While trips to party or just hang out at the beach are great, I really wanted to hit one of the major historical cities this time. I looked into London & Paris – but Italy won out. The off-season flights and hotels were dirt cheap and the weather would still be good enough to be out and about. So I booked a non-stop [ERW-FCO] on Norwegian Air, one of the low-cost European airlines.
Day 1 (Fucking Newark)
The first thing I learned was that it’s not worth saving $200 on a plane ticket if you are going to have to spend $100 dragging your ass to some airport in another city – in this case Newark. The uber to Union Station and bus to Newark were expensive. Spending 10 minutes at the Newark Bus Station was disgusting. Being trapped on the express city bus from the station to the airport was absurd. You see, the bus driver had a beef with one of the passengers. So, the bus was going to sit right there within sight of the terminal until the cops came to start arresting people. Those of us with luggage eventually ducked out the side door and hoofed it the remining five minutes.
Security was a breeze and so there was time to kill. My only clear memory of Newark airport was this weird hologram of Connie Chung. You see, someone with access to a government grant decided it would be a good idea to create the ‘New Jersey Hall of Fame’. And it was her misfortune to be both famous and from New Jersey. So, there she stands, in holograph form, endlessly repeating how proud she is to part of the select few. She’s got this enigmatic look on her face. Something like ‘God I can’t believe I let myself get talked into this’.
Meanwhile at the gate, the pilots showed up an hour early and spent about fifteen minutes of it at the check in counter doing some sort of paperwork. Part of me wants to think it was like renting a UHaul and they were trying to decide if the optional comprehensive collision insurance was worth it.
Next to arrive was the cabin crew. There were the most ridiculously well dressed and groomed set of individuals I’d ever encountered (it set the tone for the trip). They were friendly, but they were also Spanish. So, they had a huge smile for you as you boarded the plane. But if you didn’t comply with all crew instructions there was going to be a problem.
Day 2 (Rome 1)
The flight was beyond uneventful – helped by the greatest seatmates you can have – none. 
After zooming down the west coast of Italy we darted straight into Leonardo Airport Rome [FCO]. Just like in Barbados, all English speakers got waived right through immigration and customs and were free to roam about the country.
FCO was the biggest airport I’d ever seen. It was four stories and covered in so many helpful signs that you had no idea where to go. I groped my way around until I found FCO’s train station and bought a ticket for the Leonardo Express which takes you straight into downtown Rome.
Europeans use their train system far more than we do – and it shows. The train station was spotless and the trains themselves looked like they had just come off the assembly line. It left precisely on time and I was downtown in about 20 minutes.
Termini (the station for downtown Rome) is huge. A full five stories tall by the time you count the upper galleries and basement shopping and squatting on about six city blocks. It was filled with people in a hurry and the two things I would see over and over in Italy – Fashion and Food. Fashion and Food in the shops. Fashion and Food on the advertisements. And fashion on the people and Food being consumed by them.
Learning from my Barbados mistake, my first task was to go up to the second floor and get a local SIM card from TIN – the main Italian wireless carrier. They offered tourists a deal of ten gigs of LTE data for $20. It was so good in fact that you had to show your passport because they didn’t want to make that deal available to actual Italians. The guy behind the counter spoke passable English and after I assured him my phone was not locked to ATT he sold me the SIM card and a couple of phone reboots later I was in business.
As soon I walked out of the train station it was clear that Rome is an entirely different kind of city. It wasn’t an artificial city like Washington DC or a dying one like you see throughout America. It was old, alive and proud. As I walked toward my hotel the buildings got older and older. Halfway there I noticed one emblazoned with MCCXV – 1215. That wasn’t the address – it was the year it was built – over 800 years ago.
After working through the streets and alleyways I found my hotel just where I expected it (another improvement on Barbados). Since everyone in Rome speaks just enough English to get their job done check in was a breeze. Three minutes and a glance at my passport and they handed me the key.
I’d say the building dated back to the 1,100’s but it had been completely gutted and rehabbed. I got on the tiny elevator, opened the door to my room and burst out laughing. It was the smallest hotel room I’d ever seen, with just enough walking space to make it from the front door to the bathroom. But it was totally modern, very clean, cheap and in the middle of everything.
The first thing I learned about Italian hotel rooms is that in order to turn the lights on you have to have your key card in the little slot next to the door. At first I thought they were charging me for electricity by the minute or something. But it turns out that’s a common way of making sure you don’t leave the lights on when you leave the room. Seemed reasonable. The second thing I learned was that the mattresses in every Italian hotel are really uncomfortable. I never figured out the reason for that.
There was a small terrace on the top of the building, so I decided to check that out before the sun went down. Roof top terraces are pretty common in Italy and this one was very nice. It would have been ideal for some take out food and a drink if so inclined.
