Images of Rome - (where are they?)

Interlude - the elixir of life

Rome is filled with water, and I don't just mean the river encircling the city.  There are fountains and otehr reminders of water at almost every turn.  In looking at the artistry one forgets the reason for their being, moving water. 

Some fountains have particular cunning in designing how the water enters and drains.  Bernini had the water rushing down this sea creature's throat!

If you look closely at the sides of some old buildings you will see markers that indicate the high water mark from years when the Tiber flooded the city.  There are quite a few of these which makes you wonder what it must have been like being at the mercy of the river until embankments were built.

The thing that really surprised me was that the water gushing from all of Rome's fountains is completely drinkable.  People fill their water bottles and drink straight from the tap as it were.  Mind you I might think twice about filling my throat with water that had recently been used to cool off someone's road weary heels!

 And then there's just enjoying the rather over the top celebrations of water.  Can there be a more celebrated fountain than Trevi?  There's never no one there throwing in a coin to ensure a return visit to Rome, myself included!

Day 7 cont. - When in Rome do as the Romans do - but first, you have to find some Romans!

It's our last evening in Rome.  We have seen what we can, and spent time with those who are living here but who are not from here.  So the thing to add is find some Romans who can fill in another blank on living in this city, espcially as Italy itself is days away from celebrating 150 years as a united nation.

Thankfully, we don't have to kidnap anyone off the streets or atttach ourselves to some unsuspecting family out for a Sunday stroll.  My cousin married a woman from England, whose sister moved to Rome, married a Roman and has 3 Roman children.  A family connection - excellent - they can't escape!

We got picked up in a rattly Pugeot and driven south-east before turning down a lane and parking just where the lane stopped and a steep hill began.  We slipped past a gate and came upon a tiny pink cottage hugging the hill, a large apartment building built right up its backside and a vista of green heath stretching out below and to the horizon, a huge regional park .  Lemon trees blazed fruit, a small stone fireplace emitted the sole warmth of the house, fuelled by sticks picked up from the trees and shrubs just beyond the patio, and a family of 5 welcomed us into about 1000 sq. ft. they call home.

Three beautiful, school-aged children - one boy who plinked away on a guitar and unselfconsciously answered all our questions, a girl too shy to talk and who mostly closeted herself in her bedroom with a book, and a younger girl who dumped a collection of coins on the floor that she immediately set about cleaning with an old toothbrush and soapy water - and their parents who run a coffee bar (him with her help) and teach preschoolers (her part time) gave up one of their precious evenings together on our behalf. 

The girls had made an absolutely delicious lemon drizzle cake which we had with English tea served in tippy ceramic mugs Momma had made, sitting on whatever seats we could all find - a few at the small kitchen table and a few in the sitting room adjacent.  Two huge dogs lolled about.  Shelves were filled with books and pottery and odd bits of memorabilia and daily schedules. The fire smelled of the outdoors and the indoors smelled of damp.  Does this place really exist in Rome, barely 2 miles from the Colosseum?  It felt like we were in some enchanted hovel deep in a fairy tale.

They all added thieir opinions about Rome and Italy of today.  They are embarassed about prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's antics, but mostly because they know the rest of the world laughs at him and thus at them, which is worse.  Since adopting the euro in 2002, Italy has become poorer and harder to make a living in, with a huge gap between salaries (unchanged from before) and goods (vastly more expensive since).  Everyone works harder for less and envies the ones who left for Australia or America before the change, which is ironic because at the time those that left were often pitied as those who had to leave in order to seek their fortune. 

They deny there is an economic problem in the country greater than that of other countries and had never heard the acronym PIIGS (referencing Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, countries in danger of economic meltdown and requiring financial assistance from the European Union/International Monetary Fund).  We learned about the school system, the differences between the different types of secondary school:  Liceo Classico, Liceo Scientifico, Liceo Linguistico, Liceo delle Scienze Umane, and Liceo Artistico, and heard from each child of their plans and challenges. 

