Saturday, April 14, 2001

Obligatory Siena Wrapup: Erin and I standing on a pretty overlook, on the way to our regular osteria for dinner, discussing vegetarianism again. The story of my conversion, ten years ago, is here, but I hadn't heard Erin's. In 3rd grade, I believe, a classmate of Erin's brought in cute little chickies for show and tell; immediately, they repaired to the lunchroom for chicken patties. "Right," said the eight-year old Erin, "that will be all of that." We're on the subject, because on my last login, I noted that the Post is running a series called "Modern Meat: Brutal Harvest," part II of which being called "They Die in Pieces." This covered myriad violations of the so-called Humane Slaughter Act, in which cattle on the assembly line are not actually stunned or killed before they hit the detailer, the haunch ripper, the disemboweler, etc. One other thing, a nicer surprise, on the veg front, in a moment . . .

Our final day in Siena, we decide to go our separate ways for a bit. (A notorious anthrophobe and introvert, I am spoiled for human consumption after being left out in the open with other people more than a day or two . . .) Erin, on her 10-mile morning runs, has been lucky enough to get out of town and see some of Tuscany; now I endeavor to do the same, making for the western gate. Did I mention that Siena is a literally walled medieval town? Yep, big stone wall, snaking all around the city limits, and I follow it for a while. Also, I duck out through the western gate and discover . . . the town cemetary. This features a truly suprising number of fresh flowers and, best of all pictures of all the dead people on the headstones. This, I aver, makes for much more interesting graveyard-going; you really feel surrounded by the dead. (Or, more to the point, surrounded by people who are no longer here—a friendly reminder that you still are.) The far end of the graveyard overlooks rain-misted Tuscan hills.

I seem to start drinking earlier every day, but what the hell, I'm on my own and can do whatever I want. I find a gelato-focused place—but like every other joint in this berg, it has a couple of taps. I take a frosty one up to a cute little sequestered loft, and stretch out with the copy of Watership Down I swiped from Erin. (She realized she had managed to never read it; and I haven't read it in at least ten years.) The temptation is certainly there to attribute it to the drinking, but afterwards I came across a bull loose in the streets, being chased by several policemen with a rope . . .

With a couple of hours before meeting E back for dinner, I endeavor to wrap-up any sights we might have missed. I hit the Battistero, a chamber on the back side of the Duomo, with an ass-kicking ceiling, as well as a nice chapel across the street, the name of which I didn't catch. Finally, I catch a bit of mass in the Duomo itself, which is quite diverting. At last, I grab a slice of pizza—and my own, non-shareable monster gelato cup, ha ha, on my way back.

Morning, and transportation snafus keep us alternately waiting, and running, and getting to Rome 4+ hours late. At one point, we're expecting our passenger train, when in comes a big, rumbling freight train.

E: Maybe we can ride in those steel boxcars.
M: Just don't take the free shower.
E: Oh, my God . . .
M: Nothing succeeds like Holocaust humour.

Tromping through the streets of Roma, from Stazione Termini, I find myself harping on a familiar (if not tired) theme. Now I'm convinced of it: all cities are fundamentally the same. They differ precisely and only in their attractions: San Francisco's views and steep streets; London's bridges and towers; whatever's listed in the guidebooks. These give cities their individuality. But when you get right down to where people are living, slogging to work, driving through traffic, shopping for produce . . . they're all precisely the same.

Speaking of which, we almost immediately stumble on some striking individuality, overlooking our piazza, Piazza Venezia. (Later, it's even more stunning at night .) We located our hotel in a mere 15 minutes of searching high and low, and to our delight Mark is already checked in. He's also got a bombshell loaded up: he's gone vegetarian.

M: You are last on my list of likely converts. But what great news! What was your thinking?
M: Well, you never gained an inch of ground with all your talk about health benefits. But, your tirade from last month got me thinking. I decided that, really, if I could avoid killing . . . then I should.
M: Matt's going to be feeling a little isolated when he gets here.