But as always, the first night’s task is to walk around and locate the basics. Since the sun was going down I threw on a sweatshirt and headed out.
After about a thirty second walk I looked up and – like a dumb American – said out loud to myself, “Hey, that’s the Roman Forum”. And by God it was – the center of ancient Rome sitting right there in front of me. I’d seen it on YouTube, GoogleEarth and every other platform, but there it was in person. And just like Barbados the pictures didn’t do it justice. None of my pictures did any part of Rome justice.
Specifically, I’d found Trajan’s Forum, one of the public spaces built by the Emperor of the same name in 112BC. It was used as a market, storehouse and for court proceedings (the Romans loved to sue each other). Around the edge was []. It’s a large, wide, street used by cars in the day and people strolling about at night. Even though it was the off season the street musicians were still out in force. This guy was doing a creditable version of some old Beatles tunes.
While wandering through the alleyways that surrounded the forum I spotted a Subway and took note in case of a nutritional worst case scenario. After another hour of walking, with my phone now dead, I reached a level of desperation hunger and decided to double back to the Subway for a quick sandwich.
Not so fast.
You see, Italian streets make no sense. The odds and even rule for opposite sides of the streets – not applicable. The same street changing names every few blocks – seemingly encouraged. Even the street numbers were not consistent. The 800 block of one street might be the 1150 block on the reverse side. For nearly two hours I walked through the same damn streets slowly devolving from good natured confusion, to frustration to out and out hangry-ness. Eventually I gave in and just grabbed a collection of candy bars from one of the ubiquitous all-night convenience stores. And then, yet another tourist beaten by Rome’s nonsensical street design, I went to bed.
Day 3 (Rome 2)
Up at the crack of dawn and downstairs for the hotel breakfast bar before a shower. Like most Americans I know exactly what to expect at a hotel’s breakfast bar. A bunch of fat people in their pajamas and sweat pants – scarfing down iffy eggs, small cartons of bland cereal, fruit that’s either before or past it’s prime and something that might be orange juice.
As I walked into the breakfast room here I knew I had badly miscalculated. Everyone was showered, dressed head to toe and enjoying a breakfast bar that was straight out of a diplomatic reception. There really wasn’t anyway to walk this fax pas back. So I just sat in the corner, kept my head down and left as soon as I was full and with what dignity I could manage.
Now showered and properly dressed, my first task was to lay hands on a Roma pass. Most cities in Europe have something similar. It allows you free or discounted entry to most of the museums and free public travel. Since the details are always subject to change I’ll dispense with them. But for my to-do list it would prove a great deal. The passes were sold right next to the hotel and their office even featured a large map so I could see what buildings had recently been opened or closed for renovation.
So off I went.
But first some backstory. There may indeed be seven hills in Rome – but only two of them matter. The first is the Capitoline, located to the north, where the earliest temples were built. The second is the Palintine, to the south, where the aristocracy – and later – the emperors, had their residences. Between them, in an area about 2-3 football fields in size, was low marshy field that served as the Roman forum.
The Forum is where everyone came together. To do a little bit of shopping, exchange some gossip, handle their public business in the courts and help lynch the people that had just fallen from power. It’s kind of amazing, but the heart of one of the world’s largest empires was so small you could walk around it in about an hour.
I started with the Colosseum, and frankly, it wasn’t that interesting. It might be large, but it used to be far larger. This picture shows one of the few places where it retains its’ original height and depth (on the left) compared to the inner core that makes up most of what’s left. In the other you can distantly see the faint outlines of the stairs that took people to the uppermost reaches of the original structure. Now that must have been an impressive view. But so much of its’ stonework had been scavenged over the centuries that it’s a shadow of itself. The other problem is that there’s not that much that’s accessible to the average tourist. So basically, you just mill about for a while, pretend to be impressed and secretly wonder what all the fuss is about.
Because the pictures didn’t really do anything for me I did try to take one dramatic video of what it must have been like to enter the ground level as a spectator. This test shot turned out ok. But on the real run I took one extra step back to get even more in the picture. Crash – Boom – Fuck. I had stepped off the back end of a platform, plunged about two feet and jammed the hell out of my left knee as it took all my weight plus the force of the fall. I stood there about 2-3 minutes – pretending to check my phone and pretending that nothing had happened. Then I gave myself the worst medical advice possible – “Just Walk It Off”.
Next up was the Palintine hill, guarded by a quick checkpoint where then scanned my ticket and made sure I wasn’t carrying an assault rifle. There were a series of tour groups forming up and some signs. I checked out one that said something to the effect that the Palintine was considered sacred because of the unusual peacefulness you could find there. I dismissed it as standard tourist drivel.
