Roma 2011 - Quo Vadis Laskins?

4/15

Here’s a tip for flying Alitalia:  check in on the late side.  By the time we got to the counter, they did not have four seats together, so gave us two together and two others solo, and we agreed to sort it out on the plane.  But by the time we got up to the gate, they’d found two and two together – in first class, or Classa MAGNIFICA as it is called on Alitalia.  Peter got right into it, scarfing prosciutto, shrimp, a rice cake, cheese ravioli, tuna steak, grape cake, all while watching UP and reclining in his recliner bed.  I watched the Black Swan while dining and sipping wine and then limoncello and pondering which Bulgari beauty aid from our little freshen-up kit to use first.  Isabel immediately put on the socks from her kit. 

I’ll also make a travel note that the Italians are pretty lax on security, for a country that has such a history of terrorism.  No passport check on the way in, no shoes off on the way out.  I suppose that their days of terror featured the home-grown kind, but it does give one pause.  Maybe there are methods of tracking that we don’t know about. 

4/16

Our Roman aerie was a cozy and comfy apartment, perched high above Via dei Giubbonarri, near the Campo di (de’, dei, you see it many ways) Fiori.  There is room for all – our friend Andy Reinhardt will join us later tonight – with lots of terrace space overlooking a classic Roman skyline of jumbled tile roofs and antennae and plants plants plants.  There is a duomo in each direction, and the bells ring on and off all day making a quintessentialy Italian soundscape.  As we are being shown around the apt., the bells start and Isabel tears outside, delighted, to find out what is going on.

Our hostess asks very seriously that we keep all the shutters locked when we are out, and at night, as she is concerned about burglars.  You’d have to be a hardcore parcour-iste to get in that way, or come via the neighbors’ terrace, but we agree to her terms.

But why stay in the apt. when you are in ROME!  A quick walk brings us to the astonishing Bernini fountains of Piazza Navona, sandwiches in front of the Pantheon (which is, according to Peter’s friend Harry Greenblatt “an ancient Roman building with a hole in the roof”), and the Pantheon itself.  It is a big week for church here in Rome, being what is known as the Holy Week, with Palm Sunday tomorrow, then the whole show leading up to Easter next week.  We noticed that the crucifixes in the Pantheon (which was a pagan temple to a whole crowd of gods, hence the name, before being given to the Church) today were draped in red, which is symbolic of blood, getting ready for the big show of the Passion.  It is an interesting time to be in Rome, as about five million pilgrims and other turistas seem to think.  The Pantheon is the most intact ancient structure in Rome.  Here’s why:  one of the late Emperors gave it to a Pope, turning it from a pagan temple into a Christian church.  Otherwise, the Popes just tended to scavenge building materials from all the ancient buildings to build their own churches, which is why most everything else is in ruins.  Well that, and the fact that it is all pushing 2000 years old or more. 

There is indeed a perfect hole in the roof, both to let in light, and to lighten the concrete structure of the dome itself.  A sign at the door says “QUANDO IL PIOVE?” with the answer in five languages:  yes, it rains in, but there are tiny holes in the floor under the hole, so it drains away. 

They say all roads lead to Rome, but what is also clear is that all vacations do as well.  There are two other people from my office vacationing in Italy this week, and a classmate of Isabel's claims to be here too.  Will Leo Rothenburg be the Ed Ingersoll of this trip?  And I think I saw a guard from Widener at the Pantheon today.

I’m still trying to come up with a title for this journal.  There are the obvious clichés:

Roman Holiday

All Roads Lead To . . .
The Eternal City
Veni Vidi Vici (in proper first person plural, of course)

And then cutesy:

See ya later, Gladiator
In a bit, Straciatella

That last one doesn't work, obviously.  In our house we have a whole list of funny see-ya-later's, like see ya later alligator and in a bit, chocolate chip.  The only Italian equivalent that I could come up with is

Arrivadercia, Quercia

which translates, badly, to see you later, oak.

But speaking of chocolate chip . . . we wasted no time getting started on one of the most important elements of our trip.  Our Pantheon walk led us to our first encounter with gelato, the first stop on our Gelatoscon, our first data point in our gelatoscopic research.  Cremeria Monteforte (recommended by the roninrome blog) did not disappoint, in fact set the bar high:

Peter:  deepest darkest chocolate (cioccolato fondente)

Isabel:  agonized before accepting straciatella a.k.a. chocolate chip (now you get the above see ya later)

Bill:  nocciolla (hazelnut)

Lisa:  a doppio of sour cherry sorbet and fior di latte, which is a kind of sweet cream gelato

I think mine was the clear winner but the chocolate-nut camp disagree.

