The Burgess Shale

Sunday, July 5 - Rome

On our last day, Italy began informing us that it was time to go.

The train from Ravenna to Bologna was nightmarish, the worst public transportation experience of my life. We were wedged with all our luggage among hundreds of locals returning from the Vent'anni di Ravenna festival — imagine the most crowded subway car you've ever been on, add twenty people, and make the ride last for two hours. For two hours I stood completely immobile, a Tetris block locked into a row of other blocks — one of the S-shaped ones, since my feet were displaced a foot to the right of my hips by my suitcase and my head was immobilized by a cage of armpits. My muscles started to scream after an hour; my toes were wedged beneath my suitcase. I was desperately trying to keep an eye on adfamiliares as more people climbed aboard at every stop and she was forced farther and farther away. The time it took to pack more people in at every station made the train run late, and I grew frantic about missing our connection.

All the while, six feet away from me, the prototypical Italian princess was holding court amongst her luggage, spread out on the floor with room for her and her teenage friends to sit, refusing to comprehend, with elaborate shrugs, that she could take up less space. Eventually I resorted to tapping them on the shoulders and pointing, with acid glarings, at the empty spaces they could move to. When she got off the train, I yelled, "Ciao, principessa!" That was the rudest thing I did in Italy. ( Click for a picture of Trenitalia brand sardines! )

We did make the connection in Bologna (since it, too, was delayed), which ensured we'd step out of the station in Rome in time to see a heavyset man in a red T-shirt pelting across the street with a briefcase and a purse. Around the corner, a lanky, pallid, Wonka-esque Canadian with a comically oversized map was lurching from side to side, crying, "Where is it? Where is it?" He was jet-lagged and panicked and nearly incomprehensible, but eventually we got him to tell us that someone had stopped him to ask for directions, and while the map was blocking his view his briefcase (with his passport, his camera, his books) had disappeared. I had to tell him that I'd seen it go. He seemed so lost, so heartbroken, and there was so little we could do. It unsettled me — I was one big exposed nerve for a while afterward.

After that, we managed to have a good last day, recapitulating some of our greatest hits — the Largo Argentina, the Piazza Navona, the Imperial Fora, shakerati at Caffè Sant'Eustachio, mozzarella at Ōbikā. We bought some of Enzo's artwork at Santa Caterina dei Funari, and Enzo (who spoke not a word of English) was clownish and grateful and a little sad. Even the unsettling experiences of the morning had their upsides — the kind and patient Lebanese tourist, more useful than us, who stopped to help the panicked Canadian; the rowdy boys on the train who looked like they were going to be trouble but instead made the trip more bearable by leading us all in cheers when the conductor successfully squeezed a few more people in. (They also inflated a condom and batted it around the cabin for a rousing game of condom-ball. One of them ran out at a stop, stripped off his shirt, and dunked his upper body in a fountain before running back on. Lively, cheerful, civic-minded hooligans!)

( Cut for the last pictures of Rome. )

This should really have been my final Italy post, but I didn't want to end on a downer, so I'll be following it with pretty pictures of Florence and San Vitale in Ravenna. This full set is here.

Friday, June 26 and Sunday, July 5 - Rome

In my honeymoon photo posting schedule, I seem to have broken the Piazza Navona out into its own photoset. I'm not sure why, but if I had to guess I'd say it was because of the photo above, a detail from Antonio Della Bitta's Neptune Teabagging an Octopus. It's really quite an excellent octopus.

I'm finding it hard to think of a place in Rome more crass and crowded and touristy than the Piazza Navona, to say nothing of the Angels & Demons connection, but I can't hold that against it. It's a permanent art fair and performance space, filled with street artists selling luggage-packable art, living statues, puppeteers, musicians. (All expertly mercenary — Michael Jackson died the day we left home, and by the time we reached the Piazza Navona the next day one puppeteer had incorporated a Michael Jackson finger-puppet into his act.) I can and do blame it for being difficult to photograph — the western side of the plaza is dominated by the Palazzo Pamphilj and Sant'Agnese, which cut it off from the sun beginning in midafternoon. Next time, morning light.

We visited the Piazza Navona on our first day and our last day, so it serves me as memory bookends — from masterpiece overload to harried souvenir-shopping, from homebody uncertainty to globetrotter confidence, from being ready to devour all of Italy to being ready to go home.

( Cut for further nudity! )

More Navonaness here.

Monday, June 29 - Rome

On Monday, between lunch and the time San Clemente opened, adfamiliares and I wandered the Esquiline, which is now given over to a connected series of public parks. This follows a long tradition of public land use — civic-minded emperors used the space for temples, amphitheaters, and Trajan's massive bath house, which has, over the intervening centuries, decomposed into the American southwest (see above). Those emperors were sending a political message: Nero, in a wildly unpopular move, appropriated the Esquiline for his sprawling and excessive Domus Aurea (Golden House) after the Great Fire scoured the hillside clean of private residences. The palace was leveled and filled in after Nero's death, so his successors could build public buildings. Now, 1900 years later, it is being re-excavated via tunnels all through the Esquiline — adfamiliares and I spent a happy hour tramping over the grassy hills and peering down ventilation/light shafts, trying to puzzle out what was going on underfoot.