But damn if it wasn’t true. It was quiet – almost too quiet. I could see cars whizzing down the adjacent thoroughfares, but it was like the sounds didn’t register up there. I’m not sure if it was a matter of the layout of the hill or the vegetation absorbing the noise. But I could see how someone would think there was something eerie about the place.
The entire hill was a series of ruins (except for one that I’ll note later). There were old markets and storehouses built into the hill and the foundations of palaces and grand houses. Again, it was interesting how close everything was. I had read about how the second Emperor, Tiberius, had built an entirely new palace on a different part of the hill just to get away from his mother. I now knew that he couldn’t have moved more than about five minutes away. Basically just the 40 year old ruler of the known world running away from home because he’d had a fight with his mom.
I popped out on the north edge of the hill and descended into the Forum itself. The forum was rebuilt, in part or totally, dozens of times during its heyday. The standard procedure was for one of the more ambitious consuls, and later emperors, to tear down one structure that had runs its course and replace it with something they could put their name on.
This left the forum more a collection of individual buildings, temples and memorials than a coherently planned whole. Various parts of the forum are under repair at any given point, and it was my bad luck that the Senate House was closed. But nearly everything else was accessible. All in all it’s very well maintained, explained and you can walk right up and sit on most of the remains.
Like I said, the camera on my crappy little low-end phone couldn’t really do the place justice so I won’t bore you with too many bad photos. There are far better online resources for you to see the forum. But none of them compare with being there.
But about an hour of walking around the forum really drove home just how much history was packed into someplace so small. Over here was the forum where Mark Anthony spoke Ceaser’s funeral oration and thereby put the final nail in the Republic’s coffin. 100 years that way was the [] cliff where the worst traitors to Rome were hurled to their deaths. Turn left and you would see the [], which the Romans thought was the entrance to the underworld, and just over that hedge of bushes was the oldest temple in Rome, which also happened to hold the public treasury.
I then worked my way back on the side of the Palintine hill I hadn’t seen. The problem was that some wannabe noble decided to over much of it with the huge (and unremarkable) Farnese Gardens in 1550. These buildings covered up a large amount of Palintante’s ruins – which is a shame.
But there are still large parts of the old palaces that are still accessible. It was errie to be standing in the same place were people used to hold hush conversations about war, peace and later which of their fellow citizens ‘had to go’
I missed the closing of the Paltine museum – which really sucked since it is filled with artifacts they’ve uncovered there – but that’s just a reason to go back again. All in all it was the highlight of the trip. But even with all the reading I’ve done over the years I felt like that return trip is going to require a lot more research. It’s cool to stand among the ruins, but I wanted a much better understanding of what those ruins were and what they meant.
After an early dinner I headed out to the Traverse, which was supposed to be the gritty, edgy part of Rome. But gentrification had gotten there well before me. It was a bunch of old buildings converted to, you guessed it, restaurants and art shops. One of the local craft breweries did have something witty to say about a previous customer.
On a whim I hoofed it up to St. Peters so I could see it at night. It’s at the end of a long, wide, boulevard so you can see it for nearly ½ a mile as you approach. Interestingly, as soon as I passed the wide white stipe that marks the border between Italy and Vatican City the ground was teeming with homeless guys getting ready to bed down. I assume that’s because the Italian police won’t put up with that but the Vatican doesn’t care.
Getting hungry on the walk back I had a rapidly diminishing number of choices as even the hole in the wall places were starting to close. Luckily, Rome (and all of Italy), is littered with little pizza shops on each block. They have these huge slabs of uncooked Pizza with all kinds of exotic kinds of topping (no pineapple though – barbarians). When you pick what kind and how many squares, they toss it in an oven for about 3-4 minutes and it comes out ready to eat.
What I liked about Pizza Dude was that since neither of us spoke Italian we didn’t have to do the chit chat thing. I just pointed to what I wanted, handed him my debit card and five minutes later I had my late-night snack.
The problem is that it wasn’t very good, not in Florence either. There’s very little sauce or cheese and the crust is nothing to write home about. The toppings are 90% of the show but they don’t really have a chance to meld with the rest of the pizza. So it’s more like a bland cracker with lots of individual toppings than a coherent whole. I know the styles of pizza can vary widely from town to town in Italy so next trip I’ll make sure to try Nepalese Pizza, which is said to be the best.
Arrive back at the hotel it was a hot shower and to sleep with the alarm clock turned off.
Day 4 (Rome 3)
Day 3 in Rome was going to be a big one. I had scored a ticket to see the Crypts of St. Peter, one of the more exclusive tours into the oldest parts of St. Peters Cathedral. You know when they say it’s unsuitable for people with claustrophobia that it’s going to be cool.
