romantic as the Arno or the Grand Canal in Venice. Its routine floods became too meddlesome, so walls were built up on either side in order to limit its impact on the city. From the Tiber, we walked through Piazza Farnese to Campo di Fiore, where our prescribed "Night Walk" was to begin. We decided to get some fuel for our walk, and sat down at a cafe offering a pizza and wine special. Service was surly and inattentive, making me more appreciative of tip-based waiter compensation. Campo di Fiore is a hang-out spot, like many squares we'd encounter throughout Italy. Although there are restaurants and a statue of Giordano Bruno (a heretic burned alive on that very spot), the main event is people-watching. The crowd was young and the Heineken 40s accumulated fairly quickly around the base of Bruno's statue. After a while, a Roman city cleaning crew materialized and picked up all of the bottles. There were also various street musicians, including a guy plunking out the beginning of "Stairway to Heaven" on an electric guitar. Didn't he see "Wayne's World?" I started wondering how long this nightly ritual - almost a sort of improvised nightly performance - had gone on at this very spot, and is anyone in the crowd thinking, "Man, I've been cruising for chicks at this spot for 3 years, and it's getting kinda boring." Surely ennui isn't limited to people living in places as cold as Chicago? Maybe not. Beautiful women in skirts and insensibly high heels (at least, "insensible" given that the uneven terrain of your average Roman street or square is liable to cause said shoes' destruction, or at least extreme discomfort on the part of their wearer) probably never gets old. Likewise, I suppose that Eurofabulous straight men in salmon colored pants probably never gets old for the ladies, either. Our next stop was Piazza Navona, where we ate our first gelato of the trip (Ai Tre Tartufi's chocolate) while admiring the Bernini fountain. We continued on to the Pantheon, whose facade was Lillie's favorite in Rome. It was closed, but we made a note to come back when it was open. On our way to Piazza Capranica, we ran into a couple who'd sat directly in front of us on our American airlines flight from NYC to Rome. Spying the Rick Steves' guide in their hands, we introduced ourselves and found out that they'd gotten married in Seattle on the same day we married in Chicago. We walked and talked with them to Piazza Colonna and then Trevi Fountain, where Barcelona and Manchester United fans were carrying on, as they would for the remainder of our visit. Parting ways with our fellow Rick Steves fans, we continued on to Spanish Steps. We lacked energy to walk them at that time, but proceeded to walk ten times further to get home. Upon our return to our apartment, we resolved to figure out the trains for subsequent days. We both slept badly. The mattress buckled in the middle, pushing our hot sweaty bodies together all night. That sounds romantic, except when you really need sleep. Rome Day Two: We started day two of our Rome visit with resolve and purpose, having decided to get the Roma Pass, which would grant us two paid site admissions, a discounted third, and free bus/train service throughout Rome. The Colosseum lives up to its name - it's colossal. Of the ruins we saw, it had the best curated exhibits, and really gave us not only a good sense of the Roman Empire in the first century AD, but a few lessons about governance that extend well beyond the ancient world. The Anfiteatro Flavio (the Colosseum's real name) was built by Vespasian and his son Titus on the site of a giant private pool built by Nero. Nero was suspected of burning Rome (or at least allowing the fire to rage without intervention) to clear room for an expansion of his palace. It was an "a-ha" moment for me to learn that the construction of the Colosseum was largely financed by gold seized during the Roman's quelling of the Jewish revolt in 70 AD, during which the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. It helped me put the picture of the world together for that time frame. Vespasian's younger son Domitian was fairly progressive, but his downfall came when he formally and publicly did away with the functionally irrelevant Senate. I suppose that Domitian's assassination speaks to the importance of the appearance of importance, where some are concerned. The Senate - a bunch or rich guys - needed to look important, even if they served no real purpose. Domitian probably crossed the line when he proclaimed himself a god, which was usually done after the emperor died rather than during his life. Then again, what's the point in being a Roman god if you aren't alive to enjoy it? After his assassination, Domitian was one of very few emperors to suffer damnatio memoriae, wherein the Romans sought to remove his name and memory from history. The etymology of "damnatio memoriae," wherein "memoriae" clearly refers to memory, leaves "damnatio" to mean something like "erase" or "cancel."  This definition of damnation - cancellation or erasure - gives rise to a different concept of damnation from the fire and pitchforks version fed to contemporary Christians - one where you simply never existed, as far as the world is concerned. Being completely forgotten is a Hell of significant proportions for those with emperor-sized egoes for certain, but I think we'd all have to admit that it's more than a little scary for the rest of us, too.  Before proceeding on to our next site, Lillie and I got a sandwich and drinks from one of the vendor carts you see throughout Rome. Although expensive, the food isn't bad, and I found a new favorite soda: Schweppe's Limonata. Basically, it's like lemonade with fizz. Delicious, and - as far as I know - unavailable in the US.  