So from the small little airport I found the bus to Termini Station where Erica, Erik and Karissa were to meet me. Termini, however, is more than a little station and after an hour and a half of waiting, walking, trying to call on my dying cell phone, and loosing euro after euro to the pay phones, I decided my best course of action at midnight in Rome was to line up for a cab and show them the hostel address. From there I could call Erica and tell them I was safe and sound.
Apparently I greatly underestimated the tiny backstreets and confusion of buildings that is Rome, as well as its unlabeled avenues and lack of reliable road names, house numbers, or any grid-like street pattern. After being left at the top of a soaping dark street and pointed in the right direction, I was forced to seek aid at a nearby restaurant. The doorman showed me to a large wooden entranceway in a wall up the street, rang a buzzer, and pointed me inside. With thanks I entered a large, dark hallway of yellow stucco walls that led to an open courtyard of uneven mosaic tile and the entrance to an unmarked five story building. The stone stairs inside wound up into darkness and no where could I find any link to my hostel.
Without any options, but at least off the street, I decided to stay put in the hallway and wait for Erica and Erik to return, supposing I must be somewhere near the right spot. A few minuets of waiting and the large wooden doors creaked open again and a group of about seven men, speaking in German, entered. My mind still thinking in Deutsch, I decided to ask for help, and while none of them were familiar with the hostel, one lent me his cell phone so I could finally contact Erica who told me to stay put, that I was in the right spot, and they would come back to meet me.
In the end I found the hostel a fine accommodation, our room being on the top floor of the five-story building and the offices being to the right and up the stairs of the initial hallway. We had a kitchen to cook in and that first night spent tired and sweaty I was gracious for the lack of screen or glass in the window. Only parted wooden shutters and the warm, Roman air.
Through the window shutters. All things were in walking distance for us, especially the Colosseum in the blue sky and sun, high, fluffy clouds- weather I forgot could be real. While I found the ruins of the Forum intriguing, and the flora and stone of the Palatine Hill beautiful, the Colosseum was something less than it had been in my mind. Obviously crumbled, its majesty lessened by my own familiarity with contemporary stadiums, it was still the base of all things I had seen. In fact, the entire city was to me a large archeo-historical marvel, where sites of excavation ran through city squares and arches over streets were simply treated like any other structure, while in fact they were older than my very country.
The Arch of Constantine sits next to the Colosseum and as we ate lunch by it- a cheap Italian pizza, not more than cheese and tomato paste in a pita- the thought that I was in Rome began to come through my shocked mind. From there we wandered to the Circus Maximus, a long depressed field beside the Palatine Hill where broken bottles are prevalent and the city moves around above you.
The Roman Pantheon was an intriguing building which, like most churches of Rome, looks more than dilapidated from the outside. Nothing but a drab brick, brown rotunda, but coming through the columns of the entrance you find the most spectacular display of colored stone and marble floorwork. A beautiful circle, where on one side Raphael lay and on the other Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of Unified Rome, whose monument we encountered at least once a day on our way to the sights of the city.
The ceiling of the Pantheon is done is the receding square pattern of most domes, just as it is painted on St.Paul’s in London, but here all things were real. So was the stone, magnificent and looming overhead, meeting in a wide open circle to the sky that is supposedly spectacular in the rain, the water pouring a cylindrical column to the cool floor.
The Dome of the Pantheon.But still the Pantheon could not compare to St.Peter’s Basilica, which is a church obviously meant for something greater. Our day at the Vatican was another superb sunny morning, with clouds that did not appear real, floating lithely over the plaza. I was surprised at how quickly we walked into it, almost on accident suddenly we were emerging from a group of pillars to the crowds of St. Peter’s Square, the Basilica before us and the sun overhead.
Inside, however, it took my breath away. The size of all things was greater, the statues and the ceiling, the thickness of the columns and the sturdiness of the floor, things built by man, but not for them. My only thought, standing gaping in the center isle as people moved and parted about me, was that no other church, chapel, cathedral or dome would ever compare to the grandeur of the color and size before me now. The center isle culminated at the nave with the baldacchino by Bernini, a structure of four dark woods posts inlayed with gold and crowned with the figures of angels, under which lay the remains of St. Peter. The closest I have ever been to something so religiously important.
Behind this the grandeur of the actual alter lurked in gold, blazing like a sun ray, another work by Bernini, and appropriate, but striking me as something strange and altogether too gaudy, seemingly too contemporary for the center of the Catholic Church resting here before me. Still all the niches and chapels and the height of the walls, the way the light filtered in was more than enough to convey the feeling of being a visitor to something not designed for me. Not deigned for any of us.
Statue inside St.Peter's.The rest of our day was spent touring the labyrinth of the Vatican Museums, a long series of hallways stretching on forever, containing what might very well be the basis of all Western Civilization, art, culture, things whose pale reflections we see in the sight of our own capital. In Rome they appear authentic, new, never before though of, designed, built, fresh for the human eyes. Past walls of maps and murals and finally coming to a crossroads, we followed the arrows through a small door and into the crowd of the Sistine Chapel.
