Last Day in Rome
I figure I’ll get the announcement about who won my blog giveaway out of the way before I write up my last day in Italy, just because Brittney nagged me about it. ;-)
I swear this contest wasn’t rigged, but the winner is my mom, with her guess of 1,974! The total number of pictures I took was 1,989, putting her darn close!! OK mom, let me know which picture you would like–pick any one you want, it doesn’t have to be one from Rome. :-)
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Ok, back to the picture post. :-)
Our last day in Rome, John was still feeling somewhat green around the gills, so we scrapped plans to climb up to the top of the dome on St. Peter’s Basilica, and instead caught the metro out to Ostia Antica, an archeological site that once was the ancient port city of Rome (before the coastline shifted.) The city was founded around 7BC, but the earliest remaining ruins are from around 3BC.
Ostia Antica was a lot like Pompeii in the sense that there were a lot of ruins, but at the same time, it was very different. First of all, it wasn’t buried under tons of ash like Pompeii was, it was just abandoned. Second of all, it’s not nearly as well kept-up. Pompeii was on a more dry hillside, and it was kept weed-whacked and cordoned off. Ostia Antica, on the other hand, was in a rather lush part of the countryside by comparison, and there were tall green weeds that grew everywhere in and between the buildings, which you could pretty much wander in and out of at will. Despite the relative lack of restrictions about where one could go, things were surprisingly well-preserved. Also, thankfully, it was considerably smaller than Pompeii… None of this wandering around all day business. :-)
Well-preserved mosaic floor--look at all the color! Beautiful!
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2000-year-old amphitheater. Oh wide-angle lens, how I will miss thee when I have to return thee... Sigh. Anyone want to donate to my lens fund so I can buy this lens? :-)
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The bricks of these buildings would likely have been completely covered with a facade of some sort--this picture gives a pretty good idea of how that all fit together.
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Apparently the ancient Romans had no compunctions about group toilets. Ick.
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Neat building!
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This just doesn't look 2000 years old! (To be fair, the frame around the fresco was added to preserve it, but still...)
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Clearly this is an ancient Roman pot farm.
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Somewhere I have a picture I took of this cactus two years ago. I'm weird.
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Kitteh!
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This castle actually dates to much later than the city of Ostia Antica--I think it's around 500 years old or so. Didn't get to go in--I wish!!
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When we got back to Rome, John rested a bit while I offloaded pictures from my camera for the umpteenth time, then we headed out in search of something interesting. We were thinking interesting like a church or something, but we ended up at, surprise surprise, another protest ! Not sure how I managed two in one trip, but there we have it. This one was for women’s rights.
It was definitely a march, but it had more of a parade atmosphere in some respects. I found it amusing.
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I thought it was neat that there weren't just young women there. Very cool. Oh, except for the part where I heard a dad who was walking along the sidewalk with his son, who looked to be about 8 or so. The kid asked the dad what they were marching for, and the dad said it was a bunch of women who hated men and thought all boy babies should be killed. Weak, dude--so weak. Unfortunately, the extent of my ability to reply in Italian is quite limited, and the only thing I could come up with at that moment, in my somewhat shocked state, was a few choice cuss words. If the kid hadn't been there, I may have used them... Alas.
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Like the other protest, the Carabinieri were there. Unlike the other protest, they weren't in full riot gear, and they marched along behind the protestors. I guess they felt like a women's rights march would be less threatening than a labor protest. :-)
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The street sweepers brought up the rear (both in the truck and on foot) and I was amused that the truck carried one of the same signs the protestors carried ("Basta" is Italian for "Enough".)
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Funny story… to me, anyway. John was worried I was going to get killed. So there was this little car that was driving along in the middle of the parade, and it had a loudspeaker attached to it, and someone inside it was chanting/yelling slogans. Typical protest fare, right? Well, the car pulled over pretty much right in front of where we were standing, so of course I had to get closer to get a good look. Turns out it was having engine trouble, so people gathered around to see how they could help.
This was one of the street sweepers, helpfully opening the hood of what we all thought was a steaming car... Turns out it was actually on FIRE! The second after I took this picture, he opened the hood, and flames shot out, so we all jumped back. Then people were bringing out water bottles to try to pour on the fire, which I would have taken a picture of, except that John was afraid the car was going to blow up, and made me get back. Although it didn't blow up, he was probably right--a bit of distance was probably safer. :-)
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Fire's out... Ummm, so now what? (You can see the water they poured on the engine on the bottom right, and that white thing behind the front tire is actually a bottle cap from one of the water bottles that well-meaning bystanders produed to try to extinguish the fire before a shopkeeper showed up with a large bucket.
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After this, we headed to Termini to try to buy stamps for postcards, which turned out to be a ridiculous endeavor. I forgot to mention that earlier this morning, we’d gone to a post office and spent 40 minutes standing in two different lines to try to buy stamps, only to discover that they were SOLD OUT (how the heck does a post office sell out of stamps?!?!?) We kept getting sent to a variety of tabacchis (tobacco shops that also sell lottery tickets, stamps, candy, metro tickets, and other random stuff) and every tabacchi told us to go to another one. Grrr. We ended up only being able to find enough for Joel’s postcards and then a few more, so John and I split them and I picked two postcards at random from my stack and stamped and mailed those (Dad/Kathy and Adrian, consider yourselves lucky!) Good grief that was difficult. Note to self–always look for stamps first thing when arriving in a new country. And yeah, I actually knew this… I was just lazy. :facepalm:
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Heading out of Termini, we met a cheerful crowd of protesters on their way home.
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Finally, it was back to the hotel to pack up and leave early for the airport the next morning–our trip was over, and it was time to head home! Bye, Italy–it was a lovely trip. :-)
Cute embroidery on our hotel curtains. The cat is looking out at Rome's skyline--that's St. Peter's Basilica in yellow. I love it. :-)
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Day 6: Rome, again
Note: for some reason I was light on pictures on this day. I’m not sure why–I know it was a low-key, but I still usually manage to take a ton of pictures. Oh well.
