Rome

     Irving R. Levine, Rome  

    Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Neither was Cleopatra.

     We had another walk once the bus got to Rome.  Taxis and delivery trucks went down the street past the hotel’s front door, but no room for a bus.

     We landed at a busy time in the afternoon.  We had to hurriedly empty the bus and gather our suitcases so the bus could quit blocking traffic.  “Hurry” wasn’t too practical as I was still recovering from the visit to the winery and the subsequent two-hour bus ride.

      We had to single-file down the walk and cross a couple of busy streets.  One of our number had swollen feet and couldn’t walk very fast.  She and her husband soon fell behind.  The Goodwife and I lagged the rest of the group to try to keep the laggers in sight.

     Thankfully, the tallest of our number also was concerned and hung back, too.  I could keep an eye on him as he stood 6’5” or more.  We briefly lost sight of our laggers when a red light cut us off.  The big guy came back and we managed to reunite. 

     Another block and the big guy’s wife directed us around a corner where we could see the end of our band entering our hotel.  There was a bit of grumbling about our guide from that incident, but the hard feelings didn’t last.  Our guide proved later at the coliseum that he was quite willing and capable to search out and rescue a lost soul.

     This hotel had a small elevator and the desk lady checked us in and handed us small sticky circles of paper with our room number on it.  We put the numbers on our suitcases as instructed and within ten minutes, a small Pilipino man delivered our luggage to us in our room.

       After a brief rest, we congregated in the hotel foyer where we were issued new radios.  We had turned in the ones we used in Florence and Venice.  The guide explained that only Vatican-issued radios could be used in Vatican City--rented to us by the Vatican.

      I am sorry to report that that information did little to lessen the prejudice against the Vatican instilled in me by my Lutheran upbringing.  It would have been nice to have those radios as we tried to find our way to the hotel.

     We set off on a walk from our hotel to the Pantheon (or is it Parthenon? I can never remember) with our guide pointing out landmarks left and right.  The Pantheon is a huge building with the ultimate vaulted ceiling and nothing but the walls to support it. 

     A question springs eternal as you view Rome:  How did those old guys build such huge buildings that lasted so long?  How could they know so much?

     The Pantheon had another remarkable feature—there was no charge to visit.  Following our trusty guide’s advice, we supped off the main thoroughfares for quite a lot less than eating outdoors under an awning along a busy street.

     We returned to our hotel, visiting a church and Trevi Fountain where you toss a coin over your shoulder into the sizable pool which insures your return to Rome someday (the city crew pulls a thousand or more Euros from the pool bright and early every morning) on our way.

 

Somewhere beyond the crowd is a huge pool and a fountain gushing from the lit wall.

      Vatican City was the next place we visited.  We rode the Metro, the subway, to get there.  We had the Fear of the Lord instilled in us.  The subway is the likeliest place to have your pocket picked, we were told.  Part of our tour was a money belt issued to every person.  Put your money, passport, and credit cards in your money belt. 

      Our guide said the easiest way to travel on the subway without incident is to go to the extreme ends of the train, either the front or the rear.  To that end, he divided us into two groups.  “Don’t try to all use the same doors,” he told us.  We followed his instructions, and sure enough, the ends of the train weren’t crowded and we had no problems.

     Part of our tour was a three-day pass for the Mero system, subway and bus.  We took the subway all three days.  We found it safe and convenient.  We kept our valuables in our money belts, nevertheless.

      Vatican City was crowded but I guess every famous place we went was crowded.  We were told that was nothing compared to summer crowds.  We spent three hours there, mostly on our feet. We had a local guide who took us to a bulletin board and lectured us about what I don’t remember. 

Our local guide who took us through the Vatican.  She said Martin, our tour guide, “is a rock,” a compliment.  I said “mostly from here up,” gesturing at his neck and head.  I was prepared to say that I only meant he had a soft heart if I was challenged for being cruel.  It was accepted as a joke.  Even Martin laughed.

      We went through three “museums” I think she called them, or were they galleries?  They were three long halls with flat ceilings, we were told, that were illustrated and looked as if they were domed.  The walls bore famous paintings and statuary, but my art reservoir was full to overflowing long since. 