I stood up and realized I wasn’t going anywhere. Yesterday’s misadventure at the Coliseum had left me with a left leg would neither flex or move. I could have tried to push through it. But I knew I would probably have wound up at whatever is the Italian equivalent of CVS’s minute clinic.
So after breakfast (property dressed this time) I spent most of the day in bed recovering from jetlag or hobbling around the immediate area eating and just loafing about.
One of my real finds was a place called ‘Perfect Burger” which, not surprisingly, sells hamburgers. And you know what – they were pretty close to perfect. Really fresh buns with an almost creamy bread and a patty that tasted like it had just come off the cow. And thankfully everything was cooked fresh, including the fries. Load it up with a topping of mayo and you have a meal fit for a gastronomically timid American.
I also had my first of several encounters with Gelato and I liked it. Eventually I decided that the difference between Gelato and American ice cream is that Gelato is all about the flavor, while ice crème is more about the texture. Gelato could come in dozens of flavors, many of them unique to the imagination of any given shop. But some of them were just overwhelming in their tartness or tanginess.
Walking around I finally started to notice all the paramilitary police teams on the streets. It didn’t worry me much. Italy has a long history of domestic terrorism, so militarized police are a long-standing practice. They seemed to be in force around the outdoor restaurant seating where a single car could take out 10-30 tourists. But their main job seemed to be flirting with teenage girls.
I slept though dinner, so my late-night choices were limited. I managed to find a place that was said to be the late-night drunk food mecca for Romans. It was a disappointment. The tacos tasted like a cross between slightly expired Taco Bell soft shells and the free chili topping from 7-11. But everyone else was drunk and seemed to enjoy themselves. I just sat there and plaintively licked my fingers waiting for a taste miracle that never happened.
Day 4 (Rome 4)
Woke up and gingerly put some weight on my leg – good enough – got dressed and headed out.
I actually spoke with some Americans in the breakfast room. They were probably in their late 70’s, from Texas, and were on a date to Italy. He was a history professor that had once designed a board game about the power politics of the Colorado fur trade in the 1820’s. I saw his GF roll her eyes as he explained the game’s mechanics so I ended that part of the conversation before she decided to end their relationship.
Now I was off. This was going to be more of a long walk through Rome’s northern area than a specific destination.
First was the shopping district (or at least one of them). It was ridiculous. Street after street of shops – high end – vintage – custom tailored and consignment. You could have shopped for weeks before checking everything out. Eventually it merged into a more commercial district with some high-end brand stores. The cost of the Lego Ferrari was more than I’d spent on the plane ticket.
My first historical hit was the Mausoleum of Augustus (the first Roman emperor). He had built it so he could be buried with his descendants and those that had gotten him to the top. The only one that was excluded was his daughter – mainly because her sexual tastes ran toward the ‘public’ and ‘indiscriminate’. When the Goths sacked the city in [] they tossed all their ashes into the Tiber. Over the remaining centuries it had been stripped of its valuable outer stonework and used as a castle and, of course, some sort of church. It was in the process of being restored and was surrounded by tall construction walls. But what little I could see of it through the gaps was just the brick core of the structure – it was kind of sad.
But next to the Mausoleum was a brighter note – the Ara Pacis. It’s a huge piece of marble propaganda put together by Augustus to show how great things were going under his benevolent rule as Principes (First Citizen). They had been finding bits of pieces of it throughout the area but it wasn’t until the early 1930’s that they found the bulk of it buried under 13 feet of mud. They slowly reassembled it and in the 1990’s it was encased in a rather hideous piece of modern architecture.
Next was a walk past the Spanish Steps. It’s basically a place for lovers to see and been seen. Not having packed a lover in my carryon bag I decided to concentrate on finding a bathroom instead.
More interesting was the Villa Borghese – whose primary attraction was nearly 200 acres of well-maintained English style gardens on one of the outer hills of Rome. Not terribly busy in the off season it’s usually packed in the summer. You could probably have had 25,000 people sitting there at once, each with enough space to sit and read a book or play a guitar. There was some cool graffiti as well. I found it profound – I also found it odd that it was in English.
The next stop was the Galleria Borghese. It’s one of the top attractions in Rome. If you’re into dark, claustrophobic paintings of overwrought women and thugs posing as princes than this was your place. Me, not so much – I finished quickly.
I then worked my way through some of the more modern districts – some of which had some not so nice graffiti that wasn’t in English. But I was soon completely out of the tourist zone and observing actual Italians in their native spaces. It was great people watching. I hit a bookstore and nearly got hit by a couple of cars – it was authentic Rome.
Here was some sort of underground tunnel. And if you listened carefully you could hear the people down there exploring their unchosen hobbies. I decided not to explore.