Day 6, Friday, started early when Joel! had to get ready to leave for the airport. :-( All of us went to eat breakfast coffee and an over-Nutella’d croissant (yes, I’ve discovered there *is* such a thing as too much Nutella!), but then John was still feeling a bit off after his food-poisoning adventure, so he went back to the hotel to crash while Joel! and I tried to find the Piazza Navona before he had to be at the train station.
Two wrong buses later, we think we went *past* the Piazza Navona, but we’re still not sure, and we ended up just giving up and heading back to the hotel. Oh well. Joel!, I think I forgot to tell you this, but John and I found it later on, and it really wasn’t anything exciting or unusual. I didn’t even get a picture of it. So yeah, you didn’t miss much.
Anyway, John finally felt up to wandering just a bit, so we headed out to see the Spanish Steps. I forgot to get a picture of them from the bottom, so here’s one that Joel! took on his first day in Rome.
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View of Rome. That big dome in the center is... well, I don't remember, but the dome behind it is St. Peter's Basilica.
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Fountain in front of the Pantheon. One of the things in Rome that I never got tired of was the colors of the buildings. So so pretty!
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Goofballs in the Pantheon.
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Am I crazy for wanting to buy this for-sale Fiat? I just want to put it in my pocket and take it home with me!
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Friday was a short day, since John was still feeling pretty lousy, so after wandering a bit, we found a cheap lunch counter to eat an early dinner at ($5 for the two of us for chicken and really yummy roasted potatoes! sweet!), then went back to the hotel and hung out and read. Exciting life we lead, I know. :-)
Day 5: Naples, er, Rome
Day 5, Thanksgiving, dawned quite a bit earlier than any of us had planned. I woke up around 3:30 and discovered that John had quietly been getting sick since before midnight. I gave him some tylenol I’d brought (as he had a fever) and some saltines, but without getting too graphic, he was no better at keeping those down than he’d been anything else. Around 5 I started looking for the local hospital in Joel!’s guidebook, and around 5:30, I pushed John out the door so that we could walk down there (a five-minute walk, really this time!) and he could get some medicine. He’d already probably started off a bit dehydrated from our hike the previous day (I know I was) and he wasn’t able to keep any fluids down, and we were supposed to have a full day ahead of us in Naples, and then head on to Rome.
We were staying in Sorrento, which is a tourist town, so I expected that there had to be *someone* in the hospital who would at least speak a bit of English. Apparently this isn’t the case at 5:30 in the morning. However, they were able to produce a doctor from another floor who spoke a bit of Spanish, so I spoke to her in Spanish and she spoke to the ER doc in Italian, and the process was reversed for her to speak back to me. It worked fairly well. They gave John a bed and hooked him up to an IV with some anti-nausea stuff and fluids, and when that one was done they started another one. All in all, we were there for about three hours.
Now, I didn’t bring my camera with me. Shockingly, it didn’t even occur to me — I was more worried about John. But I did have my phone with me, and in those long, chilly hours of sitting on his bed (no spare chair) my urge to document things overtook my sense of niceness, and I took a picture of him lying in the bed.
I'm sure the karma I ruined for taking this will come back to haunt me someday. Sorry John, you knew I had to post it. :-)
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Ok, let me just say something — this hospital? TOTALLY no-frills. No seat (not lid, SEAT) on the toilet in the bathroom, no extra chairs in the ER (which was just one room with a couple of not-used portable screens) and you had to bring your own blanket if you were cold. Fortunately John had brought his snowboarding jacket (the one he brought because this trip was supposed to have much cooler weather than we actually encountered) because he still had a fever and he was shivering like crazy. But in the end, neither of us were complaining about what the hospital lacked. Why? Because on the discharge papers, the ER doc wrote him down as an Italian citizen, and didn’t charge us a thing for 3 hours in a hospital bed and a couple of liters of IV fluid and anti-nausea drugs. Sweet! They did write him a prescription for a few things, which I went and picked up after returning John to the hotel, and this brought the only souvenir we acquired this whole trip (despite my repeated threat to steal one of the black street cobblestones in Rome and bring it back with me) — a box of Tylenol suppositories. I mean, come on — how many people can say they’ve been to Italy and brought back a box of Tylenol suppositories? And hey, they worked better than anyone could have expected — all John had to do was LOOK at the box and the thought alone of having to use them was enough to make him stop barfing. :-D
All together, the prescriptions cost around $40, but it was worth it to get him feeling a bit better.
When we returned, Joel! went to talk to the hotel’s proprietor and let him know we’d be checking out a bit late. We let John catch about three hours of much-needed sleep while we retooled our plans for the day. Instead of going to Naples, we’d head straight to Rome, try to check into the hotel early, leave John there to get some sleep, and Joel! and I could head out into the city in search of other cool things to see. Train tickets were procured, multiple trains were taken, and hotel rooms were checked into. With John tucked into bed with a bottle of electrolytes and an empty trash can, Joel! and I headed out into the city… and promptly got lost. Ok, not lost, just not where we were supposed to be, by a long shot. Turns out that there are many streets with irritatingly similar names, and it also turns out that while both of us are pretty good with directions, Joel! is a lot more tolerant of being misdirected than I am.
It was almost dark by the time we found our first destination of the afternoon evening — Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini. This was one of the things on my list because it looked neat. What is it? In case you didn’t click on that Wikipedia link a couple of sentences ago (see, I even gave it to you again!) it’s a crypt underneath a church where they ran out of room and started stacking bones along the walls and decorating with them. Much to my sadness, we weren’t allowed to take pictures, but, er, Joel!’s camera may have inadvertently gone off once or twice. Might have accidentally done so. And the next day when John and I went to see it, his video camera may have accidentally turned on whilst hanging out of his pocket. Don’t you hate it when those things happen?
So yeah, here are some pictures that we most definitely didn’t intend to take. More, as always, in my Flickr Italy gallery. These are definitely ones you should click on to get more detail — so so crazy! I’ve had people say to me that they felt it was morbid or somehow wrong… Yeah, this is probably why the Italian government outlawed construction of similar crypts (and continued work on existing ones) sometime in the 1800s. But to me, it was kind of like seeing BodyWorlds – it’s amazing to me to see the beauty of the human body, especially parts we take for granted but so rarely see. Mark Twain visited here in the 1800′s–here’s a piece of an account he wrote about seeing it.