Their life is simple - there is not a lot of money around for holidays or fancy clothes or electronics - time off is hanging around at home with books, guitars and a coin collection, studying, or running around a soccer pitch with neighbourhood friends.  The hands of the parents show a far greater age than their years would indicate, and they can't sit still for long, never having had the luxury of practice.  

It was a lively, wonderful slice of family life.  As night drew in, Papa went off to his bar to turn the coffee machine on for the early morning rush (it takes hours to heat up) and Momma filled our arms with fresh lemons picked on the way back to the car before we were rattled home to our spacious top floor flat where we packed our things for our early morning flight back to London.

Day 7 cont. - iconic tourist stop

Probably the most traditionally tourist site of any in the entire city of Rome would be the Colosseum.  Am I right?  Come on, when you think of the city isn't it the first image that springs to mind?  And in every tourist brochure, there it is, front and centre, right there on page 1.  In the boardgame 'Go' the souvenir of Italy that players collect is the Colosseum. 


The Forum, Palatine HIll and the Colosseum can be seen with the same ticket.  We took in the first two early this morning, and then took a break in between so that we'd resist the urge to be jaded with yet another ruin, even though this is the ruins of all ruins, and returned to enter refreshed and ready.  We were also happy to enter as Rome is experiencing rain for the first time in a week.

The place is pretty amazing and incredibly impressive.  Built after the end of the Roman Empire (a big surprise to me!) it is also the largest building constructed at the time too.  It took about 8 years to build and seated 50,000 people.  Some stadiums today take longer to build and hold less people!  Every knows it was used for gladiatorual combats about it was also used for simulated sea battles, called naumachiae.

May I remind you that sea battles require boats and water.  This is kind of hard to believe - how the heck could they put on sea battles?  For one thing, the Colosseum is really not all that big for such an undertaking and battles require boats to move, turn, ram into each other, so they'd have to be built to a small scale.  The water would also have to be relatively shallow given the space restrictions, so boats would also have to be built with shallow hulls.  Despite the shallow depth, it must still ahve taken quite a bit of time to flood the place and then drain it again, so audiences would have to patient.  And given the fact that these naumachiae were very popular entertainments on large lakes, I would think that audiences would think Colosseums efforts would be quite lame after the novelty of seeing the place flooded had happened the first few times.  Seeing a bit of blood and gore of gladiatorial battles or gfights against wild and exotic an=imales would be much more exciting.

It would appear this was the case and it wasn't long before the Hypogeum was built and these water battled ceased.  The Hypogeum has recently been researched and renovated somewhat and it's strikingly complex and clever.  It's essentially a wooden floor above a series of chambers below.  In these chambers worked slaves who operated trap doors and lifts and cages, brining wild animals and fighters quicky into the arena where they appearedd as if by magic from different spots on the floors.  I can't imainge what it must have been like to work under there in the summer heat with the smell of hot slaves and animals!

After it became disused as an entertainment centre, the Colosseum housed a church, then a cemetery, then housing and workshops, a castle, and almost a wool factory to provide employment for prostitutes (!) before it just got buried by time and inattention.  One of the few good things Benito Mussolini did was to have the place fully exposed and excavated in the 1930s.

There's another side to the Colossum that surprised and fascinated me.  In 1643 Domenico Panaroli, a Roman physician and herbalist, started to catalogue the variety of plants growing inside, some of which were rare and exotic - finding 684!  It seems that the intestinal tracts of all those wild animals and birds that took part in murder and mayhem and violent entertainment spectacles contained seeds that sprouted and grew over the centuries while the place was quietly forgotten.

Day 7 cont. - 3/900

Did you know there are over 900 churches in Rome?  I had no idea.  Well, I do now because I looked it up.  900!!!!

And it seems every blessed one of them has artisitic, architectural and/or cultural significance.  Which means they are all worth seeing if not spending some actual time inside.  I doubt if there's person alive who has given all of them the credit they deserve by seeing all of them, but I know there are enough fanatics in the world to think there are those that have seen a lot of them. 

It's all a bit exhausting for my little brain to think about.  I have decided that I will visit three. 

The first was not actually chosen by me but rather presented itself as an opportunity.  While walking home from dinner one night our host exclaimed - "Hey, look! the Sant'Angese in Agone is open!"