We take off for drinks, dinner, and gelato, angling vaguely toward the Trastevere neighborhood, across the river Tiber (erm, that's Tevere). Our basic plan is to avoid doing anything terribly cool or entertaining, until Matt gets here; because, God forbid. ;^) Unfortunately, we seem to be unable to avoid stumbling on major sights. Directly across from our Piazza, we found ourselves looking down on the Roman Forum, with the Colosseum as (teensy) backdrop. The next morning—while Erin takes her customary 400 mile morning run (probably to Napoli, that day)—Mark and I take a quick turn around the block, doing our best to dodge attractions: "Damn! I think that's Trajan's Column! Quick, this way; no! Trevi Fountain's that way! Go right! Piazza Navona! Curses!"

At any rate, the three of us end up on a rooftop patio with beer, gin & tonic, and cappuccino, respectively. Under the blessing of a rainbow, the conversation ranges from our shared history and inadviseable drinking exploits, to the aquatic ape theory of evolution (which explains such otherwise inexplicable anomolies as hairlessness, tear ducts, sweating, and newborn infants that know how to hold their breath underwater; Mark makes a couple of points I've missed—if we had forward-pointing nostrils like apes, we could never dive, dolphins are the only animals that really share our skin/muscle structure), the high intelligence of octopi (they live 80 years, hunt crabs—with methods like pulling over old bits of pipe to where they know the crabs will show up, then hiding in the pipe; the intelligence, and visciousness, of killer whales (they'll do a trick where they throw a one-ton seal a hundred feet in the air, then wack it with its tail on the way down, to break all its bones and tenderize it). [Do you know the story of the two seals they recovered and rehabilitated after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, at a cost of over $80,000 per seal? And they had a big ceremony to put them back in the Sound, with lots of people, and TV cameras, and they released the seals . . . and a killer whale showed up and, in full view of everyone, immediately ate both the seals? I love that story.]

We emerge onto the street, weaving through some priests.

M: There sure are a lot of clerics in this town.
M: You'd think the Vatican was located here.
M: [Passing some ruins in the middle of a block] This city really is a striking a confluence of the old and the new; and it's sometimes hard to tell which is which . . .
M: Or which they're trying to keep.
M: It seems to me the people here most want to be moving forward.
M: Well, Italy, like the rest of the world, has this dog-track rabbit of U.S. prosperity before it, and they're all trotting at full speed to get their teeth around it if they can.

Drowsy, before bed, we compare currency, and Mark expresses disappointment with the high value of the Italian lira.

M: Two thousand to the dollar? Pshaw. In Poland, it was like 34,000 to the dollar.
M: Well, I've got good news for you: soon we'll hit Turkey, and I've got a cool 140,000,000 in my pouch there. In ten million denominations.
M: If we pooled our money, one of us could be a Turkish billionaire!

Late morning, and Matt appears! The Italian unification is accomplished! He's only slept one hour in the last 24, but no worse for wear. He freshens up and we hit the town—starting by climbing the ornate monstrosity across the street. This is the Vittorio Emanuele II monument (built to commemorate Italian unification, around 1870, I think); and Vittorio is riding one big horse. We continue to the top, for a view of the horse's ass and the surrounding neighborhood.

From there, we pass by the Forum again (the other side now), on our way to the Colosseum, which squats at the end of the street. Untold thousands of people and beasts slaughtered each other here to the wild applause of 50,000 Romans. The scene in Gladiator where the tigers are raised up on elevators into the middle of the fight? It really worked like that. (Only the elevators were behind blinds, so the gladiators never knew when or what they were going to have to fight.)

Before the Colosseum sits Constantine's Arch. From Rick Steves' Rome: "In AD 312, the Emperor Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius in one crucial battle. The night before, he had seen a vision of a cross in the sky. Constantine became sole emperor and promptly legalized Christianity. With this one battle, a once-obscure Jewish sect with a handful of followers was now the state religion of the entire Western world. In AD 300 you could be killed for being a Christian; by 400, you could be killed for not being one. Church enrollment boomed."