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We had a fun time playing guess-the-anatomy. The human body is an amazing and beautiful contraption...
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Scythe and scales. Circle of bone around the skeleton is supposed to represent the womb, therefore the whole thing stands for life and death. Oh, and that's a child's skeleton.
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After we left the crypt, we went upstairs to the church to wander around for a bit. We only lasted a few minutes, though, when we heard drumming and lots of noise outside. We’d seen police out earlier, and it’d looked like they’d been getting ready to close off the street, so we thought we were in for a parade.
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Turns out we got a labor demonstration instead — the drumming we heard was actually was people pounding hard hats onto the ground.
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The police did close a street off (the church is right by Piazza Barberini) and there were tons more standing around, holding (but not wearing) full riot gear. Awesome!
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So, me being the foolhardy curious person I am, who’s always up for photographing a good demonstration, I waded right in.
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Of course, this was the ONE day the entire trip that I, for some reason, took my 50mm f/1.4 lens out of my bag (a lens that handles low-light situations extremely well, and that you don’t have to be right in someone’s face to take a picture, unlike the wide angle lens I used pretty much the entire trip) and left it back at the hotel. Major :facepalm:. So I used the wide angle lens, and while I did have to get right up close to people to take pictures, I’m REALLY impressed with how well it handled low light! I mean, it was dark enough that I wouldn’t have been able to read a newspaper without being right underneath a streetlight or something, but these came out pretty well, considering that I didn’t use a flash. Sweet!! I think I was the only photographer there who wasn’t using a flash.
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I have to admit that I really, really missed my 70-200 f/4L lens. While it definitely would have been the wrong lens for this (NOT a nighttime lens!), it’s a lot of fun for crowd stuff. I’ll just have to find me some daytime protest rallies sometime. It’s not like I don’t live within easy walking distance of the state capitol or anything… :-)
Anyway, after we got tired of wandering around protesters, we headed off to find the Trevi Fountain and Pantheon, which weren’t actually all that far away (Piazza Barberini, where the rally was, is on the same Metro stop as the Trevi Fountain.) A nice walk later, we were people-watching at the Trevi and eating gelato. Yum.
Because it seemed like fun, I decided to take a lousy cameraphone picture.
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Just how wide is that wide-angle lens I was using? Check out the following pictures.
Exhibit A: The cameraphone shot.
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Exhibit B, the wide-angle picture: taken from the same exact place as Exhibit A.
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Ummm, yeah. BIG difference there.
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Pretty decent crowd for 8PM on a Wednesday in November, I thought. Note the official Italian autumn/winter uniform of jeans and a black jacket. This was almost universally true regardless of where we went. Joel had brought a black sweater, so he was able to go native for a day, but neither John nor I had brought black jackets, so we didn't blend in as well.
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After the Trevi, we hoofed it over to the Pantheon, and I was surprised it was still open, as it was pushing 9PM by the time we got there.
Not HDR, just the lens picking up a heck of a lot of light.
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The Pantheon was originally built in the 1st century AD as a temple to the Roman gods, and has been in continuous use since that time. In the 7th century AD, the Christians co-opted it for their own use as a church to St. Mary and the Martyrs. Several notable people are buried there, including one of the kings of Italy, and the painter Rafael.
Random fact -- since its construction in 126 AD, it has been the world's largest unsupported concrete dome. Neat, and so so beautiful!!
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Another neat fact (to me, anyway) is that the hole in the dome allows the rainwater in, and there are 22 small drains in the floor for the water to drain into. There's something there that fascinates me -- not sure what, though.
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After the Pantheon, we waited what seemed like an eternity for a series of buses that didn’t want to show up. There was one route that was much more direct to our hotel, but we waited and waited and didn’t see it. We had the option of taking a more frequent but longer, less-direct bus, but it’s tricky — what happens when you get on the less desirable bus, only to turn around and see your bus pulling up behind the one you’re now stuck on? We ended up taking the more frequent, less-direct bus, and fortunately we didn’t have the frustration of seeing the bus we’d been waiting for pull up behind us… but it was still a long wait.
Back at the hotel, we roused a still-sleeping John, who assured us that he most definitely did NOT want to have a Thanksgiving dinner, so Joel! and I went out in search of food, before going back to the hotel and crashing. Last year, I had Ethiopian food in Washington DC for my Thanksgiving dinner, and this year I got to have Italian food in Rome. I wonder where I’ll be next year…
Day 4: The Amalfi Coast
The fourth day started out quite wonderfully. Why? Well, for the first time the whole trip, we slept in. Ahhh, sleep. We were up and out the door by around 10:00 though, so that we could catch a bus to Positano and then to Amalfi, to see what neat things there were to see. As it turns out, it wasn’t so much there were neat things (as in, somehow historically interesting) but there were sure a heck of a lot of beautiful things.
Oh, have I mentioned the weather? So much for what I kept reading about how people don’t travel to Rome (well, or Italy in general) in November because it’s cold and rainy. Almost the entire time we were there, it was around 70 and mostly sunny, with rain finally showing itself our second to last night there. I was soooo not complaining… except that I packed mostly long-sleeved shirts (and stopped to grab three short-sleeved shirts as an afterthought on my way out the door to the airport!) and pants, and so I was kind of unprepared for warmer weather. Oh well.
The bus to Positano wound its way along the rugged coastline, staying in the center of the road unless there was oncoming traffic, and honking around every turn. You tune that part out after a while.
I don’t normally get carsick, but man was I green when I got off of that bus… Ick. It might have something to do with roads so windy and narrow that they put up mirrors to help drivers see around curves. Nice.
Joel! originally had this bright idea that we should rent a car. I'm fairly glad we didn't. Why is it that jumping out of a plane seems perfectly sane, but driving Italian roads seems like a ridiculous idea?
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The one nice thing about being carsick? It gave us a chance to sit for a few minutes and enjoy the view. And what a view it was…
Positano.
