Rome
First of all, I want to apologize to folks out there, as I have been lame in posting for almost two weeks. Europe has been a mad scramble, as you will see, but I should have carved time out to keep up on the blog. Connectivity has been lousy, I was on a cruise ship for a week, and basically, our days have been so packed that when it was time to choose between collapsing on a bed, or writing for an hour or two, I've chosen collapsing.
I'm glad I wrote my Asian impressions, as the change to Europe has been everything I've expected. No surprise there, as I've been here umpteen times, and Kim and I lived in Holland for 18 months in 1992-1993. So we knew the turf, knew how things worked. Needless to say, the contrasts has been amazing. However, if there is one core observation between the eight weeks in Asia and our three in Europe so far, it is the contrast to what we have come to describe as the difference between Travel and Tourism. In Asia, whenever we were off the beaten path, which was often, one felt like a traveler. Sure there were other tourists, but there was a personal space available as one travelled about. Also, your fellow travelers were from a broad spectrum of the world, Europe, Asia etc.
So I coined a word that does a good job of describing the difference. When we were in Phuket and Thailand, needless to say we had a lot of discussions about the tragic Tsunami of 2004. A Tsunami of course is an unstoppable wave that comes at you, keeps on coming at you, and does not stop coming at you. Being the kind parents and slow paced family that we are, we landed in Rome after 18 hours of travel, got to our hotel, showered, changed, and headed off to walk around Rome for 10 hours. And somehow my 4 year old kept up, with a bit of carrying at the end!
Our first stop was to St. Peters and the Vatican Museum (awesome!), and the Sistine Chapel (or as the kids called it the Sixteen Chapel). This was a deliberate choice after Asia, as after all our Wat Temples, seeing the numero Uno Wat of Christiantity. The line to St. Peters was about 1/3 of a mile long, which we have heard is SHORT, moved quickly, and took about 30 minutes. St. Peters is so vast and amazing it can swallow any amount of humanity. We then went off to the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel, where our new word was born. Trying to get to the Sistine Chapel there was a gridlock of people, all following folks with signs or holding closed umbrellas up in the air. We went another way, through part of the Vatican, which was a maze of incredible rooms, some with museum exhibits, some with fantastic paintings and fresco's going back hundreds of years. However, if you stopped for more than a second to look, first would be the guide with the sign held high in the air, then the group of 30 to 40, then another sign in the air (or umbrella), then another group, endlessly. Hence the term that should be in the dictionary, and is the most descriptive term of European Tourism in Summer Peak season---
The TOURNAMI: Noun, Definition: An endless wave of tour groups, most with stickers on their chests, filling any breathable space, and swarming through Europe's highlight spots.
This is NOT to say that these places are not worth visiting, they are. But the experience changes when one is part of a pack, and really unable to make one's once decisions on timing or experience. Kim and I have been consistent about this for a looong time, as when we lived in Europe in 1992, we went to the Louvre in Paris in mid-Summer. We bought our ticket, went in, ended up among a Tournami (fifteen years before we coined the word), turner around, left, and went back in November and again in the Winter. It's tough, because if you come to Europe, there are things that you DO HAVE TO SEE, but again, it's just not the same when you are part of a wave, and especially when it is hot, hot, hot. The good news is that when you have time, as we do, you can hit the places on the beaten path, and still find ways of getting off the Tournami zones, which we did. And as expected, Rome was special.
Before I get into the travelogue side of these posts, another comment. And big part of travel is seeing the "old stuff". Almost by definition, the 'old stuff' is ruins, and in Rome, there is more "old stuff" than in most places. Without getting dismal here, it is clear from this trip, no secret to anyone, that there are cycles of growth and collapse that seem to exist everywhere in the world, and I'll have more to say along these lines. The 'good news' here is that it is not only human's stupidity to other humans, but nature plays a huge part. It seems to Kim and I that there is an equal part of man's inhumanity to one another, and the Earth doing 'earthy things' (floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fires) that contribute to all the cool things we get to see when we travel.
