Roman Holiday 2006

From Gumnickopedia

Ed’s 2006 Roman Vacation pages: Part I | Part II | Part III

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Thursday, November 16

Mark picked me up from the house around 8:30 a.m. Houston time. We got to the airport in no time flat on the Hardy Toll Road, then I breezed through check-in and security. Since I’d allowed more than enough time, I found that my flight was delayed by an hour and half.

But glad to finally be starting my vacation, I made the best of it—found a fairly quiet spot and fired up the iPod. When our boarding time was only a few minutes away, they announced that because of bad weather in the northeast, we’d have to take an alternate route to Philadelphia, so the plane had to take on extra fuel, so the flight was “weight restricted.” They asked for nine voluntters to leave the flight. I hid in the back of the crowd.

I had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to stay awake through my 2-1/2-hour layover in Philadelphia, but it turned out not to be a problem, since we arrived in Philadelphia about five minutes after my flight for Rome left. Airways rebooked me on a flight to Munich, which was to leave at 8:15 p.m. We boarded the plane on time, but then spent more than an hour on the Philadelphia taxiway waiting for clearance, or an alternate corridor, or some such airline thing.

Friday, November 17

Munich (12:15 p.m. local time)—I’m in the airport waiting for my connecting flight to Rome. I can tell I’m in Europe because there are people smoking in the airport. Imagine it!

Only a few moments to write, because I’m on 30-minutes-for-5.95-Euros Internet connection.

As my Lufthansa flight headed from Munich Rome, I finally had time to start worrying about my luggage. Fortunately, I didn’t have the energy to worry about it, so I consigned it to the category of “the things we cannot change,” and spent most of the 80-minute flight napping.

Sure enough, my suitcase was nowhere to be seen on the Lufthansa carousel. The woman at the luggage claims desk suggested that I go take a look on the U.S. Airways carousel, which is in Terminal C, which could be reached by walking through the corridor marked “Staff only.” This suggestion had “international incident” written all over it, but I put on my best “I know where I’m going and I belong here” face and posture. No one bothered me, but I didn’t find my bag in Terminal C.

I returned to the claims desk to start the process of recovering my suitcase. Turns out that the baggage-claim stub must have been attached to a piece of paper that the airline agent in Philadelphia didn’t give back to me after she processed my rebooking. But I’d held on to every scrap of paper that I’d ever been handed throughout the journey, and the baggage people were able to reconstruct the information they needed through some combination of boarding pass stubs, my passport, and a receipt for two slices of pizza from the Philadelphia airport. I suspected that they read the exhaustion in my face and just told me what I wanted to hear: not to worry—they’d find my bag and bring it to my hotel.

On the way out of the airport, I ran into an American family who’d been going through their own luggage travails. The pre-teen girl whose bag was lost was looking very teary-eyed. In a moment of Dad-like enthusiasm I said, “Look at it this way: You’re going to get a couple of new Italian outfits to wear!” (I’m not sure which of us I was trying to cheer up.)

Silver lining! It’s so much easier to get from the airport to your Rome hotel if you’re not lugging a 40-pound suitcase! Especially if you’re too cheap or proud or “adventurous” to take a cab, so you insist on taking the 25-minute train ride followed by riding two stops on the Metro and then walking the rest of the way. Especially when you turn the wrong direction coming out of the Metro station and walk half a mile in the wrong direction before you admit you’re lost and stop to buy a map.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Boarding the train to go from the airport to the city, a young Polish woman asked me to help with her heavy suitcase. (Her share of the silver lining.) We spent the ride talking about Poland, Rome, and Polish people in the United States. Then I helped her haul her bag off the train. A few yards down the platform, she was greeted enthusiastically by a gorgeous young Italian man. I wasn’t, which doesn’t seem quite fair in a karmic kind of way.

From the platform, it’s just a few thousand yards—or meters, as the case may be—to the entrance to the subway. I went by way of an ATM, where I stocked up on wonderful play money. I’m in total denial about the exchange rate. It’s the only sensible approach to a European vacation.

My layover in Munich and the delay at the baggage-claim desk put me right smack in the middle of the Friday evening rush hour. All I could think in the subway car was, “Is that awful smell me, or the other 300 tired, sweaty people in here?”

Then we reached the Barberini stop, and I made my wrong turn. I walked a few blocks and asked a few people if they knew where Via dei Due Macelli is. They didn’t; no one in Rome ever seems to know the name of any street more than 100 yards from their own front door.

