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Rome is chaos.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning. We had
been wanting to visit Rome before the end of this year and when our
son Bruce and his girlfriend Corey said they wanted to visit us in
Delft, Lynn and I thought this would be a good time to do it and
take the kids for a few days.
Our entry to Rome started with Bruce’s bag
getting lost. The initial customer service person said the bag was
still in Zurich and would be delivered that evening, and she gave
them a sheet saying that even as they were reading the sheet, the
airline was busy searching for the bag. Right. Next morning there
was no bag. Bruce called the numbers. Repeatedly. Mostly there was
no answer. Finally an actual person, or something that sounded like
one, told them the bag had never left Amsterdam but it would be
delivered that night. Next morning there was no bag. I already said
that but I’m not repeating myself. The sun had risen a second time
on their baglessness. They couldn’t go much longer in the same
clothes so we replaced some of their things. We stopped back at the
hotel in the afternoon to see if there was a change in bag status.
Seriously, do I have to say if there was? The kids were leaving us
that evening to take a train to Venice and we were going to meet up
with them when we got to our transfer point in Zurich but they were
really edgy. The clerk in the hotel had suggested that they go back
to the airport before they left on the train because sometimes they
just don’t bother delivering lost bags. So they went back to the
airport and there it was.
It was raining as hard as I’ve ever seen as we
took the train from the airport into town. Happily it slowed to a
hard drizzle by the time we got there. I’ll go back to where I
started this piece: Rome is chaos. Corey and Bruce wanted to buy
their tickets to Venice to get that chore out of the way. So we
spent a half hour looking for a ticket office. The walk from where
our train terminated to the main office was about four blocks (no
kidding) but we didn’t know that. After a couple false starts on bad
advice, we found an adjunct office. We now had to walk only about
four blocks from the train station to the hotel (after the four
blocks within the station) but the traffic was maddening. We had to
cross some major intersections with no lights for control. One
enters a crosswalk and the traffic is supposed to stop. They stop if
you look like you’re willing to walk in front of their speeding
cars. Of course, if you aren’t quite to the place in the crosswalk
where they will be, they don’t slow down. It’s not for the faint of
heart or anyone with anything resembling an infirmity. We learned
that crazy Roman traffic is not a phenomenon of the 20th
and 21st centuries. Julius Caesar imposed restrictions on
the time of day when chariots could be driven in the city. Before
the specified time in the evening, chariots had to be left outside
the city gates. No mention was made of the parking rates.
At this point in the trip having gone through
lost bags, heavy rain, and crazy traffic, the score was Chaos 3, Us
0. We were worried we wouldn’t make a comeback. We did.
Rome is, of course, the heart of the Catholic
world, so we started our trip with a visit to the
Vatican.
We were there on a Tuesday so the Pope didn’t make an appearance and
the crowds were not overwhelming. We went into St. Peter’s Basilica.
St. Peter’s is 500 years old and is the largest church in the world.
It’s built on the site of a Roman chariot race course (not the one
depicted in Ben-Hur – that’s at Circo Massimo closer to the
Coliseum). It’s about 600 feet across and can hold 60,000 standees.
The dome is about 430 feet high. The artwork and the opulence of the
place can make one dizzy. It’s easy to see how someone raised in
Catholicism would walk into this place and feel his spiritual home.
From the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square facing the
basilica, if you look toward the right, there is a gray building.
The Pope’s
apartment is on the top floor and farthest to the right. We saw
no evidence of him sneaking in an afternoon nap.
We went down to the crypt where one can find the
tomb of St. Peter and the graves of several Popes including John
Paul I, John Paul
II, Paul VI, and John XXIII. In Dan Brown’s (of the DaVinci
Code) book Angels and Demons, he describes people going into the
crypts but in the book it sounds like catacombs, dark, dank
passageways with little light and totally spooky. This isn’t that at
all. It’s well lit and has a feel of reverence to it but I was very
glad to walk out.
Next we went to the Sistine Chapel and I had my
first "oh, wow" moment which is my informal gauge as to how much I
like a place. One has to leave the Vatican grounds and walk about a
half-mile along the outside walls to get there. There’s also an
admission charge to enter the Vatican Museum and the Chapel. The
chapel, even for a non-Catholic like me, is overwhelming. There are
benches along the side to sit on while viewing the ceiling. Spending
all that time looking at a ceiling can hurt your neck and the people
next to us brought in a mirror for easier ceiling viewing. Our book
didn’t say anything about a mirror but it did have a description of
each of the scenes that Michelangelo painted and knowing what we
were looking at increased our appreciation of it immensely. Over the
centuries, the ceiling had become dull from the residue of carbon
from burning candles and the general pollution in the area. When it
was restored recently, art experts had to reevaluate what they
thought they knew about Michelangelo because they had previously
thought his colors were muted and dull when it turns out they were
quite bright and lively, just covered with soot. A very small
portion of the ceiling was left in the condition before restoration
to show the difference. I have no pictures of the Sistine Chapel
because none were allowed.