Finally, I turned back toward downtown and found what I was looking for – the old outer walls of Rome. There are actually two sets of walls in Rome – the early Servian walls built in the 4th century BC and the Aurelian walls built between 271-275 AD, 700 years later. The Aurelian walls can be explained kind of like this. “Well, there seem to be a lot of Germans migrating this way so we should probably put together a bigger set of walls – and by the way we don’t really have a budget for this so just do what you can and incorporate as many existing buildings as possible.”
The walls didn’t work so well and the city was sacked repeatedly over the centuries. The Italians, being a practical people didn’t bother rebuilding the walls. They just filled the breaches with the two most important types of buildings in Rome – churches and restaurants.
But I was looking for something specific and about ten minutes later there it was – the holy of hollies – the last remnants of the Castra Pretoria – the home of the Pretorian Guards.
All that was left was a single outer wall that had been incorporated into the Aurelian walls. It’s a little difficult to see, but if you look carefully you can see the original side of their barracks in a slightly different color of brickwork – along with the windows and doors. I wondered if the guys that built that thought it would still be there 2,000 years and a dozen murdered emperors later.
The original grounds of the Castra Pretoria is now taken up by the Italian National Library – or so the Internet told me. But as I walked past the walls, I noticed security cameras, barbed wire, secure gates and all the other marks of a super-duper secretive building. And there it was – what is really built on the old Castra Pretoria – some sort of secretive Italian military unit. Damn – people never learn.
On the way home there a massive flock of birds circling above. They actually blocked out a great deal of the sky. Again, I could see what the Romans, who were naturally a superstitious bunch, would have been spooked by the omens.
Perfect Burger again.
Day 5 (Rome 5)
Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head – and headed out.
It was the earliest I’d been out yet and I got to experience Rome as it was waking up. It was the full treatment of early morning light, no cars and some of the earliest risers going about their business. I’m not sure if you can tell, but three of the four women walking down the street are in some sort of religious garb.
1st stop was the Pantheon – this was a favorite – not just because of the building but because of where it was located – smack in the middle of buildings that went up 1,000 years later. That’s how Rome is – you’re walking through a fairly modern area and boom – a massive building – one of the oldest and most famous in the world – sitting right there.
Built by Agrippa (more about him later) and rebuilt several times since it, like many of the old Roman (um – Pagan) buildings, were taken and repurposed by the Catholic church. Sure – they put in some nice artwork, but it would have been even nicer to see it back in its’ original glory. Even converted it’s still a pretty unique piece of architecture. Certainly one that pushed the boundaries of the possible in building technology.
2nd stop was the Capitoline Museum. As you remember the Capitoline Hill was on the north side of the forum and had the oldest temples & ruins. But the Capitoline Hill suffered the same thing as the Palintine. Some idiot had built a space-hogging monument on top of it in the early 1900’s, making it impossible to do much in the way of excavating. In this case the idiots were the people that wanted to curry favor with [] – the first king of a reunited Italy. Romans have complained since it’s construction that it doesn’t really fit. But the elites wanted to kiss some political ass, so what can you do?
The Capitoline museum is mostly ancient artifacts they’ve found there over the years with some nice Renaissance paintings. They’ve put a lot of thought into integrating the building into the ruins they’ve found. Some of the foundations of the old temples are even part of the museum’s lower levels.
It was my favorite museum of the trip.
Here’s a bronze horse dating back to the []’s and a chariot dating to the []’s. Each are cool in their own right. But I kept imagining the archeologist who found them. Years of digging and just finding old coins and random bricks. Then one day you unearth these beauties – who knows, they might have been the finds of his career.
Here’s a statue of the Emperor Commodious being depicted as the semi-divine Heracles. As you might know – when people in positions of power start thinking they are semi-divine they usually get wacked out by their underlings soon afterwards – and that’s just what happened to Commodious. When the poison didn’t work they had his personal wrestling coach strangle him while he was taking a bath.
One underground hallway was nothing but old funerial inscriptions. Some of them are cool, like the ones that gladiators and old soldiers set up for each other.
How much is 1.5 million cerstacticies. Saber Metrics. What’s his Wins Above Replacement?
But this is the best – found outside the Roman version of a public storage unit. If you’ve ever rented a storage unit it probably sounds pretty familiar.
Whomever has rented a space in these spaces does not hold the right to sublet. Surveillance is not guaranteed. Any merchandise that is introduced and deposited in the storage facilities shall be seized by the landlord if the rental fees are not paid…Whoever, having rented the storage area, leaves his merchandise and has not left it to a guard, the landlord shall not be responsible in case of damage.