     Eventually we went to St, Peter’s Basilica, and it was probably great but I am forced to admit I don’t remember much about it.  Too many churches with too much art.  We ended our time at Vatican City by passing through the Sistine Chapel.

      The guide had to shut up while we were in the Chapel—no talking.  Somewhere, a guy with a microphone would say “Silence!” in three or four languages.  “This is a church!”  The buzz—buzz would decline to a murmur.  But then, the buzz would grow to a dull roar and “Silence!” would ring out again.

     I bet the priest or whoever was doing the yelling wished he could thump some kids behind the ear for misbehaving in church.  But we were mostly adults!  I suppose such corporal punishment is politically incorrect nowadays.  Far be it for me to make a suggestion that could add to the church’s woes in an area that could be considered abuse.

     The Sistine Chapel is a marvel.  I sometimes wish we could have seen it first.  Then we could compare Michelangelo’s ceiling to all the other church ceilings we saw.  I guess it worked seeing all the other church ceilings first and then viewing the master’s.

     Standing looking at Michelangelo’s ceiling in a crowd stressed the neck.  In other churches less crowded, we could sit in a pew and lean back to look up.  We eventually did win a seat on the sidelines of the Chapel, but we were too far away from center to view the famous illustration of God and Adam stretching out to each other.

      I always understood that Adam was striving to reach God, but our guide, the local one, not Martin, suggested that God was emitting the spark of life to old Adam, animating his dust.  Well, end of my art critique.

       We gathered around a statue (or was it an obelisk?) in the Vatican courtyard near sundown, prior to gaggling back to the subway, and Martin pulled out two tickets he had managed to garner to attend the Pope’s appearance scheduled for the next day.  We had a few Catholics among us but there wasn’t much of a fight over the tickets.  Taking the tickets meant missing the Coliseum.  A couple did make the sacrifice and felt well rewarded for their choice.

     The subway delivered us back to the Spanish Steps, the landmark we relied on to find our hotel.  Why Spanish steps?  No one seems to know.

Coming up, the Coliseum.   Stay tuned.

Not Quite Rome

     A funny thing happened to us on the way to the forum.  We stopped at a winery somewhere between Florence and Rome.

     We took only our second, and last, bus ride while in Italy.  Quite different from many of the tours which take you to ten places in 12 days.  I think there must be a lot of bus time for those folks.

     As our airplane ride approached its end on our way to Venice, we flew over some really rugged mountains with here and there a village clinging to the slopes.  I kept looking for that territory as we rode from Venice to Florence and from Florence to Rome.  I never did see it.

      We did see mountains, but with rounded peaks and wider valleys than the ones I recalled seeing from the plane window.  We crossed Italy from east to west, but we must have taken a kinder gentler pathway.

       The bus pulled off the interstate and into a village.  We wound through the narrow streets and eventually left the pavement.  We climbed the curvy path upwards and eventually came to the winery.  We weren’t the first tourists to arrive there.  A big sign in the driveway near the yard said “Busses” with an arrow pointing to the left.

      In that section of the yard, there was room to turn a bus around, and probably room to maneuver farm equipment and trucks bearing the farm’s bottled product to the rest of the world.  During the climb up the graveled road, we went through a fog bank.  We climbed through the fog and could see the clouds now beneath us.

       It was still a bit cloudy as we debussed.  There was a ring of chairs in the pleasant yard behind the main farm building, maybe the home, but certainly the business office and the great room to host tourists and wine-tasting events.  Nobody sat since the clouds and fog left everything, including the chairs, dripping wet.  The clearing skies hadn’t had time to dry things off yet.

      So our hostess stood, and we stood, under the trees as she told us about the farm.  Grapes were the main crop on a 15-year rotation.  After 15 years, the vines need to be replaced.  When the old vines are torn out, the land is planted to alfalfa to replenish the nitrogen and restore the soil.

     I assumed that there must be something like 15 plots on their 750 acres, a pretty sizable spread compared to most European farms we have seen.  After a year of alfalfa, that crop is turned into the soil and a new crop of grapevines goes in. 