Monday was also the day we toured the Catacombs of Domitilla — miles and miles of grim tunnels, lined with rough stone slots where bodies were stored. We descended from a lizardful garden to a sunken basilica, then down a little stair to the catacombs. They're huge (see link below) — our tour was abbreviated (after a lengthy wait in the monastery garden), and our irritatingly "spooky" guide seemed in a rush to get back aboveground for siesta, but we could've walked for hours and still not come to the end.

After dark, we played tourist and tossed coins into the Trevi Fountain, then climbed the Spanish Steps with gelati, to gaze out over the city at night. ( Cut for night photos, and frightening hot dogs! )

More photos here. They weren't permitted inside the catacombs, but there are some remarkable maps and images from a 3D mapping project on the Austrian Academy of Sciences site (scroll down, and don't miss the team portrait). I try to imagine what it would be like navigating that maze with the body of a loved one.

Sunday, June 28 - Rome

The Ara Pacis ("altar of peace") was erected by the senate along the Via Flaminia to celebrate the Pax Augusta, the end of civil war as brought by Augustus (aka the end of the Republic and the start of the Empire). It's a remarkably persuasive piece of architecture — decorated with portraits of the imperial family, symbols of peace and prosperity, and other pro-imperial propaganda aimed at convincing the populace that this new Empire thing was what the gods really wanted anyway. And anybody coming to Rome from the north couldn't help but see it.

It was lost in the Tiber's flood plains for centuries, but eventually chunks started turning up, and archaeologists were able to do a fair job of reassembling it in the early 20th century. Mussolini had it moved next door to the Mausoleum of Augustus in 1938, which is where it stands today, though his fascist outer building was torn down and replaced in 2006 with a big, antiseptic-white, glassed-in gift-box designed by Richard Meier — very controversial!

adfamiliares hadn't seen the Ara Pacis before, and was suffused with girlish glee the entire time we were there. "It's a very significant monument," she says when I tease her.

( Cut for peace and imperial rule! )

The rest of the set is here.

Various dates - Rome

Rome is filled with beautiful churches, and it seems every one is encrusted with glorious ornamentation and packed to the rafters with great works of art. We were able to give some of them the time and attention they deserve, but for many we only had time to poke our heads in and snap a few photos. This is the grab-bag post for four of the latter type: Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Sant'Alessio, San Rocco, and Sant'Agnese in Agone.

Above is Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the only Gothic church in Rome. (The pointed vaults and deep blue color scheme are dead giveaways.) It's called "sopra Minerva" because it was built on the site of a temple to Minerva — well, Isis, actually, but they didn't know that at the time. This is also the church where Galileo was forced to recant. We arrived five minutes before services started (that's what the sign in the picture is telling us), which is a shame because it's pretty spectacular. adfamiliares visited again on our last day, since it's one of her favorite churches, but I was running around trying to find Enzo the street artist, so I only had the five minutes. I was able to take a picture of the stained glass window that proves the Dominicans are in league with Cthulhu, though! ( Cut-hulu fthagn! )

Saint Alexius, the story goes, left home as a young man to escape an arranged marriage, then returned years later after living as an ascetic. He'd changed so much that his parents didn't recognize him, but they let him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. When he died there, identification papers on his body revealed the truth. His parents' surprise was exceeded only by our own when we walked into Sant'Alessio on the Aventine and found the very stairs beneath which he'd died! Supposedly! Borne aloft by angels! ( Cut for a stairway to heaven. )

We only popped into and out of San Rocco (next to the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Ara Pacis), since we had places to go, but I found it moodily opulent, with the feel of an attic. ( Cut for chandeliers. )

On our last day, we visited Sant'Agnese in Agone, just off the Piazza Navona. ("Agone" has nothing to do with agony or martyrdom — it's the site of an athletic competition. "Piazza Navona" evolved from "Piazza [i]n'Agone".) Saint Agnes was stripped naked and dragged through the streets by a Roman magistrate who didn't like her vow of chastity, but her hair miraculously grew long and clothed her. Hooray! She was still killed, though — the church is built on the site of the brothel where she was martyred, and it is apparently possible to ask the sexton to unlock the door that leads to the 4th-century ruins below the church. (We did not know this, alas.) ( Cut for uncut hair. )

As usual, you can find the whole set on Flickr.

Saturday, June 27 - Rome

On the Palatine, it's not difficult to imagine the lifestyles of the rich and imperious, to re-dress the crumbling brick walls in marble and populate the stairs and arches with elegant Romans. You can see them nibbling on snacks, or drifting around the fountains, or idly discussing the races going on in the Circus Maximus below. It was a hot day when we were there (they all were), and the cool breeze skating over the hilltop made it very clear why emperors would choose to live there. I was particularly excited to see — to be shown, really, by adfamiliares and her constant companion, the Blue Guide — the newly opened House of Augustus (almost humble, by comparison with later additions), the foundations of an Iron Age hut village, a shallow pool with islands in the shape of Amazon shields, and an octagonal labyrinth-cum-impluvium.