Palatine Hill and the Forum were both scenic, but not tremendously well-marked with regards to the ruins. There were some tunnel areas with exhibits, but the outdoor structures didn't have placards. There may have been guidebooks/maps available, but we didn't see them on the way in. Nonetheless, it was enjoyable and impressive to climb around Palatine Hill. We had maps from other sources of the Forum, so we at least knew what we were looking at. To be honest, in the hot sun, I think our brains were too melted to register much besides, "I bet that looked cool when it was standing." The various arches remain impressive, and those ancient Romans did love their arches. The Curia Julia building remains impressive and its exhibit reinforced the lessons learned about Domitian, as it was the building where the Senate met. Thoroughly sunburned, we decided that our next destination must have shade, so we proceeded to the Mamertine Prison, where St. Peter was held in a cistern before his crucifiction. I think that the weight of it might have hit me better, if there hadn't been an American "preacher" shooting a home video about it. Something about that made the moment horrifically contemporary for me. American Christian congregations have memberships who profess deep faith but to what? Jesus forgave where they condemn and gave away where they have investment clubs. Where the courage of their Christian convictions are concerned, some of them wouldn't last two seconds in the cistern with St. Peter. Would I? Hmmm. Probably not. I could do a better job of taking up a metaphorical cross, but I'm in no hurry to face a real one. On our way to see the interior of the Pantheon, we had lunch at a Tuscan place with a pushy waiter, so-so food, and paid too much for it. To cap it off, we couldn't get any wine, because Rome had banned liquor sales that day, so that the crazy Barcelona/Manchester soccer fans wouldn't go on a booze-fueld rampage. Weak. Our waiter poured us some non-alcoholic white wine. Seriously weak.  The Pantheon was not just a pretty face - it's beautiful on the inside, too. We arrived with about 15 minutes to take it in before we were pushed out the door to allow a church service to start. Many of the greatest pieces of art of Italy are in churches, so this experience repeated itself throughout our trip. Mostly, I thought about what it would be like to call the Pantheon, St. Peter's Basilica, et al my "church home." Nothing against Lower Brandywine Presbyterian Church, but we didn't have any statues by Renaissance Masters. From the Pantheon, we returned to Trevi Fountain, where aforementioned Barcelona fans were still singing and chanting. We split a gelato and then continued on to the Spanish Steps, which we actually climbed, this time. We found our way to Rome's subway, which we took to Piazza Vittorio.  Piazza Vittorio is surrounded by clothing shops run by Chinese-Italians. Hyphenates seem weird when "-American" isn't at the end, for some reason. We ran into a lot of Indian-Italians, who - overwhelmingly - were in more menial positions in Italy than we see in the United States. Since India was a former British colony, I wonder if the Indian-Italians migrated first to the UK and then sought better fortunes in the EU. We took a brief nap, after which a woozy Lillie slipped and fell on the spiral staircase that led to our loft bed, splitting open her toe. She was a trooper and it wasn't too bad, so we continued on. I thought maybe I should find some super-glue and fix her toe that way, but my phrasebook didn't have Super-Glue in it, so how would I accomplish that? For dinner, we ate at Ricci Est Est Est Pizzeria, which had the best pizza we'd eaten in Rome - although our sample size was fairly limited. We had some grilled vegetables and fried squash blossoms, to go along with a pizza featuring gorgonzola and salami. Delicious! Our waiter was very nice and accommodating of our (we would later learn, bizarrely American) request for a box for our leftovers. Apparently, Italians do not "do" leftovers. Again, we were stymied in our attempts to get a glass of wine. Winelessness was becoming a real problem, as wine was pretty high up on our list of reasons to come to Italy. We'd gone really easy on wine for our first day in Rome, as we were so jetlagged from our trip and the memory of wedding night excess was still fresh - but now we were in the mood to tie one on, and the city was not cooperating. We went to bed blind stinking sober, and - truth to be known - slept better. Rome - Day Three: Day three in Rome began with espresso for me and cappuccino for Lillie. We were getting the hang of the train system in Rome, making good use of our Roma Pass. The weather moderated a little bit for our third day, growing somewhat overcast - but our fellow subway riders all stood on (rather than climbed) the escalators up from the trains to the surface, even so. It was just too hot to put that much effort into it, if you weren't in a rush - and Italians are never in a rush, except when driving. Our first destination of day three was the Cappuccin Crypt. The Cappuccins were monks after whom cappuccino was named - a bald white head (the froth) on top of a brown robe (the coffee). The crypt contains the bones of about 4,000 monks, arranged in various decorative and floral patterns - artwork made out of human remains, set against a backdrop of soil brought in from Jerusalem about 400 years ago. This was definitely one of my lovely wife's favorite places. I'm not big on the macabre, but I can't say it completely gave me the willies, either. Mostly I was pre-occuppied with the mechanics of how dead bodies become art. Do you leave 'em out while the flesh rots off and the organs disintegrate, then arrange the bones after they're stripped? Do you help the process along with a bit of butchering? Do you plant the monks in the ground to let the worms do the work for you, then dig them up after a while? If so, how long do you leave a body in the ground before you dig it back up? Did they label them and figure out when the corpse would be ready for the next part of the art project? The American Embassy, a sushi joint, and the Hard Rock Cafe