After dinner and collecting our travel companion Andy, we searched out Gelateria Alberta Pica, which is near our place.  This is another place that had come recommended by roninrome, the Chowhounds, friend Megan Todd, and various guidebooks.  I had read that they could be forbidding personality-wise, and it is true that the gal behind the counter projected a certain Durgin Park vibe.  No matter, here's what we had

Peter and Isabel:  more chocolate
Andy:  nocciolla
Bill:  riccotta and pear and fig (that's all one flavor)
Lisa:  rice with cinnamon

Mmmm.  The general excitement of a late night gelato expedition was added to by the arrival of Andy, one of our all time favorite people.  We are all delighted that he is joining us, but only Isabel finds it in herself to jump up and down while shouting Andy Andy Andy!

4/17
This day was Palm Sunday, as previously noted a big day on the Christian calendar.  As we drove out of town, we saw a great ceremony or maybe reenactment at the Circus Maximus, which involved folk in ancient Roman garb (think gladiators) and other costumes such as medieval-ish looking robes, which we assume had to do with the day. It all looked terribly intriguing, but we had another destination in mind.

Our first full day was spent actually mostly outside of Rome, on an excursion to the Villa d'Este in Tivoli.  Thanks to the generosity of the senior Laskins, we had a car and driver to take us out and back.  The V d'E is the mother of all water parks, except that of course you can't actually swim.  It was built by a 16^th c. cardinal who was mad that he’d been passed over for Pope, and decided to retire to the country.  There is really a lovely Renaissance era villa , but the star is the garden in back built down a hill and filled with fountains.  There are cascading waterfalls, and artfully spouting rocks, and fan-shaped sprays.  There are beautiful vistas down the valley and grottoes.  There are gods and allegories and pools and flowers.  There is the water organ that plays a few minutes of classical music every two hours, with the valves operated by the water pressure of the fountains.  There is the fountain with Ephesian Diana, a.k.a. Mother Nature, who had 16 breasts, all spouting water (it was noted by one member of our party that her brassieres must be true marvels of engineering).[1]  It is pretty much impossible to describe the Villa D'Este gardens, but enchanting and delightful are a start.  I could have stayed all day, and gone back tomorrow. 

And it was the end of some sort of Celebration of Culture week in Italy, so the V d’E and all other museums were free!

After a little picnic of pizza al taglio in a park, we had some run-of-the-mill gelato in Tivoli:

Bill:  mirtillo (blueberry)
Lisa:  pineapple
Peter:  mirtillo
Isabel:  banana
Andy:  baci (hazelnut and chocolate) and coffee

Our very nice return driver gave us a little tour of the big sites on the way back, so we swung by the Colosseum and the monument to Vittorio Emmanuelle II.  The striking thing about driving around is the differences in scale.  The Roman sites are SO BIG, and the Renaissance streets and buildings are so comparatively small and narrow and twisty.  Also, many of the Roman sites were actually built with bricks, which of course makes sense but which seems so New World to me, given that it was the high-end building material of choice in our part of the world.  The difference is that the Romans faced everything with marble.  It is just astonishing to come on something vast like the Pantheon after dodging clown cars and motocyclos in impossibly narrow streets.  

After dinner (which included some dessert) we had two options for high-end gelato, equidistant from our resto.  We chose to seek out Gelateria del Teatro which proved nearly impossible to find but ultimately worth it.  It was late, dark, and the streets were narrow, twisty, and quite empty.  It was just a little unnerving, and felt like some Imperial assassin would be waiting around the corner, dagger drawn.  At one point Isabel did a face plant on the cobbles and raised a huge bump on her forehead.  We finally thought to give up, and just accept whatever gelato could be found, despite the tears of exhaustion and pain.   BUT I spied a promising looking sign in the distance, and sent Peter to recon.  Eureka!

Andy:  chocolate-orange
Isabel:  strawberry (exquisite)
Peter:  coconut (which prompted Andy to comment that no one in our family has any respect for each other's taste preferences, see my pineapple earlier in the day)
Lisa:  raspberry and sage
Bill:  fennel and candied almond

Bill feels that he may have peaked tonight, gelato-wise.

4/18
This morning, while Andy worked, we four Laskins made our way toward the Trevi Fountain, stopping first at Della Palma where we had (BEFORE lunch)

Lisa:  meringue (with little bits of meringue)
Peter:  chocolate strawberry
Isabel:  mango
Bill: pink grapefruit (delish)

On our way to the Trevi, we happened upon a street of high-end religious vestment sellers.  Gorgeous priest robes and bishops miters are displayed in sober windows that alternate with other windows showcasing altar crosses, bottles of oil, candles, and so forth.  One establishment displayed special commemorative vestments for the beatification of John Paul II.  There was his saintly visage gazing at you from the middle of a priest robe.  These shops were very elegant, this is clearly the 5th Avenue of religious garb.  I did spy one window devoted to sensible-looking clothes for nuns but what becomes clear is that, for an institution that venerates some well-known ladies, women in the Church really do get the short end of the stick, costume-wise.