It was smaller than I imagined, and while pictures of it always seem too busy for the eyes, it wasn’t so in person. We moved through the bodies of people, all standing steady, necks craned up to take in the full view of intricacy and color. I wanted to stand there for hours, I could have really, while around bubbled up the well of conversation only to be “shussshed” and moments later, well up again.
We exited in a final push towards the rear door and found yet more museum hallways taking us back out of the museums, and eventually into Rome again, to the market stands which grabbed Vatican tourists on their way to the metro- all too like the vendors in the temple- but still intriguing to browse.
On our third day in the city we decided on a day trip to Hadiran’s Villa, a monumental site of excavation, a 45-minuet bus ride outside of the city in the tiny town of Tivoli. Here we leapt off the bus in a flurry, hoping for the right stop, and backtracked our way through back alleys until we found the road to the Villa, encountering along the way the most typical of Italian sights; the cypress-lined gravel road.
The Villa itself was a massive complex of crumbled stone where once the Emperor Hadrian spent his leisure. It rests at the base of a complex of small hills and mountains, into which stretched the buildings of Tivoli. It was sunny and warm again as we walked through open ruins, climbed on some, posed with others. Baths and pools, some full, some drained, were evident. Rotundas whose ceilings were simply now patchwork with sky and half-fallen columns. It was the perfect day trip as we sat in a grove of trees and ate our lunch, protected from the slight drizzle that had snuck up on us. Everywhere, in between stone walls and complexes, grew a vast array of wildflowers which inexorably ended up in my hair as the day progressed. Small lilies and bright poppies, buttercups, daises, some I could not name at all, giving color to everything around them.
A bouquet of Italian wildflowers.I was glad to get a day out of the city, whose maze of streets were becoming strangely familiar at this point, and see more of the country. All my life the idea of Rome has never been associated with any nationality. Rome in my mind simply was only the city, without ties, and to remember that I was in Italy was hard, even while encountering the language almost constantly.
On our fourth day the weather took a turn for the worst and came in a plunking downpour, thankfully still warmer than the Irish version, but unpleasant nonetheless. We set off through the neighborhood of the Villa Borghese, upscale and lush with greenery, in search of the Galleria Borghese, only to read in our tourbook as we huddled around a heater on the veranda of a nearby restaurant, that it was closed without a reservation. Disheartened, we turned to head back into the city, tramping wet streets in our drenched clothes- none of us prepared for the rain- to the Santa Maria della Vittoria, where housed is the famous sculpture the Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Unfortunately this was closed for lunch. Tired, we decided to dry out in the hostel, get some food, and come back in the afternoon. Tracing the same route we took that morning, we stopped for dinner at a small pizza place we had had breakfast, where the cook recognized us four wet Americans with a grin a euro slice of pizza.
Farther down the Quattro Fontane we found ourselves in the spot we had stood that morning, now in the warm evening sun. In fact we were standing at the top of the Spanish Steps, a sight we had missed in the rain of the Piazza Trinità dei Monti. Beautiful and in bloom, with flower pots in patterns on the stone, it was gorgeous crowded (as everything is) between buildings of deep dry yellow and red.
Nights in Rome, after we cooked our pasta dinners, we treated ourselves to the wonders of Italian gelato, frequenting the same stand each night. From there we would tour the Colosseum or the Trevi Fountain while it was lit at night, Erica and I vying for the “artsy-ist photo” we could take. To culminate our trips we even splurged our college-age budgets for a nice dinner out, complete with wine and dessert, at a small bistro with street-side seating and fairy lights for the long-falling dark.
My "artsy" photo attempt.Our final day was spent trekking the city one last time, from the Pyramid of Cestius back to the National Museum of Rome (which we discovered was closed on Mondays) to a final attempt to catch an Italian movie, and finally ending up at the Piazza del Popolo, after passing the Roman LUSH Store (a discovery I found most exciting)! Be also finally stepped inside the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, another drab, brick construction we passed each day in the Piazza della Reppublica on our way to or from Termini station. Inside we found a large open space, the church being more like a squat cross than having an extended isle, where works of art and pendulum demonstrations ticked in the corners. In ayed into the floor, however, was one of the most intriguing gold lines, cutting diagonal from the corner of the right wing, up past the alter, and surrounded with stone cuts of astrological animals and marks for seasons. Called the Meridiana, on sunny days a pin-prick hole in the ceiling lets in a dot of light that, depending on the season, lines up with certain spots on the golden line, telling dates and times on the floor of the church.
All the more because I come from such a young place, culturally speaking, Rome blew a gasket in my head. Something so old, existing, in front of my eyes, touching this stone that was carved and placed here before any man West of the Atlantic had even stepped foot in a boat for the Americas. Before anything I have ever know. But more than that, you get the feeling that any reference to classical culture you have ever encountered was only a shadow, and here is the real, monumental thing.
A girl offering flowers to Mary at the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri.
