Roman Holiday 2006 II

From Gumnickopedia

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

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Sunday, November 19

Sunday started in the usual way: Italian breakfast in the tiny dining space in the reception area on the fourth floor of Hotel Doge. Cornetti (“little horns”), the Italian version of croissants, not as delicate or crispy, but more moist, and coffee in any of several forms. The first couple of days, I had caffè latte, but then I figured out that the woman who runs the coffee bar most days makes a better cappuccino, so that’s now my morning beverage of choice. It’s stronger and hotter than the caffè latte. I also got over my shyness one day and asked for a second cornetto, and now she offers me two right at the start, one plain and one filled with pastry cream.

I checked in and did a little work at the Internet café in Piazza Barberini. (It’s expensive, but it’s convenient, and they let me use my own laptop, which makes it worth the extra expense.) There I rendezvoused with Michele.

We wandered over to a church that I hadn’t managed to see in three previous visits to Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi (St. Louis of the French, one of Dad’s patron saints). Mark and I tried to go there on our 2004 trip with Patrice, Sherry, and Cookie, but we kept finding it closed. (Many minor churches in Italy operate on the same extremely limited business hours as retail businesses—open for a few hours in the morning, then a few more in the late afternoon and early evening.) San Luigi is the French national church in Rome, dedicated jointly to Saint Louis, Saint Denis (San Dionigio), and to the Blessed Virgin, the three patrons of France. It houses Caravaggio’s remarkable masterpiece The Vocation of Saint Matthew. But we didn’t get to see it. Mass was in progress, in English no less! We took seats in the back. In about five minutes—the amount of time it took me to realize that it was a funeral Mass—an attendant came over and asked us to leave.

Michele found it most amusing that the first time I’d tried to go to Mass, they threw me out. Undaunted, we set out to find another church—not much of a challenge in Rome. We passed three or four in our five-minute walk down to Via Vittorio Emanuelle I, the road that leads out of the old city toward the Vatican. We popped in at San Pantaleo (they’ve got all kinds of saints here that you’ve never heard of), but no Mass was in progress. Then across the street to the beautiful, thoroughly gold-leafed Sant’ Andrea della Valle (St. Andrew of the Valley). Success! A public Mass was in progress, and only approaching the end of the Liturgy of the Word, so I believe that makes it official (like playing through the home fifth inning).

After lunch, we walked down to the Via dei Fori Imperiale, which runs along the northern side of the Forum. It’s a wide street with broad sidewalks on both sides, and on Sundays, it’s closed to motorized traffic. It’s a beautiful setting for strolling, and Michele tells me that they also close it off for outdoor concerts in the summer. The street is too long to see a stage from one end to the other (or even from either end to the middle), so they put up huge video screens along both sides. That would be something to see! Mental note: Come back to the Rome in the summer…or stay until summer rolls around….

On Sunday, the strolling Italians and sightseeing tourists are met by hundreds of southern Asian street peddlers selling all kinds of junk and guys dressed as Roman centurions offering tourists the opportunity to have a picture taken with them. Michele looked at a scrawny 5’ 8”-ish centurion and said (in Italian), “He is not a Roman! You are a Roman.” I would have been more flattered by the compliment if I hadn’t immediately understood that the judgment was all about the poor guy’s stature rather than that ineffable Roman-ness to which I aspire.

By the time we’d walked down to the Colosseum, the temperature had worked its way into the mid 70s. Everyone who wasn’t souvenir-shopping or waiting in line to get into the Colosseum was sprawled on any available flat surface soaking up the sun. We exercised that option. After basking for an hour or so, we climbed the Esquiline Hill, and I got to play tour guide for a change. Michele had never been to the Basilica of Saint Peter in Chains, where the (alleged) chains in question are on display, along with the (much more plausibly authentic) Michelangelo statue of Moses.

In my narrative so far, I haven’t been going into a lot of detail about the food, partly because I don’t want to make anyone jealous about all the delicious pasta and pizza and ice cream and coffee that I’m consuming, but mostly because if I mentioned all the meals, you might start to get the impression that all I do is eat. It’s important to put the eating in perspective; the usual pattern is: walk two or three miles seeing some sights, stop to eat something, walk a mile or two seeing some sights, stop to drink something, etc., etc. A lot of introduction just to get to this: We ate a late lunch of Chinese food. Nothing was remarkable about the food—for the most part, it’s the same as American Chinese food, with slight differences in the vegetables used. And it’s served in the order of a typical Italian meal, with an obligatory pasta dish coming before any meat. The names are kind of fun: involtini primavera (spring rolls), pollo alla kung pao piccante (Kung Pao chicken), etc. We had a “culture bump” when I ordered hot and sour soup—Michele told me that only old people eat soup, and I tried to get off the hook by explaining that in the U.S., everyone eats soup, but he would have none of it.

After lunch, we hit the streets again.