If you like fountains, then Rome is the place for you.  They are everywhere and in astonishingly good shape for such old monuments.  The Romans, known for their superior resource management skills, built canals to move water around the city, and the Renaissance artists built gorgeous fountains on top of the Roman sites.  The Trevi, which is the most famous fountain in all of Rome, if not the world, is incredibly clean and well-kept, no small feat given the masses that gather around it constantly.  I found myself wanting to linger despite the crowds of teenagers from every land, the peddlers trying to sell cheap toys to my kids, the smoking European tourists, the heat, and did I mention the crowds.  The water and fountain are clear, and splashing with great vigor, and the sculptures of Ocean riding his carriage pulled by horses and tritons just burst out of the background, threatening to barrel over the crowd of goofy onlookers in complete disregard for our silly little mortal earthly selves.  Ocean is flanked by Abundance and Salubrity, which of course one must explain to one's offspring (plenty, and healthful or wholesome).

If you really want to know about fountains in Rome and environs, you have to read T. Lemann's journals.

After a refreshing pause at the charming boat fountain at the base of the Spanish Steps while waiting for Andy to join us, the five of us found a quiet eaterie in a nearby courtyard where we enjoyed lunch under a wisteria arbor.  Amply refueled, we returned to make our ascent.  Andy and Peter counted the Spanish Steps, several times to ensure accuracy, and determined that the guide books are WRONG.  There are in fact 136 steps, not 137.  A letter needs to be written.   Unfortunately the House of the Monsters that is a block from the top is undergoing renovations (funded by the Max Planck Institute to establish a center for the study of Kunstgeschichte).  This is a shame because based on what we could see through the scaffolding, it is a fantastic building in the literal sense - the windows and doors are in the mouths of great monster faces, each mouth an aperture!  

But those monsters had nothing, creep-wise, on our next stop.  After the House of the Monsters we marched over to Piazza Barberini (they of the bees-on-their-crest fame, it is good tourist sport to look for Barberini bees everywhere in Rome) to visit the crypt of S. Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini.  The church was built in 1626 to serve an existing order of Capuchin monks.  In 1631, they began to run out of sacred space in which to bury those who had passed (there were a lot more Capuchin monks in those days) so they had to start disinterring some of their oldest corpses, dating from 1500. Someone got the bright idea to use the bones to . . . decorate the crypt.   When you go in, the lady at the door says to you "please (finger to lips) shh, they are sleeping."  Then you walk into a long hall along one side of which are chapels decorated in human bones, all arranged in lovely baroque patterns on the ceilings, and more formidable structures on the walls.  Garlands of vertebrae, shields of sacra, winged creatures of scapuli and pelvises, chains of femurs, bouquets of digits, and so on.  There are neat piles of skulls and femurs surrounding the robed remains of some complete Capuchin monk skeletons, and even a couple of mummified monks lying in repose.   In the last room, the ceiling is decorated with the complete teeny skeleton of a young Barberini princess, holding the scythe and scales of Death.  There is also a large sign that says, in five languages:

QUELLO CHE VOI SIETE, NOI ERAVAMO;  QUELLO CHE NOI SIAMO VOI SARETE
(what you are now, we used to be; what we are now, you will be)

You really need some gelato after an experience like that.  On our walk back to our apt., we stopped at the well-known Gelateria di San Crispino where we got:

Andy:  banana and caramel meringue (intolerably sweet, according to A)
Lisa:  lemon and pine nut
Peter:  chocolate meringue
Isabel:  chocolate
Bill:  ginger/cinnamon and saffron

Harry Greenblatt and others feel that while San Crispino is excellent, prices are a bit high for a slightly average product, perhaps a result of success having gone to the owners’ heads.  Apparently Elizabeth Gilbert mentions this place in Eat Pray Love, hence the popularity.

While lovely to sit on and contemplate rooftop Rome, our terrazzo carries a permanent smell of burnt toast.

4/19

Just about every ancient Roman attraction here in Rome features beefy men standing around outside in gladiator costumes (live people, not statues).  They will pose for a picture with you for a couple euro.  At the Pantheon I saw one woman say, you want how much? and then when the fellow presumably told her, she discreetly gave him the finger.  He and his fellow gladiators laughed heartily.  Today at the Colosseum, a slovenly-looking fellow in a short Prince of Troy kind of costume waved his cigarette at me and said "hey mommee, you want your picture taken with this bad boy?"  Well, no.

I don’t even know how to describe the Colosseum.  Everyone was very excited to see it, that is for sure.  Isabel turned to me as we approached and said “OMG, momma, OMG!”  (where did she learn that?)  And Peter just got a big smile on his face when we walked in.  The thing about the Colosseum is that it is SO BIG.  It could seat 50,000, and apparently was so well designed that it could be emptied of people in a few minutes.  You can still see the numbers over some of the outside arches, which corresponded to your ticket assignment.  When you visit as a tourist, you basically just walk in, and walk around the bottom level, then go up and do the same on the upper level.  You can’t go into the warren of rooms and cells that were under the now long-gone floor, which would probably be pretty interesting.  They kept the animals and the fighters locked up there (the beasts for obvious reasons, the humans so they didn’t run away before their event).  On the second level there is part of an exhibit about Nero, which just opened in installations all over the city.  The translations were a bit fraught, as Italian-to-English translations tend to be, and textually dense, but I have a feeling that there is a bit of  Nero-rehabilitation going on here.  Apparently it was only later in his reign that he went crazy, although he did have his mother killed pretty early on. 