      After about 15 minutes of introduction to the agricultural portion of the place, we went into the great room which had a huge table in the center and chairs all around the walls.  In one corner was another table with wine glasses and bottles of wine.

      We got a lecture on wines and wine tasting.  Our hostess demonstrated wine appreciation:  first with the eye—hold up the glass and look at the color.  Next, with the nose, smell the contents of the glass and try to determine what fruits the wine was made from.  Then, you taste it, with sucking sound as you draw in air and roll the wine over your tongue.  Finally, you spit it out.  The lady held a crockery jar and used it as a spittoon.

      We were invited to taste, and swallow, and pour out what remained in our glass into the crockery jar, if we didn’t want to swallow it, rather than spitting it out.  That seemed a much better solution for wasting the wine we didn’t want to drink.  I knew if I drank all of it, there would be four samples, I would be asleep for the rest of our trip to Rome.

      So, I tasted the first glass, a white wine.  It was good, for wine, that is.  When the crock came around, I dumped the remainder of my wine into it.  Martin, our guide who sat next to me, gave me an elbow in the ribs.  “You wasted that wine!” he hissed.

      “What was I supposed to do with it?  I can’t drink it or I’ll fall asleep if I do.”

       “Give it to me!” he replied.  So after the next two pours, after I had taken a couple of sips, I poured the remnants of my goblet into Martin’s and he polished them off.  Sometime later, it dawned on me why he sat by me.  He knew I preferred beer to wine and always made sure I got beer when we took our evening meal together as a group.  He knew I wouldn’t want much wine and he could get a double portion.  Sly fox.

      Each wine goes with certain foods.  Wine that doesn’t go with a food will not taste good.  The lady made the point by having a man and a woman among us taste a wine after we had cleansed our palettes from the first wine by taking the proper appetizers from the big center table.  Neither of the guinea pigs liked the red wine very well.

      Then the two were asked to eat something, cheese, cracker, something I don’t remember.  Then they tasted the wine again.  And this time they liked the wine much better.

       We then all had to make the circuit of the big center table and choose the correct finger food before tasting the wine.  After three wines and the appropriate food from the table, we were ready for the final course, dessert.

     I think we tasted three white wines and one red.  The dessert wine was white again.  After the dessert wine, we were invited to go outside again where the sun had come out, dried off things and burned off the fog.  We could now see across the valley below us and take a few photos.  And line up to use one of the three bathrooms on the place.

    

      Thankfully, our bus driver carried his own lunch and didn’t imbibe in the wine.  He had turned the bus around and was ready to takes us back down the hill into the village and back to the busy interstate which like all roads in Italy, led to Rome.  On our way down, we could see much better with the now-clear skies. 

      It was a beautiful setting and a welcome change from the cities where we spent most of our time.

Florence

     We took a bus from Venice to Florence.  To get to the bus, we had to ride on the vaporetto, the city “bus” system.  It is the boat system that traverses the Great Canal, which is pretty much the heart of Venice.

    There were too many of us (27) to get on the first boat, so those of us who got on the first boat, got off and waited at another “station” where we had to change boats for the rest of the group.  Once on the bus, we made a couple of rest stops and a lunch break at “truck stops” on the interstate.

     A custom strange to us, we had to go select our sandwich or snack or whatever, go back to the cashier, put in our order and pay for it, then go back to the display case, hand over our receipt, and get what we ordered.  Then we had to figure our way out.

      In the convenience stores, you never leave by the same door you came in.  They have oneway turnstiles that let you in, but not out.  To get out, we often had to go downstairs and wander back and forth through aisles of stuff, like going to an Ikea store, where you have to look at everything they have to offer before you can exit.  Our guide explained that process of entry, ordering, paying and exiting, twice in the ten minutes before the bus drew to a stop at the truck stop.  Even with the heads-up, it was still a little bewildering, but we survived and made it back on the bus in time.  