Thinking he'd eaten a bad mushroom I wasn't surprised to see him race towards the Fountain of the Rivers, but then noticed his steps moved on past the fountain and towards a large church about halfway along the west side of Piazza Navona.

The large, white Sant'Angese in Agone, commissioned in 1652 by Pope Innocent X, was designed by Borromini, a rival of Bernini.  It is said that Bernin's fountain's statues were designed to shield their eyes from the ugliness of the church.  A bit petty if true, but I've never felt comfortable believing hearsay and rumour!  I'm sure Bernini was magnanimous in his appreciation for others' artistic efforts.

The story of the church itself is that it was built where St. Agnes was stripped naked, but she was miraculously saved from disgrace due to an extraordinary growth of hair.  I assume on her head but the story isn't clear.  She was later burned and then beheaded.  Seems a bit overkill to me but I guess whomever wanted to make sure she was really dead.  Her skull rests in a chapel inside the church.

Apparently it's not often open, at least according to Eric, who has passed by this spot many times over the last few weeks.  Given that he is an architecure prof.  he has more than the usual interest and awareness genes so I believe him. 

Wider than it is deep, it contains 8 huge red marble Corinthian columns supporting the dome, seven altars, and frescoes by Gaulli, Ciro Ferri and Sebastiano Corbellini.  Quite lovely.

My second church of choice was Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome's only gothic church, which I explored with cool priest Father John on Day 5, so you'll have to go back to that posting I'm afraid.  Worth it I assure you!

Our last day took us to Basilica di San Clemente, a 12th century ediface that has fabulous marble patterned floors, frescoes and luminous tile mosaics of the cross as the tree of Life.  We arrived just as the Sunday service was beginning, so we sat in a back pew and took in the beauty of the tiles under our feet and the glitter of the mosaics in the candlelight.

But, what makes this church even more worth visiting is below.  In the mid-19th century, the prior, Fr Joseph Mullooly, for some reason decided to see what was going on downstairs and began excavations where he found the original fourth-century basilica directly underneath.

And that's not all.  He obvioulsy either got the bit between his teeth or had way too much time on his hands, for going down even deeper through the cool dark stone he found a 2nd century pagan temple and the remains of a first century nobleman's house!

One must pay and line up to descend as only a limited number of people are allowed at any one time.  But one is rewarded with early Christian art on the walls and carved on teh floors.  At the deepest level passageways are dark and narrow.  One can hear the sound of water gurgling, and every once in a while it's possible to see this underground river rushing past only a few feet below the original foundations.  No doubt this water supplied the household and made life marvelously cool in the hot summers as well. 

I can't believe there's a church like it in the world - a fantastic window on Roman life though the centuries!

Day 7 - ruinous

A visit to anywhere in the ancient world is just not legitimate without scrambling over fallen rocks and trying to image entire buildings from looking at one slice of a column.  I couldn't look anyone in the eye without having done so here, in Rome, the heart of one of the greatest civilizations ever known to man.

Our first day of cloud too, so looking at bits of stone took a more sombre tone, but we were ready for it, up early to get there before the hordes.  We started by walking up the Capitoline hill and looking down on the Forum and across to the Palatine hill before making our way down and inside. 

I tried to imagine what it was like to see Julius Caesar as he departed from home for his assasination (and could not keep from hearing his wife Cassandra, speaking in a Bornx accent that Wayne and Schuster put in her mouth for all time: "I told him, Julie, don't go!  But would he listen?  It's like talking to a wall!") , or troops returning from foreign conquests and parading down the Sacred Way (the "Broadway" of the Republic) in victory, or the vestal virgins moving to and from their shifts to keep the flame alight, maybe high fiving each other as they passed,  bleary-eyed from their previous day of being wined and dined as special guests at the Colosseum. 

Whatever the mental picture, these remnants and foundations were once the absolute centre of Roman life.  It's quite amazing there's anything left here at all when you think that the place became vacated not long after the Republic collapsed under its own excesses a coiple of millenia ago, then used as a quarry for pieces of stone incorporated into other buildings and roads, the place itself as a cow pasture for centuries.

