Italy

Roma

In the summer of 2000, I accompanied my grandfather to Rome where many of his cousins still live. My younger brother and friend Erik also came along.

Our first stop was Vitinia, a small suburb of Rome. Vitinia sits almost perfectly between the center of Rome and the beaches of Ostia. The metro station was just a fifteen minute walk from my cousin’s house, where we were staying.


Nearly every bedroom in my cousin’s house had a balcony overlooking the town. To the right is the view from our bedroom's balcony. The bedroom was on the third floor of the house; houses there take advantage of vertical space.

Our first day of being a tourist took us to Rome. We took the metro to the Pyramid station and walked to the forum, the Colosseum, and then up to the Spanish steps. This is quite a walk.

The forum area is largely taken over by tourists. There are actors dressed as Hollywood’s version of Roman legionnaires looking for a few Euros from tourists eager to have their picture taken with a guy who could have come from Ceasar’s Palace in Atlantic City.

Then of course there are the venders selling trinkets and plastic busts of great Romans, modeled on the marble sculptures from the Uffizi. Erik took it upon himself to ask one of these fat venders whether or not he had any busts of Mussolini. That went about as well as anyone might expect. The vender muttered a few curses and yelled at Erik telling him to essentially fuck off.

We decided at that point that maybe it would be a good idea to hurry up and move along.

Just before the trip to Italy, I had recently completed my Introduction to Art History Class, a primer for art and architecture that worked up to the Roman Imperial period. As a result, I was really quite into the triumphal arches scattered around the city. Sadly though, I somehow missed the Arch of Titus, one of the more significant arches.


Arch of Constantine

Arch of Septimius

Arch of Giano

Arch of Drusus
Walking through the Roman forum is not like walking past relics from American history, a mere three or four hundred years old. At nearly two thousand years old, the forum has held up remarkably well, but still is mostly just the skeletal remains of its former self. The old Roman Senate building has been restored / rebuilt, but otherwise, for the most part, all thats left are pieces of stone or in some cases columns and foundations.

What still is working perfectly though is the plumbing. At several places throughout the forum, as in most of the country, public fountains produce a constant flow of ice cold water ready to drink and free for the taking. The forum also provided a great place to eat our lunch-- prosciutto and Parmigiano Reggiano on fresh bread. I'm not much for sandwiches. But that's probably because most sandwiches back at home don't have such fresh ingredients.

The old Roman Forum merges with the modern city of Rome near the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first King of a united Italy. The monument was built at the turn of the 20th Century.

The monument has been called "the wedding cake" because its rather over the top aesthetic sensibility. The structure incorporates corithian columns and a statue of Victor Emmanuel II. The museum of Italian unification is also in its base.

Also in the heart of Rome is the Pantheon, a model for Roman architecture. The temple has a traditional facade with relief sculpture and columns. Inside, the cofferred ceiling allowed for an impressively high concrete dome. The center of the dome contains an oculus allowing for light to enter the temple. The passage of time can be marked also as the sun spot created by the oculus travels around the inside of the temple.

On the day we visited, we had our first encounter with an old Italian Gypsy woman. She was hobbling around with a gnarled cane and bent half over with a massive hunch back protruding in the air. She moved as if she nearly blind. Later we saw her standing up straight. Such are the gypsy women in Rome.

The Vatican

The Vatican is its own little city completely surrounded by Rome. Obviously for some folks who still hold onto their ancient religions, the Vatican is a pilgrimage worth taking for the sake of the soul. For me though, my interest was in the art and architecture safely guarded behind the walls of the Vatican Museum.

The museum is quite expansive, in part because the Church has always been a huge patron of the arts, but also because they have the resources to become serious collectors. A number of ruins from the ancient Roman period have made their way to the Vatican Museum. Inside the Basilica of Maxentius and Constatine was a massive statue of Constatine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome. Little remains of the former statue, but like many folks, the Vatican has his head.

The other obvious monument at the Vatican is the Saint Peter’s Basilica. Unfortunately for me, I had not yet taken the second half of the introduction to art history class, and had not studied Renaissance or Baroque periods of architecture.


We purchased Rosary beads for my Aunt from a street vender—these sorts of venders are everywhere in Vatican City. Rosary beads are a series of beads on a chain, ending in a cross. They are symbolic of several Catholic prayers that should be recited daily. The beads are of varying size and used to keep track of the number of times each prayer has been said. Catholics have a whole lot of pomp and circumstance that separates them from the other Christian sects.

Firenze

After a week in Rome and a Sunday afternoon watching Formula 1 while eating too much pasta, we took a few side trips deeper in the country. The first stop was Florence where we stayed at a small hotel not far from Santa Croce.

The tourists know Florence for Michelangelo’s David at the National gallery and the Uffizi gallery of art. We skipped the national gallery in part because outside the Palazzo Vecchio, a replica has replaced the original David. After seeing the line at the National Gallery, we assumed that the replica was good enough for us.

Below, three of the churches from Florence: Santa Maria Novella, Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo), and Santa Croce.





Palazzo Vecchio
Palazzo Vecchio was once the seat of government for the Republic of Florence, a city-state that rose to power because of its merchant class. Like everything in Florence, it now serves as a museum.

We headed to the Uffizi on the second day in Florence. Since the line was terribly long, we waited until late afternoon. This meant we had only about ninety minutes. The gallery space in the Uffizi is not terribly large, but Erik is one of the slowest museum goers I've ever been with. We saw a few important things like Botticelli's Primavera and a whole lot of busts of Romans. And then the museum was closing, and we were getting kicked out.


Bargello
We did though find ourselves in one of Florence's lesser known museums, the Bargello. A former prison, the Bargello is now a sculpture museum.

The museum has the lesser known David by Donatello. The little bronze statue is a rather flamboyant rendition of a boy rather than a man. The original was first installed in the courtyard of Palazzo Medici, then the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio.

In addition to numerous versions of Adam and Eve, the Bargello is also home to dozens of animal sculptures. Most of them are not even the regal variety such as a lion, but instead much more mundane works like a goat, or the camel below.

Pisa

Pisa is an awful little town in Tuscany. We took the train north which turned out to be much more interesting than the city itself. The train traveled along the cliffs overlooking the sea, as well as next to a nuclear reactor.

When we arrived in Pisa, there was little going on. The streets were fairly quite compared to Rome, or even Florence. The bus howerver, was rather loud. It was a fifteen minute ride from the train station to the leaning tower.

The cathedral at Pisa sits inside a gated compound. If I had property in Pisa, I'd want ten foot high walls too. On one side of the compound were dozens of street venders. Then on the other, the Cathedral, Baptistry and tower. Of course, everyone was there for the tower, mostly ignoring the Cathedral and Bapstistry. I saw no less than five people taking photographs posing as if they were uprighting the tower.