But the highlight of was this mysterious woman. She and I seemed to be doing all the rooms at the same pace. There seemed something odd about her, but I couldn’t figure it out. Then I reliezed that she was wearing her backpack backwards. Then I reliezed it was actually one of those hands free baby carriers that you were.
As I came out of the museum I could swear I heard someone playing some Pink Floyd – but the music wasn’t quite right. The songs were out of order and some of the guitar licks were different. I went down to investigate and there they were, two street musicians doing a pretty good cover. They looked like they had been roaming Europe for 10 years doing this – play for a few hours a day, spent ½ the money on rent and the rest on partying – in other words my new role models. The shot of the crowd doesn’t do it justice. At one point there were about fifty people watching and a couple of them dancing to the music.
But I was getting hungry and, God forgive me, in the middle of Rome and all these choices – I wound up at Subway getting a foot-long meatball marinara on white w/ extra mayo. The guy in line behind me was obviously some sort of senior church official in full clerical garb. The creepy vibes as he stood behind me was off the charts.
On the way back I ran across this. There’s no plaque and it might not be that important. But it gives you an idea of just how much the average ground level in a city can rise over the years and centuries. That’s why there’s probably still so much to be found dozens of feet below the current street level.
Day 6 (Rome 6)
Today was all about St. Peters, which was going to be quite a hike. It was mostly a nice walk along the Tiber which I hadn’t yet seen in the daylight. In fact, I got so carried away with the views that I overshot my turn by about a dozen blocks, finding myself in the 20th district (each of the neibourhoods in Rome has a number – a system that dates back to []).
These were far more recent buildings, most of them taking up entire blocks. I assumed they were old aristocratic houses that had since been subdivided into apartments and small lofts. The color palatte was very pale (yellows, pinks and whites) and incredibly beautiful. I came across a random cart selling flowers. They were amazing – apparently the Italians take their romance and apologies very seriously.
I also found a number of little cubby holes – sometimes used to stash last night’s empties. I call this one (left to right) “Last Year – Last Month – Last Week – Last Night”.
But on to the center of the Catholic world….
The first thing that awaits you at St. Peters is the entrance line and the street artists hassling you about hiring a tour guide. But thankfully the security checkpoint was fast and the signs were unintendedly hilarious.
St. Peter’s is one of those places that has so many superlatives attached to it that they kind of loose their descriptive power. The sad part is that the sheer size and effect can’t really be captured with a camera – even with special lenses for wide angle shots. I’ll just suggest you look at any number of YouTube videos that capture it far better than I could. But it’s really something you have to experience in person.
On a whim I took the self-guided Vatican Treasury tour – and I highly recommend it. It’s filled with really amazing pieces of artwork (mostly in metal and fabric) that’s been donated over the centuries by people that may have wanted to get a leg up on eternal salvation. Sorry, they didn’t allow photos but it’s totally worth it.
But the highlight for today was going to be the dome tour – where you can actually stand on top of the dome and see the entire city. There are two options. For $10 you can walk all the way up. For $15 they take you on an elevator for 2/3 of the way and you walk the rest. Don’t be a hero – pay the $15.
The route becomes comically narrow & angled as you near the top. And then you step out and are greeted by an amazing view of the city. I can totally imagine the St. Peters maintenance guy in 1518 bringing chicks up here for the medieval version of ‘Netflix and Chill’ The best part is that, although crowded, there’s no time pressure to head back down. You can just stand up there and soak it all in at your (admittedly crowded) leisure.
There’s a huge open area on the way down and it’s worth a linger for the still amazing views down at city and the views up at the dome. There’s also gift shop where you can pick up your Jesus related items at all possible price points. There’s also some statues of the Popes that didn’t exactly make the cut for prime placement. I mean, how bad of a Pope did you have to be to be placed next to the porta-potties?
After taking the elevators down to ground level it was a ten-minute walk to the Vatican museums. It’s [20] miles of exhibits and said to be one of the best museums in the world. But after five days I just looked at the entrance and said No Mas. I’ll catch it next trip when I’m fresh.
Across from the entrance was a sign (suspiciously in English) advertising a 9 euro ($12) all you can eat buffet. I was starved and took a chance. After all, it’s can’t be worse than most buffets I’ve hit in the US.
It was the most amazing food I’d ever eaten. Everything was fresh, with actual texture and flavor. There were 10 different crisp vegetables dishes in oils and seasoning. The pasta tasted like they had just rolled it and you could actually taste the different meats in the sausage. I had to admit the hippies were right. Americans will eat preservative-laden dog food so long as there are enough corporate advertising dollars pushing it. This one plate of food permanently changed how I viewed food.
