Rome, Italy

The next day we ate breakfast at a bar. Have we explained the bars yet? They are "Snack Bars" and you stand at the bar and have caffe or cappuccino and eat a paste (pastry). They are very cheap if you don't sit down. It took us a while to figure out how these work, but once we got it, they were good for breakfast and lunch and were fast and cheap. We bought a phone card (you buy a card to use the public phones at the Tabacchi shop). We were trying to call a hotel in Rome, but couldn't get through. Jill thinks we didn't have the area code right. So, we decided to drive on to Rome.

Rome, the Eternal City. We had originally planned to do a couple of days in Rome when we first arrived in Italy, but as the travel plans were being arranged, we weren't happy with the cost of the hotel that the travel agency was trying to book us into and decided that we could do a better job ourselves. Our other feeling was if we decided by the 8th day that we couldn't afford to stay in Rome, we could do something else. But with an extra infusion of traveller's checks as a wedding present, and the deletion of a night in Florence, we were set to spend the last two nights in Rome. But first we had to find a hotel--our constant bane.

We decided to be brave and attempt to just drive up to Rome, stop within the autostrada loop, and start calling some of the hotels listed in the Lonely Planet guide. However, when we stopped we got our first surprise--we were unable to connect using the telephones outside Rome. Glen had found the city code, but we think we were missing a 1+ or similar feature. The operator's message telling us what we were doing was wrong went by in such fast Italian that we could not make it out, even with repeated attempts. We decided to just drive into Rome and visit the hotels directly.

Driving in Rome, as driving in all Italy, requires that you watch out for everything and use an aggressive/defensive technique. While more intense than elsewhere, Jill did not find it scary or impossible to drive in Rome. Everything was well marked and the drivers were good, watching out for you when you decide it is your turn. It also helps to have a "co-pilot" to spot signs, stoplights, etc. We did fine.

The traffic was bad, but the parking was worse. In the big cities, and in the old portions of the small towns, parking is at a premium and almost impossible at daytime hours. Roma was no exception, and for several hotels, we did our usual routine of double or illegally parking and Jill would wait in the car while Glen would run in to ask questions. When we finally found a hotel, by following posted signs rather than the map, it was one of the moderately fancy places, with rooms for approximately $180 per night--too much. While searching for hotel information, we came across a little part in the guide about parking in covered versus non-covered municipal parking. We decided to give the parking a try first, then walk to find a hotel near the car park. This led us to the Villa Borghese underground car lot which charges 1,000 lira an hour (very cheap!), and then we found the Hotel Forte, which had a room with a private bath for $100 per day. While it may seem expensive to some, and we probably could have come up with a more economical solution, as Jill said, our vacation time is worth something as well. Both the car park and hotel were within 5 minutes walking of the Spanish Steps in Central Roma. Compare these costs to New York, we said, and felt good about it. In fact, by finding parking and a hotel so quickly we were able to go walking around Rome and see many of the sites our first day there. We parked, leaving the car for the next two days, returning only to pack a small pack from our suitcases, leaving the big cases in the car. Given that it was a well-lit, guarded lot, this could not have been a better option.

Walking out of the lot put us right at the Spanish Steps and the American Express office. While cashing checks at the American Express office (no commission, good exchange rate), Jill figured out that she did not lose those two checks, but we had just not written down the dates from the two we cashed in New York City. Whew!

We spent the late morning and all afternoon exploring Roma. The Coliseum is amazing in its height and size. It held 50,000 people and had all kinds of events, from wild animal hunts to gladiators to actual sea battles. It is actually kind of sad to see such a place built for such cruel activities, especially when they talked about the screens (with rollers) they erected to keep the wild cats and other animals from crawling into the spectators. Much of the stadium's outside walls are missing, since they were quarried off for building materials elsewhere.

We walked around the edges of the Forum, since it seemed similar to Pompeii. The Pantheon was a huge domed building, well preserved since it was made into a church by the Christians fairly early (the Coliseum was also saved from further destruction because a pope consecrated it. It still had a cross there, quite visible). The Pantheon's marble floor and beautiful colors gave us an idea of how many of the old buildings we'd seen across Italy must have looked before they'd faded with age and neglect.