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Random fact that was interesting to former-English-major-me: Positano had been a fishing village, but had fallen on hard times when, in the early 1950s, John Steinbeck visited, and then wrote an article for Harper’s Bazaar simply titled “Positano”. A flood of tourists followed, and to commemorate this, the city put a plaque on a wall with a quote (translated into Italian) from his article. I actually like the part from right before the quote on the plaque much better:
“Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone. Its houses climb a hill so steep it would be a cliff except that stairs are cut in it. I believe that whereas most house foundations are vertical, in Positano they are horizontal. The small curving bay of unbelievably blue and green water lips gently on a beach of small pebbles…”
"There is only one narrow street and it does not come down to the water. Everything else is stairs, some of them as steep as ladders. You do not walk to visit a friend, you either climb or slide. Nearly always when you find a place as beautiful as Positano, your impulse is to conceal it. You think, 'If I tell, it will be crowded with tourists and they will ruin it, turn it into a honky-tonk and then the local people will get touristy and there’s your lovely place gone to hell.' There isn’t the slightest chance of this in Positano." ~John Steinbeck
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Ok, I just finished reading that Steinbeck article, and the incident at the end of the article was too hilarious to not share here. For some reason, when I read this, I heard Garrison Keillor’s voice in my head as I read, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Just a suggestion for you that you may want to try as you read. :-D
A number of writers have gone to Positano to do their work. Some of these are Americans and some are British. Nothing in the little town is designed to disturb your thoughts provided you have a thought. Such a recluse was John McKnight, now of the United States Foreign Service, but then in process of writing the Papacy, a long and careful study of the history of the Vatican and its position in the present-day world. He and his wife lived for a year in a little house with a garden right over the water in the southern part of the town. The McKnights came from North Carolina and they settled into the life of Positano as naturally as they had settled into Chapel Hill. Then the year turned and Thanksgiving began looming.
Now an American living long abroad may become completely expatriate. He may speak foreign, think foreign, eat foreign, but let Christmas or Fourth of July or Thanksgiving come around and something begins to squirm inside him and he finds he has to do something about it. Johnny and Liz McKnight speak Italian fluently, read, eat and live Italian. But when Thanksgiving came near in Positano, the McKnights found themselves dreaming of roast turkey and dressing of cranberry sauce and plum pudding, of mint juleps. They got to waking up in the night and thinking about it.
The turkey arrived in a crate tied to the top of a bus. It was a fine, vigorous but slightly hysterical bird and for a week it gobbled and strutted in the one bird turkey yard built for it in the garden until gradually its nerves got back to normal. It didn’t know that the looks of its new friends were not friendly.
Johnny remembered a bit of wisdom imparted to him by his grandfather in North Carolina. Violent death, his grandfather said, be it to man or to turkey, is a nervous and discouraging experience. The muscles are likely to go hard and certain unhappy juices are released into the system. His grandfather did not know how that affected the flavor of man, but in a turkey it had a tendency to make the meat tough and a little bitter. But there was a way to avoid that. If about two hours before the execution, the turkey is given a couple of slugs of good brandy, the nervous tension relaxes, the turkey’s state of mind is clear and healthy and he goes to the block happy and even grateful. Then when he is served, instead of bitter juices of fear and shock, there is likely to be a delicious hint of cognac in the meat.
Johnny decided to follow the custom of North Carolina. Then he found that he did not have brandy. The bourbon he had provided for juleps did not seem right and the only other thing he had was a bottle of Grand Marnier. It was better than brandy. It would give not only solace to the turkey, but also an orangey flavor to the meat.
The turkey fought the idea at first. But finally Johnny got him held firmly under his arm and held the beak open while Liz put four or five eyedroppers of Grand Marnier down the bird’s throat. At first the turkey gagged a little, but in a moment or two its head dropped, a sweet but wild look came in its eyes, and it waved its head in rhythm with some gentle but not quite sober thought that went through its head, Johnny carried it gently to the pen. It wobbled a bit and then settled down comfortably and went to sleep.
“I’ll do for it in its sleep,” Johnny thought. “That turkey will never know what happened”. And he went to the refrigerator to see how the mint juleps were doing.
They were doing fine. He brought two of them back to the garden, and he and Liz sat down to begin the Thanksgiving.
The McKnights do not know what happened. Johnny thinks the turkey may have had a bad dream. They heard a hiccuping gobble. The turkey rose straight up in the air, and screaming triumphantly, flew out to sea.
Now we must go back to the sea laws of the Amalfi Coast. In the hills above the towns of Positano and its rival Praiano, watchers are usually posted. They not only keep watch for schools of fish but for anything which may be considered flotsam, jetsam or salvage. These watchers saw the McKnights’ seagoing turkey fly to sea, and they also saw it crash into the water a couple of miles off shore.
Immediately boats put off from both Positano and Praiano. The race was on, and they arrived at about the same time. But the turkey, alas, had drowned. The fishermen brought it tenderly back, arguing softly about whether it was a matter for salvage court. The turkey was obviously out of command. Johnny McKnight easily settled the problem with the rest of the bottle of Grand Marnier.
They cooked the turkey that afternoon and sat down to dinner about eight in the evening. And they say that not even an extra dose of sage in the dressing completely removed the taste of sea water from the white meat.
Please tell me you at least smiled after reading that. I was howling with laughter the first time, and the second time (as I read it aloud to John) I was in tears, I was laughing so hard. I think I need to read this every year before Thanksgiving dinner. And, incidentally, this was the day before Thanksgiving that I was in Positano…
Anyway, back to my Positano story, which is fairly less amusing than Steinbeck’s. After my stomach had returned to its proper residence, we decided to hike… well, it wasn’t supposed to be down to the beach originally, it was supposed to be down to a tourist office. Positano, being built on a mountainside as it is, has (as Steinbeck noted) only one street, and many winding staircases. So the worst part of going down was knowing that we’d eventually have to climb back up. At least they were really pretty old staircases.
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Daas boyz.