One of the things I had been noticing about Rome was a strange ambivalence about Mussolini, fascism and WW2. Mussolini is still mentioned quite openly, and neutrally, in some of the public signage. Here’s a plaque that, so far as I can tell, is a memorial to the Italian army that went to North Africa and became famous as the one that Rommel got sent to rescue from the British. It’s not the kind of thing you would see in Germany.
Day 7 (Florence 1)
This morning I was heading to Florence by train. At Termini I noticed some of the remnants of the old Servian walls from the 4th Century BC. I wish I had a chance to go up and touch them but the cops were everywhere so fence jumping didn’t seem like a good idea.
The train ride itself was very cool. Every 10 minutes or so would be a little hilltop with a town and it’s stronghold / castle. It was a jarring reminder that these lands were subject to invasions and unrest until just a few hundred years ago. There were also a series of old fortified mills adjacent to the rivers that we crossed. They were the kind of places that deluded American’s might buy on some real estate reality show with thoughts of a turning it into a BnB. I really wish I’d rented a car for the trip to explore some of them.
When I got to Florence Travelocity helpfully reminded me that check-in would not start until 3PM. So I walked around town for about an hour and then wandered over to the hotel. It’s actually a very large private house with a doorbell – which I duly pressed.
Nothing.
Pressed again.
Nothing.
Consulting their website I noticed that Travelocity had made a little mistake. Check-in didn’t start at 3PM. It ended at 3PM. Humm. I thought about getting indigent but quickly gave in and booked another hotel for the night that was actually a little closer to everything. This room was huge and I made liberal use of the searingly hot shower. Then a quick nap before heading out (damn, another lumpy mattress – seriously – what’s the deal with these mattresses?)
Florence was noticeable colder than Rome and there was a cool misty drizzle with everyone dressed like some sort of Snowmageddon was imminent. It actually gave the city a kind of Christmas season feel.
It’s far better laid out, and lit, than Rome. Plus auto traffic is banned in most of the city center which meant excellent (and far safer) walking. But it was clear after a few blocks that while Rome is ancient, Florence is medieval. Rome’s ruins had a global history, Florence was just families fighting over a city. Rome was something you could never see all of, you could finish Florence in two days. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the same.
Day 8 (Florence 2)
Work up early and moved over to the hotel who’s check-in I had butchered the night before. A little flirting with the hostess got me a credit for that missing night. Dropped off my luggage and off again.
Today’s first target was the Uffizi. Billed as the 2nd largest museum in the world with a huge gallery of statues and paintings. During the high season the wait to get in can be up to five hours – but inNovember it was about five minutes.
The sheer volume of statue statuary exhibits at the Uffizi are enormous, maybe even a little too much. This is one of the two halls dedicated just to busts of Roman emperors (the second one is the same size). And frankly some of the busts are a little suspect. If they had all been found under 2,000 years of dirt it would have been amazing. But if you read the little cards the vast majority of them seemed to be late renencinance replicas whipped up for the local patrons. And even then the descriptions hinted that they weren’t sure that these even represented what the actual emperors looked like.
There were two busts that impressed me though.
The first was of Agrippa (who we talked about earlier) Agrippa started out as kind of a nobody from a family of nobodys that lived in the middle of nowhere. But he hitched himself to Augustus very early and never wavered – eventually winding up as Augustus’ right hand man. As one of the history podcasts put it “when you hear that Augustus won the battle of x and Augustus reorganized the y – you can usually cross out Augustus’ name and pencil in Agrippa’s”. Eventually he became so powerful that Augustus’ main political advisor told him that he would either have to kill Agrippa or raise him to even higher levels of power. And eventually Augustus did – he married him to his only daughter. It’s kind of nice story about how a highly capable nobody can really become somebody when if he can pick a winner early on.
Next up was Otho. Otho was kind of a piece of shit. He tried to curry favor with Nero (yes, that Nero) by letting him bang his wife. But Nero got carried away with things and decided to marry her, exiling Otho to the sticks of modern-day Portugal. After Nero got stabbed and all hell broke loose there were a total of four Emperors in a single year. Otho managed to be second, after having the first murdered. When Emperor number three made his move the first battle was a draw. Otho’s advisors told him that things would be ok for the next battle as reinforcements were on the way. But he told them that his being Emperor wasn’t worth more Romans killing Romans. He went to bed, got a good night’s sleep – and them committed suicide the next morning. An interesting example of how even pieces of shit can sometimes make sacrifices for the greater good.
There were two other statues that caught my eye. This one is called X[]. It some guy that had the bad judgement to beat [] in a poterty contest. [] retaliated by having him skinned alive. Maybe I’m just a sick bastard, but does it kind of look like he’s enjoying it?
Second is the famous [], a man fighting off [][]. But I prefer to caption it as ‘Man with five kinds that’s drowning in debt”
The paintings were kind of like at the [] – meh. But I liked this one – as much for the caption as anything else.