I was feeling very down-on-my-luck, and I contemplated the stupidity and vanity of having bragged to someone in recent weeks that “I could never get lost in Rome,” and then (as I turned from Via della Some Church or Another into Largo di a Beautiful, But Not Significant Enough to Be in Your Art History Book, Fountain) I started to think about all the times in previous travel that abject despair has given way to delightful surprises in a matter of moments. And then the bustling rush-hour crowds stopped being scary strangers, and the ridiculously steep, narrow streets turned from dark alleys into nothing more intimidating than a backdrop for this particular adventure.

A moment later, I emerged suddenly into the bright lights of Via Nazionale, a major shopping thoroughfare and an unmistakable landmark. I popped into a bookstore and bought a map of the city. Ten minutes later, I found Via dei Due Macelli. And there at the end of my street was the promised land: an Upim store—Italy’s somewhat more stylish version of Target. For the first time in my life, I had an impulse to go shopping! But first, I had to check into Hotel Doge.

My room is on the third floor. There’s an elevator, but it’s cramped and creaky and doesn’t fill me with confidence, so except for the first time I had to ride up to the reception desk on the fifth floor, I always take the stairs.

The room is tiny. That’s not a problem—I’m spending almost no time here. The bed is also tiny. It’s been a lot of years since I fell out of a bed, but it might happen before my stay here is over.

After I checked into the hotel, I stopped in at my room to make myself as presentable as possible under the circumstances, then headed down to the Upim. I ran into trouble right away—an XL man in Italy is not the same thing as an XL man in the U.S. I had to go with XXL shirts, and a couple of those aren’t going to be a perfect fit until I walk off a couple more pounds. Still, they’re Italian, so they’re well made and more stylish than anything I’d buy at home.

The real adventure was shopping for underwear, one of the more profound cultural divides between Europe and America. They don’t have anything quite like our “tighty whities,” but they offer for sale a lot of things I’d feel very silly wearing (even with clothes on top of them). The diplomatic solution: Boxer briefs. But what size? Theirs ranged from a 3 to a 7. I grabbed a few items that seemed about right, then headed for the checkout counter staffed by a 20-something guy. He blushed when I asked him what size I ought to wear and called for help from a delicate young man working elsewhere in the department, who looked me up and down and gave me a dismissive “These are good.”

Rome (8:15 p.m. local time)—Sitting in an Intenet café in Piazza Barberini (about five minutes from my hotel). I hardly know where to begin—very tired and getting hungry, but I wanted to put down at least a few words while today’s odyssey is still fresh in my mind.

About the time I was writing the paragraph above, I made my first Italian friend. While I was checking e-mail, he settled in at a machine near where I was sitting and struck up a conversation. He asked if I like rugby. I told him that I’ve never played it, or even watched very much of it. He asked if I would like to go to a rugby game on Saturday. I gave a noncommittal answer, since it wasn’t immediately clear whether he was inviting me to go with him or trying to scalp a ticket.

We made some small talk, and when I left the café, he followed me outside and asked, “What are you going to do now?” I told him that I didn’t know, so he asked if I wanted to go with him to see the hotel where Tom Cruise is staying. Apparently, Tom Cruise and his wife-to-be are staying in a hotel just a few minutes from mine {but needless to say, much nicer) in preparation for their wedding, which is to take place in a castle somewhere near Rome. My new friend, Michele, said that lots of American celebrities have been seen coming and going (he specifically mentioned Jim Carrey) in the vicinity. So we wandered over there to attempt some celebrity-watching. No stars were to be found. Next we wandered down to Campo de’ Fiori. It was a beautiful warm evening, so there were throngs of people out walking everywhere we went. At Campo de’ Fiori, we bought gelato (the inexpressibly wonderful Italian ice cream) and then later had some red wine. (Too sweet for my tastes.)

Saturday, November 18

As I write here on Thursday (Thanksgiving) morning, I’m starting to think that I’m already so far behind in journaling this trip that I’ll never catch up. But it’s a vacation, so I’ve decided not to let that bother me too much. I’ll see if I can at least hit the highlights of the days that have already gone by.

On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours writing in the Villa Borghese park. Mark had done some research for me and figured out that most of the park is set up for wireless access. I had to play around with firewall settings for half an hour to get my machine to accept “ping” requests, only to find out that you need a cell phone to sign up for the free service. Yeesh. (You are nobody in Italy without a cell phone.)

I tabled that project for a while and I met up with my friend Michele at Piazza del Populo. We spent a couple of hours wandering the shopping district near the Spanish Steps and had a minor celebrity sighting—an Italian movie actor whose last name now escapes me…Christian something. Next time I’m online, I’ll do a little Googling to see if I can figure it out. We picked up sandwiches and bottled water for a picnic lunch, which we ate sitting in the piazza outside the Porta Flaminia (Flaminian Gate) on our way toward the Stadio Flaminio.