This seems like a good point to inject a tribute to my shoes. The only pair of shoes available for the first four days of this trip turned out to have been a great find—they remain comfortable even after 12 hours of walking around on cobblestones. No blisters or sore toes. I’m a Sketchers customer for life! Or maybe all the weight I’ve lost since my last trip is responsible for the improvement in the quality of my walking experience. In any case, my feet are still going strong after more than a week. And all the stair-climbing is having its usual effect, too—calves of steel!

By the way, by Saturday night, my camera battery was dead, and my luggage was still missing, so there’s no photographic record of Sunday. That’s a pity, because among the places we explored was the lovely Romanesque church of San Vitale. St. Vitale’s martyrdom (torture and crucifixion, it would appear) is depicted in excruciating detail in frescoes around the main altar. The other striking feature of this church is that its floor is at the level of 12th or 13th century Rome, so you have to climb down a few dozen steps from Via Nazionale to enter.

The neighborhoods around most older churches have been excavated more extensively, so the changes in elevation aren’t usually so striking, but at San Vitale it’s easy to see how much the ground level has risen over the centuries. From what I understand, periodic flooding of the river is responsible for most of the change, but it’s hard to fathom the long, slow cycles of ebb and flow of civilization that it had to have taken for entire neighborhoods to disappear into the mud and to become the foundations for new neighborhoods later on.

We sat for a long time on the steps of a decrepit palace—under redevelopment as some sort of residential/commercial complex—watching people walk by. I taught Michele the word “gaydar.” He liked it a lot and now tries to make it a part of every conversation. He taught me a few words of Italian gay slang, but I’m not sure how vulgar they are, so I won’t share them here.

Then we headed in the direction of the train station, because it was almost time for Michele to head north for the work week. On the way, a visit to a Sicilian-style bakery, where I ate a chocolate cannoli, my first since college, I think. (I used to eat them almost every day when I was at University of Dallas at Rome; there was a wonderful pasticceria near the place where we changed buses.)

After I’d seen Michele off, I hiked back to my hotel where I made the delightful discovery of my suitcase in the hallway outside my room. Hurrah! Fresh clothes and chargers for all the electronics.

Monday, November 20

Monday was the first day that the weather wasn’t so beautiful, so after breakfast, I spent the rest of the morning in my room writing, editing an article for an HTML e-mail project, and catching up on reading and replying to e-mail. (When I work in the hotel room, I have to save outgoing messages to send later, so I’m not doing a lot of that.)

When the rain let up, I meandered up the street toward the Spanish Steps. I found a promising looking tavola calda (“hot table”) and bought a few slices of pizza and a bottle of water. Then on to Piazza del Populo, where I attempted this panoramic series of photos:

I ate my lunch in the middle of the piazza, having to get out the umbrella once or twice. By the time I was finished eating, the rain had stopped and it was turning into another beautiful day. I felt a little lost without Michele’s dynamic company, so I went into wander mode—my default setting in Rome when I’m not sure what to do next: walk a few blocks in an unfamiliar direction and see what crops up.

That day, it was a surprising view of the Ara Pacis, Augustus’ Altar of Peace. I don’t recall seeing the Altar when I was hear in college, and on our previous two visits, the area in which it sits was completely cordoned off with construction barriers. I’d had no idea what was in the works. Apparently, since some time before 2001, they’ve been working on constructing a new building to house the Altar. The new facility opened two months ago. The building is a beautiful modern design. But I would have to wait a little longer to get a look at the Altar itself, because I discovered that like most museums here, it’s closed on Monday. Drat!

Then I went off on a wild-goose chase. While strolling in the Prati district, Michele and I had stopped to look at cheap cellular phones in a shop window. I’d been contemplating buying a cheap phone to sign up for the free wireless Internet access in the Villa Borghese park, and I also figured that it would be handy to have one as a way to keep in touch with any new friends I might make.

I should have bought one when we saw them the first time, because try as I might, I couldn’t relocate the store in question. First I went to where I thought we’d seen it. Nothing looked familiar. Then I headed for a spot one major street up and a couple of blocks over that seemed like the next best guess. I started to recognize more and more landmarks from our walk on Saturday evening, and eventually retraced a good bit of our route, but still no luck. The trouble with an errand like this one in Rome is that 1) the streets rarely follow any kind of grid (because it’s hilly, and because a lot of the roads are fairly recent additions that had to be routed around palaces, temples, churches, city walls, the river, and so forth; 2) shops are only open for a few hours in the morning and a few more in the late afternoon and early evening; and 3) many of them are closed up in the intervals as tight as a drum behind rolling metal blinds that protect against burglary and graffiti. The blinds even cover up the signs over most of the doors, so unless there’s an awning with a sign, there’s no way to tell what’s hiding behind them.

I gave up. My route back to my own neighborhood took me past the entrance to the Vatican Museum. A sign there says that the museum is celebrating its 500th anniversary this year. I hope to find time to get there—you don’t often get to take part in the 500th anniversary of anything.

