Neo in Rome
No, I’m not in Italy any more. But I have a few things I still want to write about my recent trip there.
First and foremost: Rome, oh Rome, why so few street signs? I had a GPS that supposedly was telling me where to walk to get to my destinations, but it was almost useless because it relied on street signs that were nowhere to be seen. Maybe one in fifty streets were marked, usually with difficult-to-read plaques on the side of corner buildings.
Rome is a major metropolis of the world. What’s up with the lack of street signs?
I only had two days in Rome. I’d been there before, in the 1960s, but obviously it’s changed a great deal, although it’s called The Eternal City. One thing that’s missing now is the traffic, banned from a large area of the city except for taxis, police cars, buses, and some residents. It makes for a somewhat eerie sensation, augmented by the many uniformed officers seeded all around the tourist attractions and some of the rest of the city, holding what to my untutored eye looked like Uzis.
So the famous Rome traffic, which I remember as a loud and chaotic cacophony, is more or less gone. I suppose that’s a plus, but it adds to the perception (already heightened in August, when many of the residents wisely leave for cooler climes, unlike yours truly) that Rome has been entirely taken over by visitors.
Most of those visitors, I might add, seem to be Americans, by the sound of their speech.
In the two days I had at my disposal I did the regular tourist things. First day was the Colosseum and Forum. Second day the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s. These were organized skip-the-lines tours, because everything now otherwise involves tickets and enormous lines, something I do not remember from the 60s.
Each tour was exhausting, involving those aforementioned staircases that were often without banisters, and featured risers of unusual heights (at the Colosseum, for example, at one point we climbed a series of four flights of extremely high steps). But it certainly was well worth doing. I particularly liked the more ancient elements, and at the end of the tour I just strolled around the Forum for a long long time.
There’s really no other city like Rome.
I took this selfie in the Colosseum, especially for the blog. I don’t usually wear hats, but this one came in very very handy both in the enervating sun and the pouring rain. By the way, we ran into a torrential storm while at the Colosseum and got soaked to the skin, although we also dried out in about 15 minutes when the baking sun emerged again:
No apples in Italy it seems.
When I was there, taxis could not be hailed but had to be called by telephone and buses could only be used with tickets purchased in tobacco shops.
Another time, we had a driver the whole time and that was the best time I had.
The funniest experience was in Florence where we went to dinner at 9 PM and were the only people in the restaurant. Nobody else arrived until 10.
Also in Florence the shops on the Ponte Vecchio closed for siesta from noon to 4.
It was August. Europe is on vacation in August. A good time to visit Rome, except for the heat.
“The funniest experience was in Florence where we went to dinner at 9 PM and were the only people in the restaurant. Nobody else arrived until 10.
Also in Florence the shops on the Ponte Vecchio closed for siesta from noon to 4.”
Obviously there is a connection.
In my youth, I read Nero Wolfe mysteries insatiably, and always wondered about the NYC custom of dining after 9, which often preceded a gathering at the detectives home to “nail” the perps — I could not understand anyone going off to any kind of meeting at midnight!
Of course, where I was born and bred, the farmers kept significantly different hours.
I still nap after lunch, but not for four hours.
FWIW
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/nero-wolfe-s-brownstone
“Despite never being directly identified in the novels the home of Rex Stout’s beloved fictional detective, Nero Wolfe has been officially recognized by the City of New York.”
Next time bring bigger apples.
I guess the “authorities” in Rome wanted to make everything “cleaner and nicer” for the Tourists. If I wanted cleaner and nicer, I’d go to Disney World. I go to Rome, I want people, I want noise, I want traffic, I want confusion, I want aromas . . . I want Rome “The City of Ages,” not a Brave New Rome.
p.s. I’m glad I went when I did.
Wait, you’re from the Boston area and you’re complaining about a lack of street signs?
Trimegistus:
Yes, there are FAR more street signs in Boston than Rome.
Hard to believe, I know.
