Tuesday October 18, Rome

During the cruise, Helga was always one of the first people in line in order to get tickets on the first bus for our daily outings. But then she noticed that the first bus often had handicapped people that slowed down the walking pace of the group. On the morning we arrived in Rome, therefore, she was in the ticket line 20 minutes early so that she could get all of us tickets for the very last bus so that we would be with a faster walking group of people and actually get to the attractions first. At least I think that was her logic, but I'll admit I was confused. It seemed to me that if we wanted tickets on the very last bus we might as well have arrived 20 minutes late and not have wasted the time waiting around, but probably I was missing something.

In any case, Bus #4 drove us from Civitavecchia, where we were docked, to Rome through an interesting and verdant countryside. From the interstate I mostly saw small fields of vegetables and grain crops, a few vineyards, and a couple of sheep pastures complete with fluffy white sheep. Things went swimmingly until we hit a traffic jam just outside of Rome and then watched our driver work his way through a sea of traffic downtown. The driving was Italian style in which, as our guide put it, "The rules of the road are merely suggestions!". The only reason I could figure that a lot more people are not hurt or killed in the driving is that all the drivers seemed to keep a very high level of awareness of all the vehicles around them, and everyone yielded more or less gracefully to the movements of the other machines. Still, driving a car in winding streets in dense and unpredictable traffic just doesn't seem to me like the kind of thing any sane person would voluntarily do.

The motor scooters and motorcycles were particularly unpredictable. In fact, they were all over the road, driving down the middle stripe, passing on the left or right, and even driving on the wrong side of the street if it was momentarily empty of traffic! At every stoplight they somehow squeezed through to the front so that when the light changed you would see a burst of scooters and motorcycles blast away from the intersection, followed by cars and the other 4-wheel vehicular traffic. The ability to cut through traffic jams and park almost anywhere you want would be huge advantages to driving two-wheeled vehicles in Rome, but they would come at the cost of risking life and limb in any accidents. Curiously, I saw a surprisingly high percentage of the scooter and motorcycle drivers were females, at least judging by their body build and the long hair flowing out from underneath the crash helmets.

After this rather hair-raising ride into the central city we disembarked near the Spanish Steps, more accurately called the steps of the Holy Trinity because the church of the same name is at the top of the steps. However, the plaza at the bottom is called the Spanish plaza because the Spanish embassy is nearby, and since we were going down the steps rather than up, I thought the name "Spanish Steps" was just as appropriate. In any case, at the bottom of the steps was a cute little fountain. Our guide said represented a sinking ship, of all things, and if I closed one eye and squinted a bit the fountain did look vaguely boat like.

We wandered the side streets down to the Tiber River that flows through Rome, and I enjoyed looking at the architecturally interesting buildings in almost every direction. There were of course, several churches along the way, but that wasn't too surprising because with 500 churches in Rome you can hardly swing a cat without hitting one. It struck me how much time, effort, and money had gone into the construction of 500 churches over the centuries, but I guess from a religious point of view you can't have too many of them. I expect the Ancient Pueblo people building the new, big double kiva on Mesa Verde around 1200 AD had a similar point of view about kivas(see Wanderung 3).

In any case, we wandered along the crooked streets and along the way we visited the Trevi Fountain. The fountain was as intricate as the pictures I had seen, but the water was cleaner and the whole thing much broader than I had imagined. It was so broad, in fact, and the space in front of it so narrow that I had a difficult time getting it all into a photograph. Legend has it that if you throw a coin over your left shoulder into the fountain you will come back some time, so Monika and I dutifully chucked some change into the fountain in the prescribed manner before our group continued on its way.

We reached the Tiber near the ancient Roman Forum, which was a very impressive ruin. The area of the forum was immense, about a city block in size, and the remains of the edifice were everywhere. Some of the old columns were still partly standing in rows while others were toppled over and strewn about the ground like so many toys. I would have liked to wander about the ruins and imagine the Senate standing there and listening to imperialistic statements like, "Hannibal has Elephants of Mass Destruction! Carthage must be destroyed!". The Roman civilization was not, after all, the first to succumb to lure of imperialism and quite certainly it was not the last, but despite its durability the Roman empire was not sustainable. In fact, the population of Rome collapsed from around a million people during the empire to only 70,000 or so in the Middle Ages, which I expect also caused property values to decline a lot.