Tuesday, November 21

Success at last! My first stop of the day (after coffee and cornetti, of course) was San Luigi dei Francesi, and it was open, and no one kicked me out. Alas, I took nothing but blurry photos, but the best of the bunch is at right. The Caravaggio Vocation of Saint Matthew is spectacular, but hangs on the left wall of a chapel that you can’t enter, so photography was out of the question. It’s Caravaggio at his best—full of anachronisms, jokes, visual puns, and unanswered questions. Next I stumbled upon Palazzo Altemps, a medieval palace that was extensively expanded and remodeled in the Renaissance. It was home to lots of princes of the church, most notably Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps, whose family name the palace has born ever since. In the modern age, it’s been restored as a site of the Museo Nazionale di Roma. Visitors can see vestiges of the medieval building, including walls of a tower that were incorporated into the foundations of the palace, coffered and arched ceilings and frescoes from the Renaissance period, and sculpture from the collections of several families who once lived in the palace. I had the whole place almost to myself, so there was time to go slowly and see everything. What a treat! So I took more photos here than I usually do, and you can see the better ones in the Photo Gallery. Look for the “Palazzo Altemps” album inside my “Rome photos” album if you’re interested. On my way to the Ara Pacis, I ran across the church of Saint Augustine, where some of the mortal remains of Saint Monica (Augustine’s mother) are venerated. There’s also a Caravaggio. I can’t remember the title, and my photos are so bad that I can’t discern the subject matter. (It sort of defeats the purpose of a travelogue to say, “You had to be there,” doesn’t it? Sorry about that.)

And then, at last, the Holy Grail of this particular day’s sightseeing: the Ara Pacis. Augustus’ Altar of Peace is an artistic, historic, and archaeological story without parallel. It was built around 9 or 10 B.C. on a spot a few hundred yards from where it now stands. It celebrated the period of peace and prosperity that followed Augustus’ victory over his imperial rivals and various foreign enemies. The Altar is a square marble building with openings in the front and back. It’s covered inside and out with exquisite relief carvings of a procession of priests, Roman notables, and the members of Augustus’ family; there are also floral decorations and scenes of significance in Roman mythology. The interior space is filled almost entirely by a bench-like structure where animal sacrifices were made.

In the ages following the fall of the Roman Empire, it was covered over by river mud and lost. Pieces of it turned up in art collections, but it wasn’t until key fragments were found in the 19th century that archaeologists realized what the pieces added up to. Now the reconstituted Altar stands in a glorious modern shelter across the street from the mausoleum where members of Augustus’ family were laid to rest.

It was a beautiful day, and my head was crammed full of enough history and art and wonder for the moment, so I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering aimlessly. Across the river, a picnic lunch in Piazza Cavour, then back home by way of my usual Internet café in Piazza Barberini to catch up on e-mail and see what’s happening at the home base.

There I also chatted online with one of several Roman friends who’d expressed an interest in meeting up. I’d spoken to Augusto on several occasions, so I felt fairly comfortable when he suggested we get together. The only hitch: He’s from Ecuador and doesn’t speak a word of English, unless you count profanity. Not entirely confident that I was carrying out his instructions correctly, at the appointed time, I took the Metro down to Termini (the central train station), changed subway lines, got off the train at Piazza Bologna, and left the station by the Via XXI Aprile exit. No sign of him at first, so I hung out near the Metro stairs. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was better off trying to look conspicuous or trying to look inconspicuous, so I settled on trying not to look like an idiot who may or may not have been where he was supposed to be. (Not as easy as it sounds.)

A few minutes later, a handsome little guy in a leather bomber jacket and motorcycle helmet walked up and said, “Eduardo?” I’d sort of envisioned us walking wherever he had in mind for us to go, but he led me over to his motorino—what we’d call a motorscooter, I guess—and handed me a helmet. Fleeting thoughts that this would be an exciting ending—robbed and left for dead in an alley on the outskirts of Rome. But then it occurred to me that someone planning to kill me probably wouldn’t have offered me a helmet. (Okay, I confess that I also thought he was too cute to be a murderer.)

My first scooter ride was terrifying! For one thing, it was already dark. And we wove up and down several hills, around some pitch-black curves, and along a big, wide, scary, busy street for a few blocks before we got to our destination. He laughed at me later for having held on for dear life. After a couple more rides, I’d gotten the hang of holding on with my knees (so I could talk with my hands, as any Roman motorino passenger worth his salt would do).

An hour or so of passeggiata and stumbling conversation in my limited Spanish, and then back on the scooter to Augusto’s house, where he had a late dinner ready—an Ecuadorian dish of stewed chicken and rice. Then another exciting ride back to Piazza Bologna so that I could catch the Metro before it shut down for the night around 10 p.m. We made plans to meet up again the next day.

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