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When we got most of the way down to where the tourist office should have been, lo and behold there was no tourist office. Lame! So we decided to continue on to the beach. I can now say I’ve touched the Mediterranean, and so has John, and so has… oh that’s right, Joel! stayed and sat on the bench and read a magazine. Geez. :-) (Ok, he’s also got me beat by a bazillion miles in the “cool travel destinations” department… but I still had to laugh that he didn’t at least dip a toe in.) :-)
Despite the fact that it was a lovely day in the low-to-mid 70s, there was hardly anyone on the beach–I couldn’t believe it! If I’d had a towel and a swimsuit (well, and a spare afternoon), I totally would have been lying out there. Alas, I had no towel or suit, and we’d planned to spend the rest of the morning hiking before hopping a bus to Amalfi, so we didn’t have the time. But we did hang out for about 20 minutes and enjoy ourselves.
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After that, we began the long hike back up the mountain. We never did find the actual hiking trail we were looking for, so when we got above the town, we found a spot that looked good and stopped off the staircase to have a nice bread and cheese travelers’ lunch. Can’t beat the view!! (OK, this was actually a couple hundred feet lower than where we ate–from where we ate, you couldn’t directly see the beach. The view was still lovely, though!!)
"A thousand feet below lay the blue Tyrrhenian licking its lips for us..." ~John Steinbeck
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After lunch, it was back down the hill to find a bus stop and head to Amalfi. Remember how I made the comment about the bus drivers honking the horn around every corner? Apparently the residents don’t find that quite as amusing…
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The bus ride to Amalfi took another… 30 or 40 minutes? I can’t quite remember. I was focused on not getting quite so bus-sick this time around.
First glimpse of Amalfi.
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By the time we finally got to Amalfi, it was getting late in the day, and a lot of stuff was already closing. We stopped to get some massively overpriced and horribly overrated gelato (I’m still bitter about how much I paid for that) and then decided to go check out the old church in town, but we’d just missed it being open, so we had to content ourselves with climbing the front steps instead and looking around outside.
View down from the church steps.
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Gorgeous Byzantine arches.
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We wandered around the town a bit more, then headed for the wharf to wait for the next bus out. By this time the sun was setting and it was getting chilly, so we were glad to be heading back. And thus ended day 4. :-)
Sunset in Amalfi.
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Day 3: Pompeii
I’m going to try something somewhat different in this post. In an attempt to not flood you with quite as many pictures as I’d like, I’m going to try linking to some of them instead. If you hold the mouse over the link but don’t click on it, it’ll tell you if it’s to Flickr (a picture) or Wikipedia (some other random information.) Click or don’t click–it’s up to you. But at least that way you know where they fit in the narrative. :-)
Day 3 started… well, I was going to say bright and early, but it was actually dark and early. Ugh. We had to catch an early train out of Rome south to Pompeii, so we pried ourselves out of bed at some ungodly hour, threw our stuff together, and stumbled over to Termini in the pre-dawn blackness. Actually, though, this was worth it, because I got to see a fog-edged sunrise over the Italian countryside, and it was amazingly beautiful. I tried to take a couple of pictures, but between the graffiti etching and reflection on the train’s window and the speed at which we were moving, they just didn’t come out. So you’ll just have to imagine it.
We disembarked in the town of Pompei, the actual town where people still live and daily life goes on, and discovered for the first time one of the hard truths about Italy — everything is “five to ten minutes” on foot. It doesn’t matter how far you are from something, it’ll only take five to ten minutes to walk there. Ok, so this didn’t really hold true almost ever, hence the reason why I called it a hard truth. In this instance, we walked for at least 20 minutes, lugging all of our luggage, through the town of Pompei and around the outer edge of the ruins to reach the Pompeii Scavi side, where it turns out the station for the train we SHOULD have taken is. Whoops. We came in on Trenitalia, the national rail line, and we should have switched to the Circumvesuviana, a narrow-gauge local train that, you guessed it, does a big lap around Mt. Vesuvius. Oh well. At least we were able to leave our bags (for free, nonetheless!) at the Pompeii Scavi entrance, and then we went around to Porta Marina to go in.
The ancient Porta Marina entrance to Pompeii. In case you haven't guessed, "Porta" is Italian for door/gate.
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We procured a couple of audioguides and proceeded to listen our way through the ruins. We saw a lot of neat old stuff, but what I really wanted to see was more signs of inhabitation than just a bunch of ruins. Don’t get me wrong — the ruins were neat too! But I wanted to see the casts of people that you always see pictures of when you read something about Pompeii. I wanted to see pottery, frescoes, etc.
It didn’t take long before we hit our first plaster cast.
Ok, so that’s a real dog, and it’s asleep. Pompeii actually has a fair number of stray dogs, but rather than just let them roam at will, they track them as best as they can, feed and house them, and they even have an adopt-a-dog program where you can sponsor a dog in Pompeii.
Anyway, I posted this picture because Pompeii has been a canine-inhabited city since it was actually a city and not just a ruin. The very first “beware of dogs” sign (or, rather, a mosaic) was actually unearthed at Pompeii, and I have a picture of a similar mosaic (this must have been a somewhat common thing?) but without the text. So this leads into my next picture, and the first plaster cast I saw.
In Pompeii’s day, this room was a granary (grain storeroom). Now it’s used to store artifacts from all over the city, as well as several plaster casts. The one in this picture is a dog. Wikipedia has a much better (and closer!) shot of this — you can actually see its collar! Archeologists believe that this dog was chained behind someone’s house when it was buried in ash.
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The storeroom held a couple of other plaster casts.
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The guy in the picture below is actually sucking his thumb. No, I’m not kidding.
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The next room over was a bit more light-hearted — an ancient latrine, according to the audioguide. I showed someone this picture and they asked me if it smelled… heh. No.
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Heading back to death, we walked down a part of the city known as the necropolis — city of the dead. It was a wide road on a hill that was lined with tombs and crypts. Pretty crazy. Something struck me about seeing graves of people who died and were given a proper burial… what a contrast with the way the city ended.
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The weather had been really really hazy all day, with clouds shrouding Vesuvius, but finally around mid-day, they parted long enough for me to get the best shot of the mountain that I was going to get the entire time.
The mountain that started it all.
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As far as volcanoes go, it was fairly underwhelming, actually. I mean, when I think of volcano, I think of something craggy and snow-capped, like St. Helens or Lassen, or totally dominating, like Mauna Loa, or spread out and erupting constantly, like Kilauea. Vesuvius could have almost been Saddleback, the two peaks that looked over the valley I lived in while growing up in southern California. I was kind of surprised by that — I was definitely expecting something that dominated the landscape a bit more.