There are no cats in the Colosseum.  There are cats – lots of them – in the Ara Sacra, which was an excavation of several temples right near our flat.  Visitors can’t go into the Ara, we can only look down from above, which may account for the cats.  They look quite pleased with themselves, fat, shiny, and dozing in the sun on top of this wall or that ancient step.

On Good Friday, the Pope will lead the Stations of the Cross from the Colosseum, so stages and lighting and sound equipment were being put into place. 

Journeyman gelato this afternoon:
Bill:  nocciolla
Andy:  caffe and ferrero rocher
Isabel:  melon
Peter:  chocolate
Lisa:  cherry swirl

This just in from Rome:  our intrepid correspondent, Andy "Newsroom" Reinhardt stuck his hand in the Bocca della Verita, and it was not cut off!  Story at 11.  Here's the backstory:  at the age of 7, Andy visited Rome with his family.  Having read the indispensable M. Sasek's  "This is Rome" (as our kids did for about a year before this trip), he was very excited to visit the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and stick his hand in the Mouth of Truth, which is the mouth of a giant stone face, hanging on a wall outside of this church.  However, when his party arrived at the church, access to the Mouth was closed for the day!   Young Andy stood at the barred gate and shed bitter tears at this denial.  Forty-four years later, the gate was not barred!  And Andy's hand did not come off.  For the record, I stuck my hand in, and Peter did too, and then pronounced it a fraud as his hand remained attached to his arm.  It is important to note that the Mouth is in fact widely believed to have been a drain cover of sorts from the nearby Temple of Hercules, ie. it is not an oracle.  You can touch the brick wall behind it if you reach in far enough.

Back to Alberto Pica tonight after dinner, where we had:

Bill:  torta di Romana (pine nut)
Isabel:  straciatella
Peter:  strawberry
Lisa:  zabaglione (yum)

4/20
If you want to get to the Vatican, follow the nuns.  Do not follow Bill, because while he will get you on the correct bus, it will be going in the opposite direction, and it will only be when a kind-hearted expat tells you have gone about half an hour out of your way that you realize you should have just followed the nuns in the first place.

We followed the guidebook's lead, and chose Wednesday morning to visit the Musei Vaticani, assuming that "everyone else" would be at the weekly papal audience in St. Peter's Square.  Well, they were - it was apparently Blessing of the Soccer Teams day or something like that, since there were great groups of young people in track suits filing into the Square through metal detectors.  But it is a bald-faced lie that the museum will therefore be more manageable because this is the most horrifically crowded museum I have ever visited.  Having had to ride the bus 45 minutes back in the correct direction, and then sit in Vatican gridlock for 10 minutes (the driver finally just threw the doors open where we were, to the great cheers of his hot and cranky passengers), then hiked up past the lines, we (I) were not in the most Christian frame of mind.

Of course, this is one of world's great museum collections, so one is soothed by Egyptian antiquities, Roman copies of Greek statuary, the original Laocoon, the magnificent Map Room with its astonishing ceiling, and so on.  Until one descends with the masses marching in increasingly narrow lines like the workers in Metropolis, into the maw of the Raphael rooms and of course, la Sistina.  Suffice it to say, the experience of finally seeing these great works is somewhat marred by the sheer number of people with whom you are seeing them.  I note that American tourists are not nearly as pushy as European (although there was the lady in the bathroom who finally yelled "come on ladies, there is a long line out here!" when everyone was just taking too darn long), teenagers (of which there are about three billion in Rome right now) are universally clueless, and that it must be April break in Italy too, based on the number of groups of Italian schoolchildren with matching caps and furious teachers.

But . . . it IS Rafael, and that IS the “School of Athens,” and of course, the Sistine ceiling is completely stunning.  The dictum on no photographs is completely ignored, although occasionally the several guards will clap their hands and call for SILENZIO because of course it is a working chapel.  They are not very effective, but they are more successful at regularly clearing the altar steps of exhausted visitors who have just walked about TEN MILES to get to the chapel, and now have to strain their necks to see the ceiling.

I am sorry to say that la Sistina nearly drove me to tears and not in a good way.

There was also a show of Fabergé eggs and such in the Pinacoteca, which was quite interesting.

After a somewhat restorative lunch, we wandered around St. Peter's Square, admiring the Bernini colonnade, checking out the markers noting the direction of the wind around the obelisk, and watching the enormous line to go into the Basilica itself wind through the Square.  And we had our Ed Ingersoll experience.  As Bill went to step on the disk that indicates the exact center of the colonnade, from which it appears as a single column, a small boy also stepped on.  Bill gave way . . . to Isabel's classmate Leo Rothenburg!  When we caught up with Bill, we all had a nice chat.  Apparently Leo spent much of his flight over looking for Izzy on the plane.