Overall, the scale of engineering and the complexity, as well as the designs (shape of the Coliseum as a modern arena, for example) made us realize how much our modern architecture and engineering was developed by the Romans. You can also understand the concept of the "Dark Ages" where much of the construction was lost or no longer done on such a scale. While the loss of the cruelty of the Romans (as well as their habits of warfare and cultural theft--we saw many Egyptian obelisks stolen by Caligula) was no loss, the others were. However, as we were to see the next day (at the Vatican), the Renaissance did represent a return to large scale politics, construction (and destruction), art (and cultural theft) and religion, as done by the Romans 1000-1500 years before.

One of the books said that Rome is history. Other cities may have history, but everywhere you turn in Rome, there is yet another building that exudes the stuff of the past. Every step you take, you trod on history, because Rome is built upon the ruins of many cities, as can be seen when visiting the "Forum," the archaelogical dig that is fully 20 feet below the present-day Rome street level. Then there was the Colisseum, larger and more imposing that its pictures, honeycombed labyrinth and fallen arches. The Pantheon, almost perfectly preserved due to its conversion to a catholic church. (This kind of sublimation of the ancient world by modern christianity was underscored by one of the paintings in the Vatican which showed a fallen and broken Roman statue, its place filled by Jesus on the cross.) And the Trevi Fountain, which we had only known previously from La Dolce Vita, but which is well worth visiting. We walked and we walked, and every turn was another paragraph in the guidebook. We walked so much when it was time to walk to dinner we were tempted to make it a short journey, but the restaurant we had selected out of the guidebook wasn't close. We went ahead and trekked back across town from our hotel (Hotel Forte or Pensione Forte) back across the Tiber River to an Indian restaurant--and good thing we did. After eight days of Italian food--even good Italian food--we were ready for something different, and a switch from pasta to curry sounded nice. The place we selected was an Indian restaurant in which the courses were listed on the menu in the Italian way (antipasto, primi, secondo, ensalada, dolce, etc), but they were served as we had always been served Indian food. Since we had had Italian food in Costa Rica (our last trip), we thought we could influence our next trip. Although the Italian method didn't fit the Indian style of eating (i.e., rice and bread were listed under primi but you got them all at once as Indian style, with pappadams first), the food was basically the same as Indian food in the USA. On the long walk back, we spotted some cormorant-like birds on the rocks of a bridge support on the Tiber.

The walking (and we hate here to sound like a lazy Americans, we realize, but we're talking miles of walking here, not just down to the post box) began again the next morning. Our last day in Rome (and Italy) started with a trip to the Vatican museums. We were determined to make it to the Vatican as soon as it opened, just in case it was as bad as Florence's Uffizi. The crowds were there, but we shouldn't have worried. The Vatican is used to much bigger crowds, and their crowd control procedures were similar to Disney's. That's not to say the Vatican didn't have its crowd problems. There must be a basic tenet for tour guides to be annoying as possible, between their hogging the areas around the "major" works to their constant haranging. At least it was more "in place" in the museum as compared to the groups in St. Francis' in Assisi.

While moving through the line, we passed a money exchange counter before arriving at the ticket office. Glen was astonished, especially when he noticed that the exchange rate here in the Vatican was much worse than at the American Express office. Chalk it up to having too much Sunday School, but he couldn't get the idea out of his head that when the second coming came, Jesus would have a whole new group of money changers to throw out of the temple.