Continuing down the street we saw the Coliseum rising ahead of us, and it was really big with 4 levels of huge stone arches reaching up into the sky. Unfortunately, by the time we walked up to it we only had 15 minutes to see it and there was a long line waiting for the security screening plus a long line for buying tickets after that. Estimating that we would never even make it through the lines in 15 minutes, we opted instead for walking around the Coliseum and getting glimpses of the interior that way.

Walking around also gave us an idea how large the Coliseum actually was, and I estimated that it was pretty much the same diameter and crowd capacity as a modern football arena. Of course, they played more serious games than football in the Coliseum in the old days, like "Gladiator Wars" and "Kill the Christians", and I expect that pretty much every square inch of the arena floor had been soaked in blood at one time or another. Being blessed (cursed?) with a vivid imagination, I might not have really enjoyed the interior all that much. The ancient Romans, of course, apparently had a completely different worldview that saw the bloody spectacles as a positive confirmation of their cultural values. Apparently some Emperor (Nero?) in the Good Old Days ran short of gladiators one time and just commanded soldiers to force a section of the audience to participate in the games. I wonder if the spectators who were rousted out of their seats to take part in a life or death contest really said, "Oh boy, here's our chance to show what we can do against trained gladiators!" or something entirely different, more on the order of "Oh [expletive deleted]!".

After hopping back on the bus and having a quick lunch, we were dropped off at Vatican City for a quick visit to St. Peter's Cathedral. I thought the colonnade in St. Peter's square was quite pretty, but I was a bit surprised that we had to go through metal detectors to get into the cathedral. I spent the time waiting in line by taking pictures of the statues of various saints on top of the colonnade and the pretty fountains in the center of the square. The square itself is a beautiful open space, but I found it rather stark and severe since there were no trees, bushes, grass or greenery of any kind, just unrelieved vistas of stone.

Delayed for 1/2 hour by the security check, we did not have a lot of time when we finally got into the cathedral. The cathedral's interior was very large, and apparently it remains the longest church in the world if not actually the biggest. However, the vast open spaces inside made the huge vaulted ceilings feel appropriately in scale so that the interior of the cathedral, although huge, hung together architecturally. The decorations of the interior were, as I expected, magnificent but for my tastes rather opulent and ostentatious. The high, vaulted ceilings were almost covered in gold leaf and the tops of some of the domes had frescoes painted on them.

In terms of sculpture, we really enjoyed seeing Michelangelo's Pieta in the flesh, so to speak. Besides the Pieta, we saw some marble statues of popes in rather static, formal poses, and those were much less impressive, but I suppose we just don't have that many Michelangelos. The central nave also had the big dome above it and that was beautiful. I really did enjoy watching the sunbeams come down from windows in the dome into the cathedral, a restful and almost awe-inspiring sight

We were allowed to take flash pictures of the artwork that adorned many of the altars because they were just replicas rather than the originals, but copies or not I thought they were great examples of classic painting. I would have also liked to see the Sistine Chapel and its famous ceiling, but that was a separate admission ticket and another line and we just didn't have enough time. In fact, we barely made it back to the bus by our 4 p.m. departure time. Since this was a bus full of Germans who value punctuality quite highly, being late would have been a Very Bad Thing. Fortunately, one final couple boarded after we did, and that took some of the heat off of us for being (almost) late.

That night the weather worsened dramatically. Strong winds kicked up waves big enough that our ship was noticeably swaying from side to side. At one point it was enough movement that I woke up and had to kind of brace myself in the bed so that I wouldn't roll over onto the floor or anything. Fortunately the seas were not heavy for very long and I finally got back to sleep.