Finally got to Bucciantini for gelato this afternoon (had sought it on two previous occasions), well worth the wait:

Isabel:  grape
Peter:  blackberry
Bill:  pistachio and blackberry
Lisa:  fig and fior di latte (fig won this round)

We may not get into St. Peter's, given that there is a service there for Holy Thursday, and then who knows what happens on Good Friday.  Well, we do know, actually.  The Pope does the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum.  But man, that Vatican just kicked my butt today, and I don't know if I have another visit in me.  

While the children rested, I snuck out to a local bomboneria, and stocked up on Easter treats.  What a wonderful store - filled to the ceiling with the colorfully wrapped giant eggs filled with candy that they give on Pasqua here.  I could have easily filled a suitcase.

4/21
Rome is actually a pretty hard city to wrap your mind around, if you've not been here before.  The streets are unpredictable and you have to have a really good map or else there are plenty of ways to get lost.  There is no such thing as a grid, which makes it harder to get your bearings.  Today for example, our walk home from Campidoglio was unexpectedly short, apparently we were much closer to our flat than we thought.  Turns out we are just a few blocks from Ara Coeli, with the VEII monument and Capitoline Hill nearby.

But it is more than just streets . . . it’s that scale switch from tightly Renaissance in the quarter where we are staying, to grand Roman just nearby, that is jarring.  You're dodging motos and toy cars on teeny streets and the all of a sudden you burst into an open space with massive brick walls towering over head, and eccola, you are in Ancient Rome!  It is just hard to explain the scale of the Roman building except to say that this kind of building just wasn’t possible in a non-slave society.  They say that one million people lived in ancient Rome at the height of its power.  I don’t know the slave/free breakdown.

And finally, the layering of culture and existence is another challenge.  You have to know your emperors in order, know your Christian history, esp. the Popes, AND your Renaissance.  Everyone built on top of everyone else (see Palazzo Senatorio right on top of Tabularium, below), and since the Romans did that to each other for several hundred years themselves, it makes for an awful lot of well-recorded history and material culture to sift through, in one spot.

Today, the Forum ROMANUM, as Isabel likes to say.  The main Forum attraction was not really a market, rather it was the most central and sacred place in all of the Roman Empire.  Here is the Umbilicus Urbis, the bellybutton of the empire, so named, apparently because Romulus dug the pit as part of a religious rite and then all the men threw some dirt and some fruit in, and called it the center of Rome.  Here too is the Lacus Curtius, known as the Heart of the Forum.  Here's that story: an abyss opened in the ground one day, and the Romans knew not what to do.  They thought it was a sign of the gods' displeasure, so they offered sacrifices, first fruit, then sheep, pigs, cows.  But still the hole was there, getting bigger.  Per Livy, the citizens decided that they must throw in that which they held most dear, but what was that?  Their armed strength.  So, a soldier named Marcus Curtius rode into the hole, in full gear, with a horse, and the hole closed and Rome was saved.  There are other stories, too, including one that has something to do with the Rape of the Sabine Women, but this one with Marcus Curtius seems to get the most traction and I like it best.

And here in the Forum is the Temple of the Vestals and the House of the Vestals.  The floor plan here is quite clear, so you can really see how the whole Vestal complex was laid out.  The central area of the house is lined on either side with remains of statues of famous Vestals, and there are wild roses growing around the edges.  It is very beautiful. Vestals were recruited between the ages of 8 and 10, and served a term of 30 years.  Their principal job was keeping the sacred light of Rome burning, securing the wills of important people, and keeping safe the most sacred relic of Rome, the Palladium.  No one knows what the Palladium actually was, but one school of thought maintains that it was a tiny wooden figure of Pallas Athena, brought by Aeneas when he fled Troy, and landed in what is now Italy.  The Vestals kept it so secret that no one knows what it was!  They also famously took a vow of chastity, and if they broke it, they were buried alive.  Romulus and Remus' mother was supposedly a Vestal, so that's why she had to abandon R&R in the Tiber, so no one would know she'd broken her vow (with Mars, no less).  Then the she-wolf helps out, then they are found by a shepherd, and the rest, as they say . . . .

Another fascinating structure at the Forum is the Temple of Antonius and Faustina, all of which is left is a stunning columned portico.  What’s interesting is that it is right in front of the back of a church, and the church doors, when you look through the columns, are about 25 feet above the ground, where the base of the temple is.  That’s because when the church was built, the ground level was 25 feet higher, since they hadn’t started excavating the Forum, and the columns of the portico were half-buried.  We had to peer through scaffolding to see this, apparently the temple is having some work done, but it is impressive still.

