The Burgess Shale

We are alive and well in Rome. I'm posting from a little internet-enabled bookstore in Trastevere, just down the winding, terra cotta-toned streets from our tiny hotel by the Tiber. Rome is astonishing — every street is a museum, every building photogenic. Hard to decide whether I'm overwhelmed or exalted. So much to say, but later, when I can do it justice.

Hope all is well in the homeland.

You know what you get to do when you're traveling to Europe in a week?

You get to buy maps.

More than that, you get to spend half an hour looking very serious in the Globe Corner Bookstore, with five different maps of Rome and three of Florence spread out on a map drawer, comparing their ease of use, level of detail, clarity, bonus features, and overall scrumptious mappiness. (I looked particularly serious today, in my new charcoal-gray shirt with the white buttons, black jeans, and black pinstripe Chucks.) I walked out with:

• the Rough Guide map of Rome (marked with restaurants and cafés, and very cleanly surveyed and laid out, if not quite as pocketably handy as the little laminated Streetwise Rome),
• the Pocket-Pilot map of Florence (small, plastic, and pretty detailed — a bit of a tradeoff between wussiness and size),
• the GlobalMap of Siena, and
• the Litografia Artistica Cartografica map of Ravenna (both the only ones available).

I was excited about the trip before, but now that I have maps to pore over on the plane and train I am fairly well bouncing.

For our first few nights, we will be staying at the Hotel Domus Tiberina, steps from the Isola Tiberina, the only island in the Tiber, formed around the body of the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus, who was drowned there in 510 BC*. A shrine to Aesculapius was built on the island in the 3rd century BC, because a snake jumped off a boat and swam to it, and the basilica of Saint Bartholemew was built on top of it in 998. The northern bridge has been in continuous operation since 62 BC. Deep time, baby.

* Caution: May be folk tale.