The Palatine Hill, where twins Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves before fighting to found the city (Romulus won, thus the name "Rome")  was lovely and green, a garden at the end filled with citrus fruits glowing like globes of sunlight on such a grey day.  The Hippodrome, really a kind of open stadium likely for foot races (too small for chariots) lies below, surrounded by walls and trees, with Circus Maximus far below and outside the walls.  The Circus is enormous, capable of holding 250,000 spectators, about a quarter of the entire population of the city at the time, and 12 chariots at once.  How exciting it must have been to watch Ben-Hur hurtle his horses around the track! Well, ok Ben-Hur is a fictional charioteer, but there must have been some champion that kind of looked a bit like Charlton Heston and that caught the local's imagination.  Every audience needs its hero.

We ducked into the 'Museo Palatino', which had a semblance of warmth, although I'm sure that a museum of stone floors, stone walls, and filled with stones is ducked into for the opposite reason most the the year.  It is filled with pieces that have been excavated from the area, staturay and frescoes and even pieces form the Bronze Age. 

It's likely that if we had a large hot coffee in our hands and maybe a snack of the chocolate (me) and cheese (Martin) variety we could have spent hours more wandering around this place evocative of a long gone civilization, but the bodily attractions of this current civilization sent out their siren call and we were powerless to resist. 

Day 6 - kicking back

Our friends head to Istanbul today and we want to hang out with them before they go, so have decided not to include a visit to Tivoli or Ostia Antica today as planned.  They will be there when we return to Rome another time, for that we will. 

After a lazy breakfast and coffee at the Alex Bar, we wished A&E well on their way, and then decided to explore more of the 'hood.  First stop was the wonderful market at Campo di'Fiori, full of food items (for cooking, for eating and for taking home) including balsamic vinegars, dried herbs, olive oils, limoncello and crazily coloured pasta. 

There are also souvenirs of course, housewares and crafts- something for everyone.  After picking up a few items for gifts, we continued on towards the river, following our noses along streets that were full of shoe shops (Borini, Loco, and NuYorica), second hand jewellry, woolen shops and one wonderful little place that made and sold leather bags and purses, called T. Nobile.  The place smells fabulous and the woman who runs the place is great fun.  I couldn't decide which one to get, so got all three, including one hot pink prototype that I couldn't live without!

We went down to follow the river embankment a ways, joined only by a few homeless people and young lovers who sat on the wide bank and snogged, oblivious to the trash and smell of urine as only young lovers can be.  Rising again to street level, we emerged not far from the Synagogue and Jewish Museum, and the Ponte Fabricio, which once upon a time was called the Jews' Bridge as it once carried Jews and others who were not allowed to live in the city at the time across, to and from their workplaces.

It's no accident that the Jewish ghetto neighbourhood is located here, where the Tiber most often and disastrously flooded until the embankment was built in the nineteenth century.

We moved inland to see the ruins of Portica Octavio, built by Augustus before he was Caesar. Most amusing was seeing a house incorporated into the ruins, lived in by someone either who likes living among ruins or who wouldn't sell to those who preserved them.

We stopped for lunch practically next door (da Giggetto), where we finally got our fried zuccini blossoms (stuffed with anhovies) and artichokes (huge globes flattendd and fried until they are tender and crispy) as only the restuarnts in this area can do them (or at least that's what everyone says!) 

Little lanes suddenly turn on  themselves, or open into a square dominated by a church, or just wind on and on until they become something else.  It pays to stop a look up at walls and balconies and then even more at rooves and porticos as there are architectural and cultural rewards on display for the observant. 

We crossed busy and continued on to the Trevi fountain to throw in a few coins guaranteeing a return visit (so that we can see Tivoli and Ostia Antica!) 

and then past more shops for gifts - wonderful chocolates at Confetteria Moriondo & Gariglio, unique knits at Tartarughe, fountain pens at Stilo Fetti, wooden toys and pinocchios at still family-run Bartolucci. Oue feet sore, we dragged ourselves back home in time to watch the light change aand the bells ring over the rooves once again.