In the Antiquarium (the museum on the Palatine), we were both amazed to come across the Alexamenos Graffito, uncovered in 1857 in the paedagogium (a training school for court pages). It shows a man gazing at a donkey-headed man on a cross, and is captioned, in untidy scratches, "ALEXAMENOS WORSHIPS HIS GOD." It is thought to be the earliest depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus, as well as a pretty funny illustration of the mockery early Christians dealt with. (I tried to get a picture, but it's just scratches in plaster; you can see it on Wikipedia.)

( Cut for palatial photos! )

The full set is here.

Saturday, June 27 - Rome

Tip for the traveler: buy your combo ticket at the unpopular Palatine, not at the Colosseum! We felt awfully superior breezing past the long line of punters waiting to buy their tickets. We were the last ones in, too — they swung the gates closed behind us.

Unfortunately, my camera batteries were running on fumes by the time we got there — this was at the end of the day, after the Palatine, the Capitoline Museum, and the Forum — so I was forced to be a little parsimonious. I did get a few shots in, though it meant circling the whole arena — twice, once on the lower level and once on the upper — to find the late-afternoon light. Let's just say Colosseum is a good name for it. By the end, we were thinking wistfully of the sail-like awnings that used to shade the spectators.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in Rome, it was easy for me to imagine what it must have been like to attend the games as an ancient Roman — maybe because I'd been to a baseball game a few weeks before, and neither stadium design nor sports fandom has changed much in 2000 years. To underscore the point, the museum on the upper level contained a case full of ancient concessions that archaeologists had sifted out of the soil — chicken bones, pomegranate seeds, peach pits, pinecone scales. I have to admit it sounded pretty appealing, buying a crock of sunflower seeds and spending the afternoon with my buddies (and 50,000 of my most bloodthirsty fellow citizens) at the ostrich fights.

( Cut for colossal photos! )

My Colosseum set is on Flickr.

Saturday, June 27 - Rome

I hope y'all are enjoying these photo posts, because I've now uploaded a solid 18% of my pictures. Whoo-boy! This set is from the Capitoline Museums, which are packed full of classical treasures — like the remarkable Dying Gaul with his broken sword, above, about which Byron wrote

He leans upon his hand—his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually low—
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one.

The museums are contained in two buildings cupped like parentheses around the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline. A subterranean passage links them, and to judge by the echoing silence therein I suspect most tourists experience museum fatigue after the first, and never find their way to the second. The museums are built around structures left in situ — the massive foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus stick up through the floors at one point, and you can take a glass-walled elevator ride through the stratae of an excavation.

This was the first time I learned that two fully-charged camera batteries are not sufficient for a day in Rome. But I did get a goodly number of photos. ( More antiquities within! )

My complete set of Capitoline Museum photos is up on Flickr, and as I add new sets they will go into my Italy 2009 collection.

(Edit: Muttering to myself, I just summed up the whole trip: "Never have I seen so many things with their own Wikipedia articles!")

Friday, June 26 - Rome

The first sight we really saw was the Pantheon. We passed hatfuls of ruins getting there — the Largo Argentina, the Theater of Marcellus, the Circus Maximus, the Portico of Octavia (which sprouted from the sidewalk beside our lunch restaurant) — but this was the first structure (other than our hotel) we entered. It was my first experience with the monumental scale of worship in the ancient world — the interior space would just contain a sphere 142 feet in diameter. It was converted into a Christian church in the 7th century, which saved it from the fate of the Colosseum and other structures — although much of the marble facing was reused at one time or another, and Pope Urban VIII melted down the massive bronze pedimental sculpture for cannon, which led one anonymous wag to say, "What the barbarians didn't do, the Barberinis did."

( Photos for all the gods within! )

My complete set of Pantheon photos is up on Flickr, and as I add new sets they will go into my Italy 2009 collection.

Tuesday, June 30 - Rome

It turns out there are things other than the Laocoön in the Vatican Museums. Since they were unexpectedly closed on Monday (thank you, Saints Peter and Paul), adfamiliares and I were forced to take a whirlwind tour — only three hours, which counts as "whirlwind" for the Vatican Museums — on Tuesday morning, before we caught our train to Florence. It's strange to be surrounded on every side by priceless things you've been seeing all your life in books, things that launched whole artistic movements — I felt privileged, and a little overwhelmed. The crowds were like a river in most parts of the museums, but we danced pretty deftly through them, and saw everything we'd hoped to see (if not as thoroughly as we might've liked).

( Masterpieces within! )

All my Vatican photos are up in my Vatican Museum Flickr set. As I upload more sets, they'll show up in my Italy 2009 collection.