     So we arrived safe and sound in Florence.  The bus driver had to pull over on a busy thoroughfare because the street the hotel was on was too narrow for him to navigate.  It was but a short block downhill with luggage in tow to the hotel courtyard.  This time there was an elevator (no such thing in the Venice hotel).  Our guide gathered all our suitcases near the elevator entrance and ferried them up to the proper floor, where we retrieved them and reported to our assigned room.

      After about 30 minutes to refresh ourselves, we gathered in a very pleasant terrace where we were welcomed with all kinds of beverages, many of them alcoholic and a few snacks.  As we imbibed, our guide gave us a briefing on Florence and some of the things we would see while there.

      Following the session on the terrace, we took a walk downtown to look at the landmarks we would be visiting.  The guide left us with about an hour before we were to meet in front of this giant statue and head to our dinner.  A few of us found a restaurant with outdoor seating (maybe all the restaurants had outdoor seating).  

     We had a little trouble finding seating for the six or eight of us, so a nice young man volunteered to abandon his table to us.  We prevailed on him to just let us join him, rather than drive him off.  It turned out he was from Scotland and the conversation was on.

     When I told him the farther north I got in England, the better I liked it, he glowed.  He was quite interested in Colorado so we pleasantly passed an hour before suppertime.  Before he left, he advised us to climb the hill and visit the fort.

    That night’s supper was a feast.  Every employee in the restaurant seemed a personal friend of Martin, our guide, and they spared nothing to make us welcome and happy.  Some of our number got a little too happy, but getting loud in Italy isn’t a sin.

    The feast was capped off when the main guy (owner? I don’t know) rolled in a big display case full of various desserts.  He took great pride and joy in displaying each dessert and explaining something about each one.  Rod, a fellow tourer, and I got along well, and I stuck close to him because he was diabetic and could turn down dessert without incurring the chef’s wrath.  So I didn’t get scorned too badly when I volunteered to help the Goodwife with whatever dessert she chose.

      At the end of dessert, nothing would do but have an aperitif.  “No thanks” wasn’t an acceptable choice.  The Goodwife and I had a lemon something.  The small swallow I took nearly gave me a heartburn it was so strong. 

     Then we made our way to the hotel.  Florence was a lot easier to navigate than Venice.  I could probably have found my way home without help.  Our hotel was only two or three blocks off the Arno River.

      The next day we toured the Domo, a church with a dome, I guess.  It was reminiscent of the old barn during a blizzard.  It was crowded, warm and stuffy, and noisy.  Our first day in Venice, we were issued a radio on a lanyard with one earbud.  Our guides had a microphone and could broadcast to us wherever we went as long as we didn’t get too strung out.

      We went through the crowded church trying to listen to the local lady guide without steeping on someone or getting stepped on.  By the time we were through, I decided I had seen enough Madonnas with Baby Jesus.  The earlier ones, it was pointed out, had no facial expressions and somewhat unrealistic proportions.  Later ones had various facial expressions displaying joy or dismay or what have you.

      The problem for later painters was what expression to give the child Jesus.  After all, he was God, not man.  As we viewed one picture, the guide told us, he child Jesus sitting on Mary’s lap looked like Winston Churchill.  Well, no cigar, anyway. 

       Later, we would visit the Pitti Palace, built by the Medici family (maybe, not sure).  Every room, and there are a lot of rooms,  is stuffed with so much art you could spend a week there and not begin to cover all the pictures and statuary.  Needless to say, my reservoir for art was saying “Full!  Whoa!  Quit!”  We left there and still had an evening appointment at the Academy where we saw some Michelangelo statues and we got an earful on that guy. 

     He learned anatomy by dissecting corpses, which was strictly against the law, at that time in the hands of the church.  He wasn’t a very nice guy.  He rarely finished anything.  He had underlings who did a lot of work on his “David” statue.  He was human.  We saw David, in all his naked glory.  It was crowded, but nothing like the place we visited that morning.

      Some of the statues we saw were disfigured by having their maleness missing.  One brave soul among us asked what happened to the amputations.  The lady guide somewhat sheepishly said there was a room in the museum filled with genitalia. 

     Other statues had fig leaves.  Not David.  He is there intact.  It didn’t appear to me that David was circumcised.  I wanted to ask about that, but I wasn’t sure I was seeing things correctly, plus I thought one embarrassing question a night was enough.  I refrained. 