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A quick note about Pompeii — it’s HUGE. Much much bigger than any of the three of us were expecting (while we we all agreed that Pompeii wasn’t what we were expecting, none of us was really sure what we HAD expected. Hard to explain.) We realized after an hour or two that there was no way we’d get through everything in the audioguide in a single day, so we consulted the map in an effort to find the highlights, and opted to go to the Villa of the Mysteries next. This is a quite-well-preserved villa that’s not actually in Pompeii — it’s just outside the city wall. One of the things I found really neat about it was that, in a couple of rooms, they have glass cases with plaster casts of the bodies that were found in the rooms. Crazy.
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Another neat thing about the house was that the frescoes and mosaics were AMAZING — they were so well-preserved that it was almost breathtaking. I just couldn’t get over the vibrance of the colors.
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According to the audioguide, this is one of the earliest extant glazed tile floors (as opposed to mosaic or stone, I guess.)
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Right around this point, the guys sat down and declared that they needed a break, and Joel! congratulated me for outwalking a Hong Konger. I could have totally kept going, but since I’m nice (and since John was being awesome and carrying my camera backpack) I sat down with them for a bit. :-)
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After we’d rested a bit, we headed back out and up a hill along the city wall to the other side of the ruins, to see the amphitheaters. On the way, I FINALLY got a picture of one of the small lizards that populated the ruins but that had been eluding my camera all day. Actually, they’d been eluding me all day. John kept saying that he’d see them running to and fro whenever he’d cast a shadow on a sunny stone wall, but I had yet to see a single one. I guess they really do exist. Pretty little buggers.
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Our recurring problem all day was that we kept getting side-tracked. We’d make the mistake of looking down a road we didn’t intend to walk down, and then someone would see something he or she would find fascinating and want to “just run over and check out”, and next thing you knew, we’d spent another half hour wandering something else. But there were so many random and interesting things to see!
Ancient bathhouse--the tubs were heated from a fire that was built beneath them, and they were sheathed in lead to keep in the water and provide insulation.
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Ancient lunch counter. The wells in the countertop held different kinds of food, kind of like a cafeteria or buffet. Some of the wells had niches beneath them for the proprietor to build a small fire to keep the food within heated. These were scattered all over the city--some had many more wells, some had fewer. What impressed us was how well-preserved many of the countertops were. They looked like all they needed was a bit of a polish before you could start serving off of them. Neat!
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Ancient graffiti -- apparently this was a slogan for some politician. The fact that Italy still to this day has a rich tradition of graffiti amuses me, for some reason.
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We kept seeing these tall, spaced-out stones in the middle of the road, but we couldn't figure out what they were for. Finally it dawned on Joel! that they were ancient crosswalks, so that the citizens of Pompeii didn't have to walk amidst the muck of the street to cross from side to side. For this picture, I tried to get the guys to do a bit of a Beatles/Abbey Road kind of thing, but this is as close as they'd get. They were remarkably patient with me and my weird whims the entire time. :-)
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Check out the wheel ruts! I never did find out if those were carved there on purpose in order to make cart passage easier, or if they just wore into the road gradually. Still, it's neat to think of the carts that must have traveled in those ruts. Also, if you look at the center of the picture, you can see more crosswalk stones.
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Something I thought was neat — pretty much every large villa was laid out essentially the same, with an entryway called an atrium, which contained a small, concrete/stone-lined pool, rooms around the perimeter of the house, and a garden/courtyard in the center. The above picture is a close-up of one of those pools. In the roof above the pool, there’d be a hole, and the roof would be sloped so that rainwater would roll off the roof, through the hole, and into the pool. Underneath the pool was a cistern to hold extra rainwater. In this picture, you can see the square stone that covers the opening to the cistern in between the two pillars on the right. The hole in the ceiling also served to illuminate the surrounding rooms. Here’s a better-preserved example of an entry pool — I’d say the linked picture is more typical of what we saw.
Also neat — in the back left corner of this picture, partially hidden by John, is a cast of an old wooden cabinet that was found in this house when it was excavated. The cabinet apparently held a bunch of well-preserved household items. This was my favorite of the houses we wandered through, because for some reason it was really easy for me to imagine people living in it.
The last neat thing about this house I noticed? The front door. See that crusty-looking door behind the metal security door in the picture below? It’s a plaster cast of the original front door of the house. I’m not sure why I found this particular detail so neat, but I did. Incidentally, no bodies were found in this house when it was excavated in the early 1900s, but they did find the skeleton of a tortoise in the garden. Random.
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A couple hours later than we’d planned, we finally got to the amphitheater. Pompeii actually has three — a large one, a medium one, and a small one. The medium one is undergoing some sort of restoration/renovation, so we couldn’t go in, but we did go in both of the others.
Large amphitheater -- what we'd think of as a colosseum, really, but as the original name of the Colosseum in Rome was the Flavian Amphitheater, and it was only named the Colosseum after a colossal statue that stood nearby, I guess "amphitheater" is the correct name.
Weirdos.
Sometimes it's just better to smile politely, nod, and walk away.
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Inside the amphitheater.
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Random factoid: like the Colosseum in Rome, the better/more expensive seats were closer to the arena. Also like the Colosseum in Rome, the wealthy people and politicians would have their own permanent box seating, and they’d signify which seats were theirs via a stone with their name carved in it. The audioguide didn’t mention this, but I thought to look for it, and I’m glad I did. Neat.
Last but not least, we made it to the small amphitheater. Unlike the two larger ones, this one was originally completely covered, and as such, had the best acoustics of any of the three.
After this, tired, cold and hungry, we tromped back to the entrance, where we picked up our luggage, climbed on the correct train this time, and rode it to Sorrento while watching the sun set. Thankfully, no pictures exist of when we first got to Sorrento… I kind of got us lost. Ok, not lost… but let’s just say that a GPS is only as accurate as the (correct!) address you put into it. Heh. Whoops. The fact that it kept telling us we were 120KM off should have been a sign. :facepalm: So we spent a while wandering Sorrento with our luggage, looking for our hotel. Joel! finally got us in the right neighborhood, and John spotted both the street sign and the hotel sign. Whew. We found a really nice little pizzeria for dinner — decent food, free bread, AND the waiter brought us a free appetizer! OK, no free water, but we didn’t expect any (which is why we didn’t drink any with dinner.) After dinner we went in search of gelato but ended up at a cheese shop instead (:innocentlook:), then went back to the hotel and crashed early.