On the right of it sits Midas with very large ears, extending his hand to Slander while she is still at some distance from him. Near him, on one side, stand two women—Ignorance and Suspicion. On the other side, Slander is coming up, a woman beautiful beyond measure, but full of malignant passion and excitement, evincing as she does fury and wrath by carrying in her left hand a blazing torch and with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches out his hands to heaven and calls the gods to witness his innocence. She is conducted by a pale ugly man who has a piercing eye and looks as if he had wasted away in long illness; he represents envy. There are two women in attendance to Slander, one is Fraud and the other Conspiracy. They are followed by a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters—she is Repentance. At all events, she is turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who is slowly approaching.
A few hundred feet from the Uffizi is the main bridge over the Arno River – the Ponte Vecchio. Back in the day it was filled with butcher shops – mainly because it was so easy to toss the intestines and other crap directly into the river. In an effort to spruce up the city they kicked out the butchers and dedicated it to gold and jewelry dealers. A very effective example of changing the zoning code.
The effect is impressive. As you walk across the bridge (which is lined by dealers’ shops on both sides) the display windows literally glow from all the gold. All I could think of was how many cops must be hidden at either end of the bridge to prevent smash and grabs. Actually, that’s a lie. The other thing I thought of was just how big the mark up must be for all the tourists that want to say they bought something on the Ponte Vecchio.
But one of the cute customs they have on the bridge is the locks. Apparently when you get married you’re supposed to come down here, attach a golden colored lock inscribed with your names and date and then toss the key into the Arno. It’s hard to take a picture of it with the glow but from the dates it looked like this was only a few month’s worth of promises.
Day 9 (Florence 3)
I decided that I couldn’t handle any more museums today so I just decided to walk around Florence and see the little things. I started by climbing up the hill on the other side of the river to get a view of the city and then walked through the open air markets and little shops.
The open-air market was large, with all kinds of food, antiques and consumer goods. But I didn’t know enough about any of it to figure out what was a good value. So I admired rather than shopped. I did the same thing at all of the specialty shops on the side streets. A music store, a couple of really expensive antique shops etc.
Maybe it’s the bookworm in me but I really liked this one. It looks like the guy has nearly five thousand books in there, and probably spends most of his day sitting around reading and talking to other people (locals and customers) that love books too. Being an Italian he was probably at a long lunch with friends when I walked by. But I picture him as being this 60 year old guy that bought the building long ago and doesn’t need to sell more than 2-3 a day to make his bills. Not a bad life.
I decided to grab a late lunch before heading back. The place I found is kind of hard to describe. It was two connected buildings with a bunch of little shops like high-end jewelry vendors & glass blowers and the like. They clearly taught classes too and had a lunch buffet run by one of their mothers. I didn’t want to be the nosey American with a camera but I grabbed a quick shot of this table next to mine after they broke up. It had been a bunch of friends who had been there for hours just chatting away. I know that we’re supposed to look down on lazy foreigners that take long lunches and just sit around and gossip. But at some point I start to think maybe these people have a point.
Day 10 (Florence 4)
I woke up done, exhausted and wiped out. Every vacation, no matter how interesting and well planned, needs a down day – and was going to be it. So I did some last minute sightseeing before wrapping things up, grabbed a big dinner and picked up some Heineken.
My hotel was actually an old aristocratic house with an inner courtyard complete with a private garden. I hadn’t seen another guest, or even heard a noise, the entire time I’d been there. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I actually did have to entire place to myself.
So I just sat in the inner courtyard for a couple of hours as it rained a little and the sun went down, listened to some music and got comfortably numb. I wondered if this was how the old aristocrats lived. But I decided that if the trip had taught me anything. It was that people powerful enough to own places like this never rest. Because someone is always plotting to take it, power, wealth or life, away from you.
Day 12 (Florence / Rome / Fucking Newark)
I woke up early and after about 10 minutes of puttering about realized that I had to check out and get moving back to Rome for the flight home. Shower – clean – stuff things into the suitcase.
Arriving back at Termini I knew I had to eat something before heading to the airport. Eschewing their offerings I wandered back in the direction of the Forum looking for something that sounded good. After an hour of walking around I realized the problem.
I didn’t want to go home.
Maybe part of me was trying to walk far enough away that I would be surprised to find I couldn’t make my train back to FCO. I started to wonder about the street musicians that had probably been there for a decade and were doing just fine.
But eventually I turned around and headed back to Termini. The only remarkable thing on the flight home was the crew telling us that in case of a crash, women should remove their high heels before running from the fireball.
And when I got back to Newark there we were, Connie Chung and I. And frankly I knew that neither of us really wanted to be there.