The Vatican museums are a huge maze of all kinds of religious art, from ancient to modern, in a series of connecting room, many of them with beautiful paintings, frescos, and mosaics on the walls and floors. The most famous of these is the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel was not what we were expecting, though it is certainly amazing. All the other churches we had been in called the large alcoves on the sides, chapels, and these were often elaborately painted and decorated. Other perceptions had led us to think the Sistine Chapel was in a church. But it is actually just one of the many rooms in this maze. You come around after seeing many many rooms and the crowd gets thicker, and there you are. The ceiling contains the story of the creation (including the very famous Creation of Man) as well as various other story panels and famous figures around the edges. One whole wall is the last judgment, which Michelangelo painted twenty to thirty years later. The story that Michelangelo hated painting the Sistine Chapel is believable, given the fumes he must have experienced in this closed-in room, as well as the positions he must have had to be in. He also had to dislike the fact that the Chapel is not very public or accessible to others. The whole room has recently been restored and the colors are bright and lovely, which they say has greatly changed scholars' opinions of what Michelangelo's paintings are like (i.e., not dark like they used to think). The darkness was actually years of candle smoke and dirt.

Many of the other paintings in the museum were remarkable, as well as the old maps, the Egyptian art, Etruscan art, Illuminated books and manuscripts, statues, on and on. We spent about 4+ hours there and while we walked through every room we could not possibly see it all. It is a collection of wonderful and incredible proportions.

But we had the biggest "proportions" to come. With a stop at a bar for a slice of pizza (they leave all these kinds of things--pizza, sandwiches--out and prepared at room temperature, and heat them when you order), we walked around to St. Peter's Piazza and Basilica.

The square itself was immense. This was the square one sees on the news when the Pope blesses the crowds at Easter. It is HUGE. When you stand at one end, you can see tiny, tiny people at the other end. It is ringed by 100 to 200 massive columns in sets of three, each with a saint or religious figure at the top (which are about 20 feet tall each).

Okay, so the piazza was big. Going into the Basilica (which is, by the way, the largest church in the world), was astounding. It is hard even to describe--it is all the churches we've seen so far increased in intensity by 1000. The display of massive statuary, carvings, paintings, altars--all in marble, covered in gold, topped with a ceiling of huge mosaics. The expense, the decadence, the sheer excess of it, the height of the catholic glory--how all this came to be in 1500 years from one small Jewish man in a desert thousands of miles away, is almost unfathomable. But if the church at Assisi could be built before St. Francis died (and his own order drift so far from his ideals before he died that he renounced himself as head) than perhaps the limits of human politics, art, and religion, are truly great.

Leaving the church, we then climbed to the dome. The first part, by elevator, took us to the roof, where we could enter a balcony to the inside of the doom. We were so high, once again, the people seemed tiny, tiny below us, as if we were on a skyscraper, or standing at one end of the basilica looking at the other. This is where we saw that what looked like paintings on the dome were really huge mosaics. We then climbed a steep, winding staircase to the top of the dome and stepped outside to a balcony that looked out over Rome. Glen, who is a bit afraid of heights, wouldn't come out to the railing (though he took a picture of Jill there). We could see all of Rome (no skyscrapers, so the church domes were the major landmarks), the papal gardens (elaborately sculpted), and the Tiber river. When in the Piazza again, that balcony with people on it was not even visible from the ground.

We walked back to the Spanish steps to get lira for our hotel from American Express. Then we walked to the Modern Art museum. By this time, our legs were beginning to get very tired, and our feet began to hurt (Jill's from an old foot injury, Glen's from his flat feet). But we trooped on. The museum was nice, with a Klimpt, a Van Gogh, a Cezanne, as well as many Italian painters. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a shop with discounted wool clothing, and Jill bought a light wool/cashmere black coat for L135,000 (about $80). It is beautifully Italian made, and her souvenir. Glen bought a wool/acrylic sweater for about $20.

Dinner was at a restaurant close by the hotel (we were really tired, our legs anyhow!). We ordered one very unique dish--risotto with peas. The peas were fresh, and the whole dish was very green--it even tasted green, in fact. The owner brought us an antipasto on the house, a polenta with mushrooms, tomato sauce, plus a bit of liver. It was good--our only polenta on the trip, which is actually a Northern dish. We ate a full meal, including a secondo of eggplant parmesan, mixed salad (with oil, balsalmic vinegar, and salt, as throughout Italy), parmesan cheese, and vino della casa. After all the walking, the eating and drinking, we were very tired.