      Well, that’s what you get when you turn a clod loose in an art gallery.

      The next day was quite interesting.  We took a short tour of something, outdoors I seem to remember.  We followed that with a fun activity.   We took a cooking class.

      We were divided into teams of four and five with one team of six.  Some of us on each team made dough while others prepared vegetables and still others worked on dessert, tiramisu.  I was on the noodle crew.

      We broke two eggs into a bowl of flour and mixed.  Then we rolled and folded and rolled again.  Out came a little machine that looked for all the world like a miniature washing machine ringer on the old machines before the automatic washers came to be.  The machine had a crank.  We ran the dough through the rollers twice on setting 4.  Then we switched to two (or something like that) and ran the dough through two more times.  By this time, it was getting thinner and thinner and about a yard long.

    Out came an attachment for the hand-cranked roller machine.  This one had blades and a grate like a rotary nut chopper.  It took two of us to hold the skinny dough up and send it through the blades.  Out came noodles.

      Our instructor took our noodles on a tray to the boiler in the back room.  When they came back ten or fifteen minutes later, it was spaghetti, by George.

     Our instructor was quite young and quite voluble.  "Aye yi yi!  What have you done to my spinach!?”  We thought we were supposed to chop it up.  We were NOT to chop it up.  Oh well.

      He was quick to point out our errors, but equally quick to laugh with us, so it was okay.  While we were struggling with the noodles, the tiramisu came along nicely.  Somewhere, one of our subdivisions was working on a sauce.  Spaghetti was our first main course.

      Everywhere we went, the menus all had a first main course and a second main course.  For this meal, the second main course was chicken fried in a tomato sauce.  It wasn’t shake and bake, but I did he-elp.  The chicken was all cut up for us and the oil was in the pan over the burner.  We started the fire and threw in the chicken.  It fried while we worked on the noodles.

     I don’t remember what we put on top of the chicken, tomatoes and green peppers for sure.  The green peppers had been boiled and were soft.  I was supposed to peel the peppers.  The best I could do was strip the meat off the skin, but that didn’t work very well.  No skin and no seeds, I was told.

     When our chef-instructor saw what I had done, he studied it and said, “Very interesting.”  I kept my mouth shut.  When everything was done, we repaired to the basement, which was really a wine cellar with bottles of wine everywhere, like in the catacombs.  There were two big tables were we seated ourselves.  Out came the ubiquitous bottles of wine, and we got set to enjoy the fruit of our labors.

  

      After wine came bread and then the spaghetti.  There were two or three different kinds of sauce, depending on which team had prepared it.  After the spaghetti came course two, the chicken.  It was quite good, I must admit.  We finished up with the tiramisu.

      That afternoon, we followed the advice of our Scot friend and climbed the hill up to a fort.  There was no sidewalk.  We shared the street with scooters and cars.  Fortunately, the traffic was oneway, so we only had to watch or back, and take to the wall when we heard something coming.  The wall was the old city wall that was topped by the fortress.

     We weren’t disappointed.  It was beautiful and quiet, just as our Scot friend advised us.  We wandered around and gazed at the city below.  All three cities we visited had churches everywhere, practically on every block.  Okay, so I exaggerate a little, but still, a lot of churches.

     We got there about 5:30.  At 6 p.m. all BELL broke out.  All of those churches below us had belfries, and at 6 p.m. they all began tolling.  We had fun trying to pinpoint which sound was coming from which church.  It was quite a serenade.

      We had to go back down the big hill.  This time the traffic was coming up towards us, and it was beginning to get dark, but we made it safely down.  The fort didn’t close until 8 p.m.  We wondered about that, but we figured it might be quite pretty to gaze down upon the city lights.  We didn’t find out. 

       After our big midday meal, we weren't very hungry, so we went to a bar where the snacks were free if you bought drinks.  It was one place they didn’t mind if I drank beer instead of wine.  We wandered back towards the hotel.  The Goodwife had a gelato to finish off our meal, and our day.

      We needed our rest.  The next day, we headed for Rome.