A long walk up the Palatine Hill concluded our visit to the Forum ROMANUM, with wandering about the ruins of the rather large Severan complex.  They say that ancient Roman swells lived on the Palatine, and it is easy to see why, with its lovely vistas over the city, and cool breezes and trees. 

The market-forum was built by Trajan (the ragin' pagan, say it like cajun, says Peter) across the way.  Trajan, poor fellow, was always a step behind.  Despite the fact that he was very successful as an emperor, there was no room for him in Augustus' mausoleum, where the first eight emperors had been buried.  So he built a magnificent column, with wonderful twisting reliefs that show the highlights of his reign, under which he was buried.  Now it has St. Peter on top (the Christians appropriated everything!), but it IS still a marvel.  His son Hadrian (he of Wall and Villa fame) went back to the circular style of mausoleum, which I find far less appealing than the column.  Note that Hadrian's mausoleum was also a-POPE-riated, as a secure fortress for the Pope, when threatened by heathens.

There are a lot of columns around Rome, all topped now with saints, usually Peter.  Saints on sticks, kind of like hors d’oeuvres at a fancy party.

Peter liked the Forum ROMANUM, but was disappointed that one is not permitted to wander freely among the ruins, which he really wanted to do.

Afternoon gelato at Ara Coeli, which I think may have changed hands since roninrome wrote his helpful blog post on gelaterie.  The exotic flavors that he promised were nowhere in sight, but we all did well anyway:

Peter:  chocolate fondente
Isabel:  watermelon
Bill:  nocciolla and lemon
Lisa:  lemon cream and pear

Think we are done today?  Hardly – we’ve got another hill to climb! 

The Capitoline Hill is the heart of Rome, and at the top is the lovely Campidoglio, designed although not finished by Michelangelo in the late 16^th c., which consists of the Palazzo Senatorio (seat of the Roman Senate from 1143 when they threw off the temporal rule of the Popes, to more recently,) flanked by the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo, all circling the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.  The two latter palazzi contain the Musei Capitolini, which is of a sort of Roman history through art museum, and also the oldest public museum in the world.  The MA statue in the piazza is in fact a copy of the Roman original, but you can see the real, somehow even more majestic one (perhaps because of its age, it is late 2^nd c. AD!) inside.  A terrorist attack during the dark times of the late 1970s did not destroy the statue, but did reveal enough general disintegration to cause authorities to move it inside the museum, and do a little maintenance.  In the same building you can also see the famous Roman bronze of the she-wolf with Romulus and Remus, the former being the founder of Rome, of course.  Romulus killed his brother rather than share, which is why we call it Rome and not Reme.  (No, says Andy, Rem just went to France.).  They say that the She-Wolf is a 6^th-5^th c. BC sculpture (twins are Renaissance additions), but there are some who now think it more recent, Middle Ages, perhaps.

There are also enormous bits of a colossal statue of Constantine (4^th c. AD), which are quite marvelous - the great head, but also a hand, and a bicep, complete with an artery.

Across the piazza is the wonderful Marforio, another massive lounging river god surrounded by fierce-looking dolphins.  We're not sure what river he represents, because we think his name might have been changed.  But the guidebooks tell us that he was known as a "talking statue" because people would hang anonymous political notes on him.  According to the Green Guide, it cost so much to move him to the Musei in 1595 that the govt. raised the price of wine!  The GG also opines that Marforio looks a bit bored in his courtyard.   

To get across the piazza here, you could just go outside, OR you can descend to the basement of one palazzo, and go through the Tabularium, which is the Roman building on which the Palazzo Senatorio was built (see above note re:  layering of buildings).  The Tabularium is where the ancients stored all their important documents, and it currently has a very interesting exhibit of different bits of Roman writing - legal, noble, funerary, record-keeping, and so on - all on stone, of course.  But the best part is to go out on the loggia, and gaze over the Forum ROMANUM.  It is quite a view.  They say that when they started excavating the Capitoline Hill in the early 1800s, the rubble was up to this loggia, which is several stories above the now-excavated bottom of the Forum.  There was also a massive Temple of Jupiter and Juno on the site, and you can see the foundations near the MA statue inside.  They have made a small-scale replica, showing what the temple above would have looked like, and it is huge - it would have completely dwarfed the present Renaissance complex.  More of that big Roman thinking.

4/22
How does one even begin to describe St. Peter's Basilica?  Even with the crowds, it is breathtaking in scope, accomplishment, majesty.  It is also a (minor) testament to the human spirit that I proposed returning to the Vatican on our last morning in Rome, after the scarring experience of the Musei Vaticani two days earlier.  But we were inspired in part by Leo's dad, who said that the line for the Basilica, while super long, actually moved quite quickly.

You have to go through a metal detector to go in, and be scanned by a person to make sure that you are appropriately dressed.  Apparently strawberry stains (Isabel) do not worry the Vatican, just bare knees and shoulders.