It occurs to me that I haven’t mentioned in any of my previous writing that the weather has been nearly perfect most of the time that I’ve been here. The temperature at night has been in the high 50s, and during the day it’s been getting up into the low 70s. We’ve had some rain, but never for more than a few hours a day, so it’s been easy to schedule around it. Yesterday (Wednesday) a cold front must have passed through—by evening, it was probably in the low 50s, which is a little nippy for whizzing around on the back of a motorscooter. But I’m getting ahead of my story….

Michele and I walked to the Flaminian Stadium, where the Italy–Argentina Rugby Test Match was to take place. There was a street fair in the park in front of the stadium. Hundreds of rugby fans were buying jerseys, pins, pennants, kooky hats, food, and of course, beer. When the time of the game approached, we made our way to our seats. They were on what would have been about the 35-yard-line in a football stadium, and about 20 rows up from field level. An announcer introduced the Argentine team, then the Italian team. A marching band played the Argentine national anthem. Then the crowd rose to its feet and belted out the Italian anthem. It was very moving—they love their country, or at least they love singing the national anthem! Everyone seemed to be singing at the top of their lungs, and whenever their was a rest in the music, you could hear the echo thundering back from the other side of the stadium. This is the point where I confess that I have no idea how rugby is played. I spent the first half of the game trying to work out some rules by deductive reasoning, then I gave up and went with the flow—I got excited when everyone else got excited and screamed myself hoarse whenever the people around me screamed. Michele scolded me for not chanting “I-TA-LIA! I-TA-LIA!,” but I was afraid to give myself away as a tourist with my bad accent.

Italy played well (or was lucky, perhaps) in the first period; the score at halftime was 9–3 Italy. But Argentina came roaring back with 20 unanswered points before Italy could scratch out another touchdown—if that’s what an end-zone run is called in rugby—for a final of 23–16 Argentina. It rained for about 15 minutes at the start of the second period, but the sun was out the whole time, so the end of the game was a steamy affair.

After the game, Michele and I wandered across the Tiber to the Prati district, a fairly new (i.e., only developed over the last125 years) residential area north of the Vatican. It was the time of day for the passeggiata (“the walking around” is about the best translation), the time after work and before bedtime when Italians wander the streets, window shop, meet up with their friends, eat, drink, and talk.

In the company of my Italian friend, I began to appreciate the passeggiata at a level that I’d never grasped before. One all of my previous trips, I’ve spent a lot of time focused on destinations—the next sight to see, the next church, the next fountain, the next delicious meal—but the passeggiata is entirely about the journey. It’s about seeing people and being seen, enjoying the wonderful mild climate, the ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the ever-changing displays in shop windows, and talking and talking and talking.

(As I was descending the stairs to leave my hotel one morning, I heard what sounded like an angry mob outside. It turned out to be two Italian men having a friendly conversation.)

Our stroll took us down Via Cola di Rienzo, a busy shopping boulevard named after the Italian populist dictator of the Middle Ages who was Mussolini’s role model. From there we crossed the river again to return to the old city by way of the Flaminian Gate, through which we’d passed about eight hours earlier. We headed south along the Via del Corso. This ancient road runs along the east side of the Campo Marzo (Campus Martius, “Field of Mars,” a military training ground in the Imperial age) and through the center of Rome’s financial district and a lot more good people-watching. Then past the spot in the Largo di Torre Argentina where Julius Caesar met his end and across the river yet again to Trastevere. Trastevere used to have a reputation as the bohemian-artistic-tawdry part of Rome, but like so many bohemian-artistic-tawdry neighborhoods (Montrose comes to mind), it ain’t what it used to be. Gentrification and its popularity as an offbeat tourist destination have diminished the “character” of the area. But they’ve also taken the edge off the crime rate, so it’s not all bad.

I was beginning to think Michele would never get hungry again (and I hate always being the one to ask, “Is it time to eat yet?”), but we finally stopped at a pizzeria on the main boulevard. We drank a liter of house red wine and ate baccalà and pizza. Baccalà is battered and fried cod filet. I think it’s dried, salted cod that’s been reconstituted by soaking, but my language skills are too limited to ask Michele questions at that level of detail. At any rate, it was delicious.

On the walk back to my hotel, Michele was scandalized to learn that I hadn’t been to Mass in…er, um,…let’s just say “a while,” so he promised that the next day he would come pick me up and take me to church. I warned him that we should watch out for lightning (fulmine).

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