Perhaps you know of the
movie and
song of the same name, Three Coins in the Fountain. The fountain
is the Trevi Fountain. It sits in an old part of Rome that is mostly
a pedestrian area. The fountain is 85 feet high and 65 feet wide.
It’s beautiful by
day and really beautiful (and really, really crowded) by
night. It’s a
romantic place, even for an old goat like me. We had fun watching
our own kids, and even were fortunate enough to find and young
couple, Suzanne
and Peter from Dublin, Ireland, at the moment of their
engagement.
We visited the
Roman Coliseum (actually called Flavian Amphitheatre) which was
built in about 80 A.D. This is where the gladiators did their thing.
The floor,
visible in the pictures, is not the floor used then. There was a
layer of boards that was the actual floor on top of what you can see
now. What you see now were underground passages then. Sometimes the
place was even flooded and some of the games in there consisted of
naval battles. Even seeing it in person I can’t imagine how they
pulled that off but that’s what the books say. Only about a third of
the Coliseum remains with the rest having been destroyed in
earthquakes or by nasty neighbors who used some of the large stones
to construct their own homes. Rome gets pretty hot and the emperors
needed some shelter from the heat and sun while watching the
slaughter so they devised a way to cover the stadium with canvas,
when necessary, to keep out the sun. The Coliseum in Rome thus was
the world’s first retractable domed stadium.
Next to the Coliseum is the
Arch of Constantine. Constantine was the emperor who defeated a
rival in 312 A.D. and legalized Christianity. Before that time, one
could be killed for being a Christian. This gentle soul removed that
problem. However, if one wasn’t a Christian, well, we won’t go
there.
The
Roman Forum is a short walk from the Coliseum. It was the center
of Rome for religion, commerce, and, of course, politics. The main
square of the Forum is about the size of a football field. This is
where Rome began and was a very crowded place. (The crowds have
merely grown and moved elsewhere these days.) At one time the
buildings here were all of marble but they are now mostly in ruins,
but walking through in here and letting the imagination run a little
amok can generate the picture. Still standing is the brick Senate
building. Built in about 280 A.D., it was restored in 1930. Julius
Caesar was assassinated in the Senate but it wasn’t here. The Senate
was temporarily meeting in another location (which we walked passed
on our way to the Vatican) and that place,
Area Sacra was the site of the murder. In the Forum is the
Temple of Caesar
where his body was burned after the assassination. This is also the
place where Mark Antony, according to Shakespeare, said, "Friends,
Romans, and Countrymen, lend me your ears…"
The
Pantheon
is the best-preserved of all the monuments in Rome and has
been in continuous use since it was built in 27 B.C. It was rebuilt
about 120 A.D. and is a Roman temple dedicated to all the gods as
its name suggests. This dome influenced both the one on the Florence
Cathedral and also the dome at St. Peter’s. Even the U.S. Capitol
dome was inspired by this one. The top of the dome is 142 feet high
and there’s a hole in the ceiling, the only source of light in the
chamber, that’s 30 feet in diameter. Since rain can come in and
these guys were no dopes, the floor is built so that the water will
drain through small holes and toward the outside walls. The first
Italian king, Victor Emmanuel, is buried here.
Rome isn’t all ancient stuff. Our guide book
recommended a restaurant open only for lunch. The book promised
great food and great prices in a place catering mostly to local
office workers and the restaurant delivered on the promise. The
waitress translated what was on the menu. My knowledge of the
Italian language is miniscule so we appreciated her help. There was
something on the menu that said pollo which I knew to be chicken.
Shortly after we ordered, a young couple sat down beside us carrying
an English language tour book. I noticed they weren’t speaking
English but didn’t think much of it because English is frequently
used as a common language by Europeans who don’t speak each other’s
language. Then I heard the woman say to her companion that one of
the items was roast kip. Kip? Ding, ding, ding. Bells went off in my
head. Kip is Dutch for chicken. I knew that, too. I asked her if she
was Dutch and she wanted to know how I knew. Welcome to our world
where everyone recognizes us as Americans without us saying a word.
In this case, though, it was her language not her shoes or hair or
whatever it is that makes us Americans stand out. It turned out she
was from the University of Utrecht, about 40 miles from Delft. She
was spending some time in Rome doing research. She spent some time
last year in Washington doing research on the same topic:
counterterrorism. This sweet, young woman probably has a thing or
two she could teach the head
counterterrorizer in D.C. Heaven knows he’s need it.
See all my pictures of Rome.
See videos from Rome. |