Rome – Day 2
As always, there are more pictures in the Flickr gallery for my trip than I’ve actually posted here–I’m trying to just cover the highlights here. :-)
I think my biggest complaint about anything this whole trip was the hotel beds. On our second day in Rome (our first morning), I woke up and announced to John and Joel! that I thought the hotel had made a mistake–they gave me the box spring to sleep on, and someone else had the actual mattress. I mean, literally, there were dents in the sheets from the pattern of the mattress springs. That’s how thin that thing was.
After I massaged out the bedspring dents from my shoulder and hip, we got up and got our free breakfast from our hotel at a cafe next to the hotel. Breakfast in Rome is, like “close to Termini”, a relative term–a croissant and a small cup of coffee. I’m not a big fan of either, but when in Rome (ha ha ha), so I ate it anyway. After that, we hoofed it down to the Colosseum, where we had tickets for 9AM (if you buy tickets online, which we did in order to avoid lines, they make you designate a start time, in order to help manage crowds.) 10 minutes later, when we were almost to… Joel, where were we going? The train station? Anyway, we were 15 minutes from our hotel, supposed to be at the Colosseum in 15 minutes, and I realized that I had forgotten my wallet, which had the ID I needed to pick up the tickets. WHOOPS. Fortunately, I was with two wonderful guys, who not only didn’t get irritated with me, but ordered me to stop beating myself up over it. We pretty much ran back to the hotel, ran back to Termini, and hopped a Metro down to the Colosseum. We were about 15 minutes late by that time, but the lady at the ticket desk was nice and let us in anyway. WHEW!
Do I need to say again how much I loved that wide-angle lens? :-)
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Colosseum Cat is watching you travel. (I'm still surprised he let me get two feet away to take this picture of him!)
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That's the Palatine Hill and Roman Forum in the background -- we went there right after the Colosseum. Hanging around our necks are audioguides so we could hear more about what we were seeing (that's why we all are wearing headphones in the pictures.) Yaay for being tourists!
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After we finished wandering around the Colosseum, we headed over to the Palatine Hill and Roman Forum to wander amidst and contemplate the ruins for a while.
Joel! and John contemplating the ruins. Either that, or they were just feeling the jet lag. Probably the latter, given that it was about 5 AM in CA and 9PM in Hong Kong.
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So I only actually got two pictures of the three of us together, and this was one of them. I may have to do some photoshopping so that we have a couple more. :-) From left, Joel, me, and John (with something apparently growing out of his head.)
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You know the old saying about how “all roads lead to Rome”? Well, to be more specific, they lead right here — the Temple of Saturn, the remnants of which are the columns on the left of the picture. That temple was mile 0 in the Roman Road system. Also, check out old and the new — another new building built right on top of an old one (look at the foundation of the building on the right.)
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After the Roman Forum, we took a bus over to St. Peter’s Square, where we sat and had lunch and one of us might have inadvertently fed some saltine crumbs to some pigeons. :innocentlook: Something that caught me off-guard a couple of years ago when I went to Rome was the public drinking fountains. They don’t always look like drinking fountains (like we’d think of them, anyway) and they don’t turn off–they continuously pour water into a drain. It seems like a waste to me, but I suppose there’s logic to their method somehow. Anyway, since I somehow became the group water carrier during the trip, I usually made one of the guys at least fill up the bottle, so here’s Joel! filling it at a fountain in St. Peter’s Square.
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After St. Peter’s Square, we headed over to the Vatican Museum, because, like the Colosseum, we had to be there at a certain time. Unlike the Colosseum, however, we actually made it 15 minutes early. I think I was trying to atone for my goof earlier in the day. :-)
Joel and John walking along the outside of the Vatican wall from St. Peter's Square to the Vatican Museum.
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There are tons of famous old paintings here, and a lot of them are actually painted right on the walls themselves. This one is the Donation of Constantine, on the wall of the Hall of Constantine inside the Apostolic Palace.
What I like about this one is the the artist painted himself into it. Look closely and see if you can find him. See the end of this post for a hint if you give up. :-)
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Another famous one — Rafael’s The School of Athens. John and I got cornered by an apparently bored American art history major, who proceeded to spend almost ten minutes filling us in on this one. It was pretty interesting, actually.
Again, wide angle lens for the win -- I would have had to have my back pressed against the back wall to be able to get this whole shot without it.
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All these things were leading up to the thing I was looking forward to the most — the Sistine Chapel! Yeah, I was here a couple of years ago. I was still really really looking forward to going back, and this time taking my time to sit and check the place out. I wasn’t disappointed — it was even better the second time! Oh, and, er, no… you’re not supposed to take pictures. These were accidentally taken when my camera just happened to be sitting in my knee, turned on and with the lens cap off. Funny how that works. I’m actually surprised at how well they turned out, given that I couldn’t actually look to aim any of them…
Things that take your breath away. This one is definitely worth clicking on the picture to see the larger version.
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Kind of a famous picture. :-) If you check out my Flickr gallery, I have a few more pictures of the Sistine Chapel there.
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The intrepid travelers. This is the only picture we have of all three of us... Oh well. :-)
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Fountain outside of the Vatican Museum.
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Vatican Museum stairwell, looking down.
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Vatican Museum stairwell, looking up.
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After we finished in the museum, we went back around the outside of the wall to St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest Christian church in the world, so that we could go inside the church and see what there was to see. Incidentally, it was the building of St. Peter’s Basilica that sparked the beginning of the Reformation. As beautiful and amazing as this place is, honestly, I still vastly prefer Westminster Abbey in London. Even with all of its Gothic splendor, it’s still somehow much more simple and peaceful than St. Peter’s — there’s something about all of the colored granite and gold in St. Pete’s that distracts me from the idea that it’s actually a church, whereas in Westminster, that thought was never far from my mind.