in Rome are just around the corner from the crypt. We went into none of the above, but had this fantasy of American diplomats getting tired of Italian food and going out for sushi. We had no comparable fantasy involving the Hard Rock. We jumped on the train to go to the Borghese Gardens. We took a wrong turn on the way out of the train station, and tried to ask a passerby "dove Borghese?" in our pathetic Italian. The monolingual older gentleman we asked gestured that we were in it, but we it looked like we'd just exited by some sort of parkway with no clear signage to enter the park itself. Nonetheless, we ended up engaged in a half-understood conversation about how glad he was that Obama was our president. He also called Lillie "bella" when we told him that we'd just gotten married. Eventually, he extricated himself from the quasi-conversation, and we went back into the train station and found the right exit. Truth to be known, although Villa Borghese features a zoo, a great museum (which, regrettably, we did not have time/energy to see), and various other amenities, Lillie and I felt a little let-down in the garden department. I grew up near Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA, and Lillie used to work at the Garfield Park Conservatory - both of which are a whole different concept of garden, one which is meticulously groomed and presents a stunning array of species arranged artistically. The Borghese Gardens are more what you'd call a park - fine for hanging out, but not breathtakingly beautiful. We found this to be the case in most Italian gardens we visited. Nonetheless, a bit of time in a green space was good for the soul and we made one of the most useful - and cheap - purchases of our entire Italian visit: a five Euro umbrella. Shortly after its purchase, a drizzle ensued. We were amused to find a street named "Giorgio Washington," not only because he was our first president, but because they went to the trouble of Italianizing his name for the purpose of street-naming. I bought a hat at the train station as we headed to the Vatican, having sunburned my bald head the day before. I was also tired of slathering on sunscreen every morning before going out. We went through a level of security roughly equivalent to the airport to enter the Vatican Museum. The collections there are extensive and I couldn't help but think that here was where a good chunk of money from the collection plate went for a thousand years - but, then again, many of the wonderful works of art may have been gifts, for all I know.  As we looked through the statuary areas and noticed various male statues missing their members, it really struck me: Who goes around specifically whacking penises off statues? I can understand wear-and-tear taking fingers and toes off, but the penis is right on the torso and not as easy to just "bump into." Moreover, a certain precision was at work, here - the penises were gone but the scrotums (scroti?) remained. Otherwise-whole statues were missing their male member. Lillie had this idea of a "Secret Society of Penis Whackers" who, for generations - father to son or maybe mother to daughter - passed the tradition of clandestine male member removal from statues.  The Sistine Chapel lives up to the hype. It's overwhelming. After viewing the Sistine Chapel, we checked out Byzantine/Russian panels, a direct cast of the Pieta, some pre-Raphealite works, Greek funerary urns, and an exhibit of world religions. The Byzantine and Russian panels dated from very early to fairly recently, but the styles remain consistent, with a strong, somewhat cartoon-like sense of line that appealed to both Lillie and I. The cast of the Pieta was worth checking out because you can get up close to it, unlike the real deal at St. Peter's, which is behind bulletproof glass.  The pre-Raphaelite works mostly made me appreciate Raphael and the other Renaissance masters. These several-hundred-year-old Christian paintings seem pre-occupied with making sure that a given set of saints is represented, rather than depicting a realistic scene. After a while, it started to remind me of my comic book collecting days, where there would be gatefold spreads of all of the DC or Marvel heroes and villains, posing almost for a class or wedding photo. Just as you have to make sure to have Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Aquaman, et al, you also have to make sure to have Peter, Paul, John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, Jesus, Mary, Matthew, et al. I'm pretty sure that some of the panels put people in the same work that never met each other in the times of the New Testament.  If I survive her, Lillie wants me to cremate her remains and sneak some of the ashes into one of the Greek urns on display in the Vatican and the Cappuccin crypt. I suspect that security would have something to say about that. I wonder if anyone else has tried this. The world religions exhibit in the basement had some interesting artifacts, and seemed to be directed at educating Catholics with no prior knowledge about other religions. It also had a few interesting pieces related to conversion efforts worldwide. I suspect that it was fairly new and probably at the behest of the late John Paul II.  St. Peter's Basilica is mind-blowing, in terms of scale and beauty. There are so many wonderful things about it that it feels sort of stupid to write about them.  I don't care what your beliefs are, you'll be impressed if not moved. The Pieta and Michelangelo's Dome alone would be worth a visit, but everything is just jaw-droppingly beautiful.  There's no real way to follow St. Peter's, except to go out and have dinner. Lillie'd heard good things about Trastaverre, formerly home to many Roman Jews, but now more like Rome's closest equivalent to Wicker Park or Bucktown. We got information on which bus to take from a sullen Tourist Information guy and were on our way. |
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