So, a bit of a Rome Travelogue will follow here. First of all, St. Peter's is a MUST. Incredible, even with the crowds. The Vatican Museum is boggling, and vast enough that the half and full days tours don't have it on the itinerary. Like much of what remains of Ancient Rome, the Church has played a key part in preserving and maintaining the ancient statues and monuments, even if as a male what they did to the guy statues that now have fig leaves on them makes me uncomfortable. To see gallery after gallery of 2000+ year old sculpture is staggering, and the closest thing that someone can do to time travel. The Chariot in the lead was a 10-1 longshot…
Kim took this one, she likes taking pictures of feet. Gotta ask her why…
We both love Mosaics…
The Vatican Museum was a place we would have wanted to spend more time in, but we had to get through the herds to get to the Sisteen Chapel. Also amazing, but gotta tell a funny anecdote. No photos are allowed, which is fine, as tons of knuckleheads leave the flash on in their camera's which can break down and damage paintings over time. So no flash and no photo rules are fine by me (hence you will see a lack of indoor pictures from me in Italy relative to other locations). But in the Sisteen chapel, crowded beyond any fire marshall's comfort level, they want SILENCE. It is quiet, with a murmer as folks talk to one another about Michelangelo's masterpiece. If the mummer gets louder, the guards 'shush' the crowd, or yell 'silencio' in a not too friendly fashion. If they get cranky however, if the crowd gets above a murmer, they BLAST an Electronic PA Announcement at ROCK CONCERT LEVELS a "be quiet you stupid tourists" in about ten different languages that takes about 5 minutes of almost 'plug your ears' volume.
After going back, having PASTA, and collapsing, got up the next morning and started Power Tour of Rome Day 2. We started with the Palatine. The Palatine was the hill of Rome that was the "upscale district' where the rich and influential families and merchants lived. It is VAST, hence of the beaten path of the Tournami's and a highlight of our Rome visit. We came up on the road, now being restored, that the was road into the Palatine thousands of years ago, past massive aqueducts and the remains of vast villas.
There were acres of buildings to wander around, some five or six stories high. There were original vast domed buildings of Emporer's, many with intact ceilings. If you looked closely, remains of floors, remains of fresco were there to see over the raw bricks that are only the faintest reminder of what this looked like in Roman times. There was a broad tunnel system connecting parts of the Palatine, and with a bit of exploring we actually found a segment that was still open to visitors (like what you see above).
You can seen a fait spec at the far end of the tunnel, which was a great cool relief from a hot Rome day, that gives you a sense of scale. These were huge, and the engineering was robust enough that they remain intact over the millennia. The construction of most of the buildings and these tunnels was brick or cement, covered by cement, covered by stucco or marble. In places like this tunnel, there were a few places that gave you a hit of what the tunnel above was like years ago….
From the Palatine, you can go down, past an amazing still active spring, to the Roman Forum, also wonderful, but part of the Tournami Circuit… Note the population density difference between prior photos and below.
From the Forum (same day) we went to the Coliseum. I'll skip the usual Coliseum photo's, but it is still a great site, and this was my third visit. It can swallow crowds, obviously. I learned a couple of things this trip. First, over the centuries, the Coliseum was basically used as a neighborhood marble quarry, and continued to be trashed continuously for thousands of years. Second of all, earthquakes continued to make things fall down. Another Kudos to the Church, as a few hundred years ago, they slowed down/stopped folks from continuing to trash the building. There was a great exhibit on Eros (not from the Church!), where you learned that Eros is really the guy that ended up being Cupid. I'll skip photos, but there were some other fun stuff in the exhibit. 95% of it was appropriate for children.