We opted to ascend the dome before going inside the church itself.  If you are hardy, like Bill and Peter, and armed with a Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar, you take the stairs - all 551 of them.  More delicate types like myself and Isabel opted for the ascensore to the roof level.  But at the roof level, you are warned:

PLEASE, KEEP IN MIND FOR THE OLD, THE SUFFERING, AND THE CARDIOPATIC PEOPLE:  AS TO GO UP TO THE DOME, THERE ARE 320 STEPS BESIDES THE LIFT.

Once up, you can go inside the dome and walk around a balcony peering down at the people and church within.  But the best part is that you are right up close to beautiful mosaic work, so you can really see how these are made.  From below, they just glow, and here you can see why – the little squares of stone and glass, some gold-painted, are deeply colored and really reflect the light.    

The balcony inside the dome is less than halfway up however, and the boys had another 323 steps to go, narrower and narrower, until they were single file up to the very tippy top of St. Peter's, where the lantern is.  Needless to say, there is a spectacular view. 

Then you descend, and there you are in St. Peter’s.  It is as crowded as the museum, but somehow more manageable.  Here is the apotheosis of Renaissance sacred art.  Michelangelo’s Pietá draws a huge crowd, but if you are Isabel you can just sneak right on up to the front, since you are shorter than everyone else, and then of course your mama has to follow to keep you safe.  Other highlights include Bernini’s baldachino, which is a marvelous carved canopy supposedly over the grave of St. Peter, and the Throne of St. Peter, which is not a throne in which a person sits, but an inaccessible chair that hovers above gilded clouds raised up by putti and angels, toward a glowing alabaster window with a dove.  It is quite spectacular, and our pictures just do not do it justice. 

There are also dozens of tombs of former popes, all massive and up high, with great carved popes above them, all looking very stern, even vaguely terrifying if you are very small.  But the carving is really spectacular.  We wonder if JPII is in there yet, and if so, would he have such an elaborate tomb?

Our party reconvened in St. Peter’s Square after climbing and appreciating, and headed back across the river to check out the Piazza del Popolo, and Pincio Gardens.  In the latter, we rented a four-seater pedal cab and toodled about for an hour, much to the delight of Isabel who shouted at one point “this is just awesome!” 

Having eschewed all the gelaterie in the Prati district near the Vatican (to my disappointment), it was agreed that on the way back to our flat, we would make one last stop at the Cremeria Monteforte for:

Bill:  how could I forget?  I know it was a doppio.

Peter:  chocolate fondente

Isabel:  rose (really, and it did not taste like soap!)

Lisa:  granite caffe con panna, best ever coffee slushee with whipped cream, but it did keep me up all night

This fueled us for a search for the mysterious “big foot”of the guidebooks, which is a large-ish foot that was clearly part of a big ancient statue, but no one knows anything more about it.  We find it a bit of a disappointment because it is nowhere near as big as Constantine’s foot.  We saw Leo’s dad and one of his brothers again, and they agreed that it was underwhelming, as big feet go.

With euro burning a hole in our pocket, we shop for treats to bring home with us and I suppose it was somehow symbolic that I bought shoes while we sought the big foot. And because we just couldn’t quite give it up, one more visit to Gelateria del Teatro after dinner for:

Peter:  cioccolato puro and fior di latte
Isabel:  chocolate orange
Bill:  liquirezia (Sicilian booze and coffee) and more fennel and caramelized almond
Lisa:  Greek yogurt and lemon-thyme-strawberry

4/23

A quick morning stop at Forno di Campo di Fiori, for pizza bianca, cookies, ciambelle, and colombe before flying home.  The Campo is a nice place to be near, since it has a charming small (although overpriced, according to locals) market, and lots of bars and restos on the edges.  It is much smaller than I thought, but impossibly picturesque.  Apparently it gets quite a young drinking scene as the weather improves, esp. on weekends, and it is true that we could hear revelers heading home down our street into the late hours.  The Campo has a forbidding statue in the middle of the monk Giordano Bruni, who was burned to death in 1600 for heresy.  His crime?  Supporting his pal Galileo on that crazy sun theory.  Now he mostly has pigeons and seagulls sitting on his head, while he overlooks the marketers and revelers.  We reveled in pizza, strawberries, and porchetta.

The Forno is justifiably famous.  I ordered a colombe, pronouncing it colom-bo, and then correcting myself to colom-bay, at which point I was gently corrected by the man serving me to say colom-ba.  “Colombo, e Cristoforo” said the lady behind the counter, and we all chuckled at my goofy accent as I hefted my bag full of goodies