Turning around, we descend back into the Forum. We spend some time casting around, ruminating. Mark finds a 1,500 year old manhole cover. Evidently, the aquaducts were such feats of technology that, when the Huns laid seige and sacked the waterworks, it took the Romans 200 years just to reproduce the original design. Perhaps more strikingly: much of the Roman aquaducts in Paris are still functioning.

We take a quick peek at the Pantheon, which is just huge—and so much like the Rotunda (at UVa) it's kind of scary. The interior—the oldest continuously used room in the world—is also quite nice.

We turn with our tails between our legs back to Trastevere for dinner. We're early (6pm), and find nothing open yet; rats—we have to sit down for drinks. With Mark, Erin, and Matt, the conversation ranges over a great deal of fertile territory. I was enjoying it too much (and drinking too much) to take decent notes. Though, I can relate what was perhaps the winning quip of the evening:

E: So, Matt, you had trouble with German grammar?
M: Well, I hardly had any English grammar—and all the foreign language grammar is taught in relation to it. I mean, if you put a gun to my head and asked me what a gerund was, I'd be gone.
M: . . . No, you'd be going.
M, M, M & E: [Extended gales of laughter.]

Late night, and Mark and I check out Trevi Fountain (impressive) and the Spanish Steps (a little less so).

Morning, pouring rain, and we all endeavor to get Mark out of bed:

M: So our plan is to trudge through the rain to the Vatican Museum?
M: Well, to be perfectly clear: our plan is to trudge through the rain to an indoor area which will be filled to overflowing with maniacal, screaming tourists who are also getting in out of the rain.
M: Great.
M: Also, we're going to pay for the privilege. Finally, we're going to subject ourselves to an almost unfathomable amount of art, most of which, in our hearts of hearts, if we dared admit it, we are going to find rather boring.

Sadly, this proved a little prescient. The walk to Piazza San Pietro was just miserable. (Though, less so, when we bought a few more umbrellas from the ever-ready street umbrella vendors.) The line for the museum was prodigious. But . . . the collection was for the most part quite impressive. Mark liked in particular the Sumerian cuneiform: a stone tablet in a stone envelope, and little graven cylinders used to mark and seal documents in wax. I enjoyed some of the statuary highlights, such as the Apollo Belvedere: "During the Renaissance, when this Roman copy of the Greek original was discovered, it was considered the most perfect work of art in the world." Also, the Laocoon: "Laocoon was a pagan high priest of Troy . . . When the Greeks brought the Trojan Horse to the gates as a ploy to get inside the city walls, Laocoon tried to warn his people not to bring it inside. But the gods wanted the Greeks to win, so they sent huge snakes to crush him and his two sons to death. We see them at the height of their terror, when they realize that, no matter how hard they struggle, they—and their entire race—are doomed . . . Goethe used to stand here and blink his eyes rapidly, watching the statue flicker to life. Laocoon was the most famous Greek statue in ancient Rome and considered superior to all other sculpture and painting. It was famous in the Renaissance, too—though no one had seen it, only read about it in ancient accounts. Then, in 1506, it was unexpectedly unearthed in the ruins of Nero's Golden House near the Colosseum. The discovery caused a sensation. They cleaned it off and paraded it through the streets before an awestruck populace. One of those who saw it was the young Michelangelo, and it was a revelation to him."

Sadly, we found the Sistine Chapel to be not all that spectacular. The Last Judgement was stirring. But the ceiling itself was hard to follow, and not all that grand. So much for fame. On the way out, Mark made a number of noises similar to those I made recently, about the subjects and themes of Renaissance artwork just not speaking to him. (However much he might appreciate the effort, craftsmanship, and execution.) Also a little disappointingly, St. Peter's Basilica closes just before we emerge—preparations for Easter Mass, we gather. Ah well; tonight we eat. 8^)

A presto,
Michael