Church service in St. Peter's Basilica. The guys in red are cardinals, and the figures in blue are nuns.
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Trying to figure out which bus to take to get home.
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After St. Pete’s, we walked down to the Ponte Sant’Angelo because I wanted to check out the river at night, and although my traveling companions were tired, they’re both nice enough guys to humor my whim.
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Bicyclist turning onto the Ponte Sant'Angelo, with Castel Sant'Angelo in the background.
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Around 6PM, we decided to call it an evening, and headed back toward our hotel in search of food and sleep. Tomorrow morning we’d be up early to catch a train to Pompeii and parts south, and that’ll be tomorrow’s blog post! :-)
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**Where’s the artist in the painting hiding? Look at the bottom right corner of the painting–he’s the one dressed in Renaissance garb while everyone else is dressed in a more classical style.
First Day in Rome
This is my first blog post on my trip to Rome–my goal is to do one a day through the end of the week, and try not to bore anyone with pictures. :-p Therefore, if you go to my Flickr gallery, you can see more pictures there–this is by no means all of them (scary, I know.)
John and I left San Francisco on Saturday 11/21 and flew to Rome to meet up with Joel!, a college friend of mine, pilot, and world traveler who lives in Hong Kong. Before anyone wonders why the superfluous exclamation point next to Joel!’s name, it just has to be there — I’ve been writing it like that since college and I don’t plan to stop now.
The flight to Rome wasn’t bad, but an eleventh-hour itinerary change left me a bit annoyed. We were supposed to leave San Francisco at 6AM on Saturday and get to Rome 7:45 AM on Sunday (meshing almost perfectly with Joel!’s schedule, as he was supposed to get in at 7:20 from Hong Kong.) However, when I got home from work on Friday, I checked my email and found an email from Orbitz (the company I’d bought the tickets through), and they’d changed our itinerary. This was the FIFTH time this’d happened, so I was annoyed, and I was even more annoyed to learn that we now had a five hour layover in Boston and wouldn’t be getting to Rome until almost noon. Lame.
But honestly, that was the only really annoying part. Even being stuck in the center row didn’t faze me (although I did miss looking out the window on takeoff and landing.)
We got to Rome and took the train in to meet up with Joel! at a cafe across from the front of Stazione Termini, the main station in Rome. There was something odd about walking into a Roman cafe and meeting up with a friend from California but who now lives halfway around the world… I thought maybe it was just me, but Joel! and John both made the same comment. So fun, though. :-)
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Joel! had already checked into the hotel, so we walked over there, dropped our stuff off, and headed out to wander and see what we could see before we all dropped dead from fatigue.
Our hotel was a small (how’d you put it Joel? Cozy?) place a couple of blocks outside of the city wall, and “near Termini” (which is, as we learned, a fairly relative concept–that train station is one of the largest in Europe, and measures two kilometers in length. Geez.)
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The Aurelian Wall (city wall) and Porta Tiburtina, two blocks from our hotel.
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What was really neat to me was how they built newer buildings right on top of the ancient city wall. Crazy!!
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Well, we wandered around for a while that afternoon, but unfortunately my camera decided to make about 50 pictures magically disappear (I just realized this yesterday when I went to start processing them!) so I have nothing to show for our wanderings. I will tell you that we went to see the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, but unfortunately you’ll have to check it out on Wikipedia, since those pictures are gone. I’m so sad about this. That place has 1500-year-old mosaics!! So neat!! Sigh… :-p
After that, we headed down toward the Colosseum so that we could see it at night. It’s funny — I never thought of Rome as being all that far north. In fact it’s only a bit over 3 degrees north of Sacramento, and it’s over 4 degrees south of Seattle. But in terms of day length/light quality, the difference was really noticeable to me. In the mornings, it seemed like early morning until around noon, then all of a sudden it seemed like later afternoon. The sun was never really directly overhead. Or maybe that was me just really being sensitive to it.
Anyway, we stopped briefly for dinner at a wholly unmemorable pizzeria with embarrassingly bad bruschetta (dry burnt toast with tomatoes… at least the tomatoes were really good, but dude, they could have at least put olive oil on the burnt toast), found some gelato good enough to atone for the disappointing dinner (dark chocolate orange=SO GOOD) and then wandered down to see the Colosseum at night. It was absolutely beautiful.
Colosseum, Arch of Constantine, moon, and Venus, with the last faint glow of the sunset on the horizon.
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I like this shot better, except that it doesn't have the Arch of Constantine in it.
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John's and my shadows on some ankle-breaking cobblestones in front of the Arch of Constantine. My biggest problem with the wide angle lens I rented was that I kept getting my shadow, and sometimes my toes! in the shots. Whoops. But this was intentional, obviously.
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Owners of the shadows, happy to be in Rome.
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Arco di Constantino and Joel!'s hand. I had a shot of this without his hand, but I decided this one was infinitely more amusing. :-) Oh, and let me just say this -- the wide angle lens ROCKED. I think I was standing about 10 feet from the fence and maybe 20 feet from the arch when I took this.
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Joel!, opting to keep his hands in his pockets and out of the picture for once. :-)
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After the Colosseum, we took the metro back up to Termini, then walked back to the hotel from there.
Funny story… When Joel! called me the day before we left so that we could figure out where we were going to meet up (since the airport was now out of the question as our flight got changed) he looked up our hotel on Google Street View, and he was a bit concerned about its neighborhood. In his words, “There’s graffiti EVERYWHERE and police tape around it.” After I stopped laughing, I told him that I couldn’t speak for the police tape (and our hotel actually ended up being in a pretty decent neighborhood) but that ANYTHING in Rome that stood still for too long eventually got graffitied. The exceptions seem to be personal vehicles and church walls.
The reason I opted to tell this story (besides the fact that I found it funny) was because of the picture I took of the metro.
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I meant to come back later and take a panning, longer exposure of this, but I never did get around to it. Oh well, next time. :-)
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Back at the hotel, John decided to “rest his eyes for a moment”, and Joel! and I sat and talked for a couple of hours before deciding to call it a night. And thus ended my first day in Rome. :-)