And now a note about what we ate, of course.  The gelato is well-documented, but we were pleased to sample excellent version of the following Roman specialties:

pasta all’amtriciana (tomato and bacon or guanciale) – sometimes bucatini, or tonnarelli, or spaghetti, or rigatoni

pasta al carbonara (Peter ate A LOT of this, could be all kinds of pasta )

pasta cacio e pepe (always a stringy kind of pasta)

pasta alla gricia (guanciale and cheese)

fettucine al tartuffo nero

suppli – like arancini

ravioli e lasagna fatta in casa, delizioso

roast pork, roast lamb, osso bucco

burratta

fiore di zuccha, which are fried zucchini flowers, always stuffed with a bit of mozzarella and an anchovy

carciofi alla giudia, and alla romana (fried, and sort of poached/marinated)

pizza bianca and rosso – and while we did have round pizza, this is a Roman type where they bake great slabs of dough with olive oil and salt, maybe top it with tomato or other stuff, then slice off a taglio for you.  Best ever.

puntarelle, a fine chicory-endive type of veg, served raw with a dressing of anchovies, lemon and olive oil.

vignarole – a delicious stew of fava beans, artichokes and peas (and yes, I did eat them, happily, when stewed with guanciale as they were here)

filleti di baccala – fried cod, way better than it sounds, possibly best fish without chips ever.

colombe, a sort of Easter version of pannetone

ciambelle, a giant sugary donut

Some of the good restos included La Campana - exquisite lasagna and ravioli of homemade pasta, and Ditirambo for pasta and a swell buratta to start.  For Andy's Last Supper in Rome, we ended up at Al Pompiere, which has nothing to with firemen but much to do with tastiness, fie on the Chowhounds who pooh-poohed it.  Giggetto in the jewish ghetto started incredibly strong with best ever carciofi alla giudia and vignarole, then veered downhill only because of scattered service (still waiting for that puntarelle).  The children were generally jewels throughout all of these meals.  Our favorite was probably Dar Filletario di Santa Barbara, a real hole in the wall, just around the corner from our flat.  It gets a steady crowd of intrepid tourists and locals from the entire socio-economic spectrum for nothing more than expertly fried fish, served wrapped in paper, with some puntarelle and fried zucchini on the side.  Bill feels that it may be the Kopps of Rome, in its clearly universal appeal.  Except about a 10th of the size, and serving fish.

On our last night, we returned to La Campana, since we enjoyed it earlier in the trip.  This time, however, we were given the English menu, which I found inexplicably difficult since I only knew the names of things in Italian!  I had to get an Italian menu to figure out what to order. 

And now for some general musings on things Italian:

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The monument to Vittorio Emmanuelle II defines bombast.  It is bigger than our Capitol Hill, and just for one guy, who was the first king of unified Italy.  A recent New Yorker review of  several books about modern Italian politics suggests that many of Italy’s modern problems in fact stem from unification of city-states that really did not need or want to be unified.  It is actually kind of a messed up society, no industry of any kind upon which to base a healthy economy, very high youth unemployment, and so on.  Maybe Italy is the new sick man of Europe. 

Like most other things, Italian security is incomprehensible.  There is the Polizia, which drive around in blue cars, and look pretty much like police, but it is not clear how they differ from the Polizia Municipale who have white cars with blue writing.  Then there are the Carabinieri, who manage to look both slightly ridiculous and vaguely Fascist in their red and black uniforms, complete with swords and white gloves.  They seem to come in pairs, and when not in dress uniform, they are armed with regular pistols.  A member of the Italian Navy appears to guard the Parliament building, at least, his hat looked naval.  There is also the Guarda di Finanzia (which may be some kind of financial institution security, but appears to be official unlike our private operations), and finally the last one we saw was the Polizia di Penitenziaria, which I think has something to do with prisons since they drive around in what look like paddy wagons.

The palazzo where Silvio Berlusconi lives is known as the "poonga-poonga palace" for obvious reasons.

The late pope, John Paul II, is to be beatified in early May, and it is a big event here in Rome.  There are a lot of nuns in Rome right now.  Isabel feels that she has stepped in to The Sound of Music.

Italian waitstaff work about ten times as hard as waitstaff in any American restaurant.  There are fewer of them, and they run around like crazy serving unadorned, small portions of usually delicious food to cheerful diners, with zero attitude or fuss.  So, dinner takes a while, but on the other hand, you are not rushed.  You would never find American waiters working that hard.  Of course, in Italy, it is a salaried profession, not an hourly plus tips kind of job.

The Italians are brilliant in their use of teeny tiny cars.  Inspired by VW and Mini, Fiat has introduced a revised version of the Cinquecento, the Topolino of 1960s fame.  We saw things even smaller, from toy I mean car companies we’ve never even heard of.  They park perpendicular to the street, wherever they can.  And amazingly, although there are often no sidewalks to speak of, and cars and motos appear to go in whatever direction they want, no one seems to get run over.

How to conclude?  Well, we threw our coins over our shoulders at the Trevi Fountain, to ensure that we would ritorniamo a Roma.  Of course, we have conflicting guide book reports that say to throw it over the left or right shoulder, so we might have done it wrong.  We’ll just have to go back to find out.

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[1] We saw several Diana Ephesi on our excursions, and learned later that these may not have been breasts, but bulls’ testicles, which are also considered a symbol of fertility.  You just have to see the picture here to really get the idea.