Rome Over

All -

I'm back home in sunny San Francisco looking at a mound of laundry to be done and a stack of bills to be paid. Fun.

I left the hotel in Rome at 7:30AM on Wednesday morning and walked in my apartment door at 7:30PM on Wednsday night. This is with the 9 hour time difference. Going Frankfurt to San Francisco may seem like a great way to knock off a lot of time but 12hrs in one plane is too much. After about hour 8 you start to go stir crazy.

You can divide a city map of Rome into seven sections - Ancient Rome; Centro Storico; Vatican City and Borgo; Northern Rome and Villa Borghese; Trastevere; Esquilino, Quirinale, and Piazza di Spagna; and Southern Rome. I covered just about everything from Piazza del Popolo (north) to the Porta San Sebastiano (south) and Vatican City/Piazzle Giuseppe (east) to the Basilicas San Giovanni in Laterano and Santa Maria Maggiore (west). All of this ground was covered by foot with the one exception of a taxi ride to see friends northwest of Vatican City and Borgo. Things I missed doing were taking a train out to see Pompeii or going up to Florence or getting south to see the Catacombes (and the Church of Lord, Where Are You Going? - seriously). I would have needed another week to do all this.

My last day started at Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli. The basilica houses St. Peter's chains and the tomb of Pope Julius II. St. Peter's chains are one of the relics you look at and say, "oh, come on". As a matter of fact, many of the religious relics require that you either suspend belief ("another piece of the cross? really??") or reach for a barf bag (there are only so many mummified appendages or jaw and teeth fragments you can take). I guess this all falls under the mysteries of faith. Anyway, the tomb of Pope Julius II was designed by Michelangelo with it's centerpiece being a statue of Moses with horns. Michelangelo was knowingly working from a mistranslated bible verse but went with the horns anyway.

I bounced from San Pietro to Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterno. Up until the late 14th century, this was the pope's principal residence. The entrance at the front has two bronze doors that came from the Forum. These seem at least thirty feet high and are only opened during Jubilee years. Inside the church are fifteen colossal statues of the Apostles plus Christ, John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist. These each are large enough that they could be in their own parks. Supposedly you can find Borromini's fingerprints on some of the church pillars he completed here. Oddities inside the Palazzo just off the basilica include four columns that are alleged to be the height of Jesus (which would make him about six feet tall) and a red slab where it is said that Roman soldiers threw dice to see who got Jesus' robe. Back in the church and over the alter is a reliquary that contains the heads of both St. Peter and St. Paul. Below that is the confessio that houses a piece of what is supposed to be St. Peter's wooden alter table.

I bypassed seeing Pontius Pilate's staircase that was brought to Rome by St. Helena. This was in a building across the road. Jesus was to have walked up these stairs to enter Pontius Pilate's palace. It was just across the street but I figured that if it was good enough for Martin Luther to skip over, I could, too.

So I went down the hill (I swear I did walk all seven of Rome's hills) to Basilica de San Clemente. This was interesting to see not so much for the church itself but rather the diggings underneath. On top is a 12th century church over a 4th century church over a 2nd century pagan temple over a 1st century Roman house.

I crossed back over to Terme di Caracalla. This used to be a massive Roman bath. You do not realize how massive the complex was until you are actually inside. The place could be used by up to 1600 people at a time and it is estimated that 6-8000 people per day passed through. For San Franciscians, it dwarfs Sutro Baths. There was not much to actually see here but it was interesting to go in and wander among the walls and ponder the volume of people who moved through.

Although my legs were already dead, I was still entertaining ambitions to walk down to the Catacombes (a couple of more miles down the road). To get there, I need to walk down to Porta San Sebastiano. The Porta marks the start of Via Appia Antica - the road that 'all' would take to get to Rome. As with most roads in Rome, the walk started off with a little sidewalk and then you find yourself hiking along the yellow line while cars and motorcycles whiz by at eight billion miles per hour. You feel like the crazy homeless person wandering along the side until you see other people doing it to.

While getting to the Porta is taking your life into your hands, it is worth it. You are there at the old walls of the city. It was a little like being at the foot of the Lincoln Tunnel going in and out of New York City. Actually, it was a lot like being outside of the Lincoln Tunnel as there were people with squee-gees working car windows for spare change. So I played Frogger and got across the road to check out the map. The Catacombes and the outlying churches were just within reach. I looked up the road I had come down and the eight lives I had used up to get here. I looked down the road with the rising walls and the narrowing features. I looked at the map again. I pondered going around and down. I thought about jumping the gated community fence and doing the Ferris Bueller sprint to get to my destination. I debated trying to hitch hike. Finally, I checked out the closing times, loooked at my watch, calcualted the variables and vectored the distances, and decided that I did not want to become Roman road kill on my last day in town. I headed back into town.

I avoided the death walk back by going along the outside of the city walls until I reached Porta Metronia where I could actually see the space between the road and the walls. There I ducked in and made my way back to the heart of ancient Rome. Gillian and her husband Mark had offered to meet me for dinner so I cleaned up and met them at San Lorenzo in Lucina. We had a few cocktails out in the open air piazza which was really nice. Rome has so many outside cafes where you can just sit and watch the crowd go by. Then they took me to a place to get some local fare - so local the menu had no english translations. The drawback of going local is people seem to like a lot of things stuff in entrails. The benefit is, if you are with someone who knows what they are doing, you can get some really spectacular food.

I got back to the hotel at midnight. My ride to the airport came at 7:30AM. I folded myself into my economy seat. Two hours to Frankfurt. Twelve hours to San Francisco.

Hank