My family and I took a tour of the Vatican which I believe are supposed to generally last about two hours. A man on the tour didn’t feel well after we walked a bit so our guide led us all to an entrance where he could leave. This, combined with the guide’s enthusiasm, caused the tour to last a little short of five hours. I enjoyed the extra time. We went through the Sistine Chapel twice. But what interested me most of all was the guide’s enthusiasm. He marveled at all the people coming to enjoy the art, the commonality that enabled the different nationalities, different cultures to be awed by what we saw – the common humanness we all shared.
I visited the Vatican long ago in the early 70s when I was young, ignorant, and unsophisticated. (I’m no longer young). There was no major problem with crowds and I was able to go at my own pace. The art works that I found stunning, outside the standard ones, were the huge maps of the world drawn within fifty years of Columbus, MichaelAngelo’s reconstruction of the ancient Greek statue the Laocoon of a father and his sons strangled by a huge snake, and the Stanza’s of Raphael in the Pope’s apartments. I went again a second day and did the tour backwards to be able to get to pieces I wanted to see again without walking the extra couple of miles required by doing the tour in order. No one cared or bothered me.
Neo and Trimegestus, the truth about the street signs in Boston is in between. There are no signs on the main drags, evah. Some of the side streets have them but they can be untrustworthy because they are obscured by other signs or foliage, or they may just point the wrong way. The city just moved our street sign, which had been behind both a telephone pole and a bus stop sign for years. As the locals say, If you don’t know where you are, you should’nt be here.
The first time we were there the Sistine was being redone and all was covered in scaffolding. I got to see it about ten years later.
Being a Protestant and an amateur historian, what I found most interesting was the relics in Rome. I think the “audit trail” of most of the relics seems to be pretty reliable, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that most of them belonged exactly to whom they claimed to belong to. I was in one of the churches in Rome, and someone pointed out St. Luke’s head, stuck up on a shelf in one of the Alcoves there. It probably (or at least possibly) really is St. Luke’s head. I went to Malta about 15 years later, and visited a couple of churches there that claimed to have St. Paul’s hand and something else. It would be interesting to do DNA tests on all these relics of St. Paul and see if they were all donated by the same person.
At any rate, I also found Italy a fascinating place. I spent a total of 9 years in Europe with the US Army, and had occasion to visit a lot of territory. My wife and I found Italy among the most interesting, and visited it several times.
Waidmann
Venice has St Mark’s body in the basilica. They snuck it out of the Ottoman ruled Egypt under a cover of pork so the Muslims wouldn’t look under.
Neo, I found myself wanting to touch my screen and lift the brim of that hat. I, too, (many years ago) found the really ancient stuff the best, and most of all I remember just strolling the Forum, amazed at its relatively small size and the compactness of the buildings; just drinking in the idea of all the voices that had been heard there; the personalities seen, the moments of history —small and large — that had transpired, the inscriptions carved and graffiti expunged, the morning greetings, the shouts by torchlight, the statues toppled and set aright, the pavement worn by millions of sandled and booted and bare feet; purpled nobles and Greek slaves. I remember standing for a moment and feeling so thankful that I had labored through and finally loved all the Latin I had taken in grade school, high school and college. I felt at once how long ago it had all been and yet, how all those centuries can collapse and seem so near and within the reach of the recollection of successive lifetimes. Thanks, Neo, for your ruminations and reports from Italy; they have been a tonic.
I, too, (many years ago) found the really ancient stuff the best, and most of all I remember just strolling the Forum, amazed at its relatively small size and the compactness of the buildings;
I felt that way in Pompei, looking at the wheel ruts in the street.
Mike K, relics of St. Mark have been returned to Egypt, and now reside in the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo. However, I think, by agreement, that St. Mark’s in Venice kept a bone or two, so St. Mark is now in both places.
My favorite film, ever, is THE CONFORMIST, directed by Bertolucci, based on the novel by Alberto Moravia., starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda. I’m not so much a fan of other work by Bertolucci, but everything comes together perfectly here.
An excellent but not too well-known novel by an Italian author is THE DEVIL IN THE HILLS, by Cesare Pavese. Here he’s like an Italian F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald at his very best.
Rome, is seems, takes an approach similar to Boston when it comes to street signs, you are supposed to know where you are.
Btw, nice hat.