The next photo might be a bit hard to see in Low Res. As they find more 'seats' from the Coliseum, the find more with graffiti. Some actually have comments on the graffiti over the years. This is an image of someone's favorite gladiator in action—
A mosaic of gladiators in action:
Gotta love this quote:
The next day we had a real highlight of the trip. Several months before, at the recommendation of a colleague, we engaged the services of Alan Epstein. Alan is a top notch guide in Rome, a guy from Philadephia who has been living in Rome with his wife and kids for the last thirteen years since he got his PHd in European history. We told Coined the term Tournami that we wanted to see the 'real rome', and he did not disappoing.
We met at our hotel, and walked a block away from our hotel to an outside coffee shop in the along the curved façade of a plaza called the Piazza dela Republicca. We learned sitting there in the morning with Alan that the shape of this bustling urban Piazza was not determined by a talented architect or urban designer, but was determined by a vast Roman bath complex that had been there several thousand years before. The baths were SO vast that they could serve 3500 people at a time, plus had entertainment areas, meeting areas, drinking areas etc. They weren't just for getting clean, but were the core of life of a lot of Rome. He said that I could ask at my hotel, which was a few hundred meters away, what was in their basement. Yep, when I checked out I asked, and it was on top of the baths.
We went into a Church across the plaza, Santa Maria degli Angeli. As he showed us the old church, he showed us areas that still retained their Roman walls. In the back of the church was a small unheralded exhibit, showing where the baths were and how the modern neighborhood evolved. Staggering, as the modern streets, curved buildings and ruins were all intermingled. The Roman construction was so robust, it was easier to follow the shape of the baths than to demolish and build from scratch. The next shot isn't the greatest of photos, however you can see part of the Church to the left, a modern building to the right, and our hotel was about 150 meters further away from the modern building, and it was ALL the bath, as were the wall you see straight ahead and going below sightline. Looking down a the ground level, unburied but not an archeological dig, you could see the remains of flooring and mosaics. And there was not another tourist within 100 meters of us, in Rome in mid-summer.
If you click this link from the University of Chicago, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/romanurbs/bathsdiocletianplan.html you will see sketch of the baths. The Piazza della Republicca, probably 150-200 meters across, represents the semicircle at the bottom of the image. The picture above is a wall somewhere along the left side middle. We had breakfast on the left side of the semicircle on the bottom, which again is a huge plaza. Staggering.
We then walked the back streets of Rome, seeing both the 4th Century BC walls, and the 2nd Century AD walls popping out of streets and buildings.
Along the way, we passed numerous places to eat pigs.
He then took us on a bunch of back streets leading to a small church.
Down steps to this Basilica, you went into one of the earliest churches in Rome, with Fresco's going back to the 4th century. The level of detail on the images, and the skill of the artistry was impressive, and only went downhill for centuries from here…
The winged horse from the top right in detail.
The Rome of this image was not an imaginged rome, but the Rome outside the door of this Church:
By the 11th or 12th century, the Churches were still often built on Roman foundations, but the skill of the mosaics and fresco's, while still beautiful, had degraded considerably. Rome became the land of the flat faces. The floors of these Churches were some of the most amazing art I saw, as in the 11th and 12th centuries artisans would take the flooring of the old Roman palaces and villas, break them up, and create beautiful floors for their Churches or buildings (forget the name of what this was called).
Keep in mind the images above and below were seven or eight hundred years newer than the Roman mosaic's preceeding.
We visited the Markets of Emperor Trajan, where the buildings were up to eight stories high, and the walls were impressive for any time. To me, seeing the 'real' flooring uncovered makes it real.
We then went to a 14th century Church, built on the top of a 6th century charch, build on top of 2nd century Roman buildings. No photo's allowed, we ended up 60+ feet underground. The Roman buildings were still there, and my kids got to step into an ancient Roman alleyway about three feet wide.
The past does not go away. It just changes shape, whether by the hand of man or nature.
Jeff -
I somehow stumbled across your blog. Great job, and I hope someday to take all the international travel I did for business and take Ethan and Theron on a trip like the one you and Kim are on. I only wish I had a digital camera back when I was traveling all the time!
Jim
Posted by: Jim | July 17, 2007 at 03:29 PM