The EU is First World, Part 1: Rome

Forgive any non sequiters, rambling, typos, or grammatical errors as this was written on a midnight flight back to Tbilisi and 3am in the Tbilisi airport does not exactly make for good editing.

 

This was a very different type of travel than the trips I’ve become accustomed to taking in the last year: no friends, two parents, a much larger budget, and three European capitals.  I met my parents in Rome, the Eternal City, and the city that’s been on my bucket list the longest, more specifically, since eighth grade, when I started taking Latin for the first time and fell a little in love with the Roman Empire.  As I got to plan the trip, there was a definite focus on the ancient world; aside from the Vatican, my itinerary mostly revolved around buildings that predated the fall of Rome in 476, so Baroque churches were mostly shelved for another trip and tour guide.  My affable parents were happy to be led to ancient sites, especially since I had planned a more leisurely itinerary than I had for our England/Ireland trip six years earlier.  We mostly walked around the day I arrived, since my 7am departure meant I had stayed up all night one last time with good friends in Tbilisi and therefore I was suffering from more than your usual jet lag.  The next morning we headed to one of the four major churches (Maria Maggore) and listened to a few minutes of mass as we admired the gorgeous church.  It was only the second mass I had ever heard, and it seemed fitting to hear it in Rome.  We then toured the Catacombs of San Clemente, which meant we got to ride out on the old Appian Way, a fact which pleased me almost as much as the tour of the catacombs.  I also appreciated that both my mother and I envied the bikers we passed and thought how lovely it would be to bike the Appian Way.  

 We also toured the Basilica of San Clemente, the 4^th century basilica underneath, the 2^nd century Mithraic temple under that, and a 1^st century room with no obvious purpose but with water still running through the ancient lead pipes.  The 4^th century basilica was probably my favorite.  In addition to the first written Italian, “Pull SOBs, pull” on a fresco about St. Clement, Cyril and Methodius also got some love.  I believe they are buried there but I mostly found plaques from Slavic countries as the brothers helped Christianize the Slavs and Cyril created the precursor to the alphabet that now bears his name (for those who can’t connect the dots, Cyrillic is the alphabet for languages like Russian, hence the fact this delighted my nerdy heart).

We ate dinner with a friend of mine from St. Louis who was also touring Europe (and the DRC) with her family.  Georgia has taught me that the world is much smaller than you think, and this reunion confirmed that fact a little more.

 

We had to rise early on day two to tour the place I was most excited to see.  If I could describe in one word why I’ve wanted to see Rome, Colosseo would do it.  The Colosseum, even after being used as a quarry for centuries, was still a spectacular sight.  From the gladiator’s area underneath to the third tier overlooking the forum, the world’s best-known amphitheater was impressive.  The Romans knew what they were doing: they developed a canopy that provided shade and some air flow, built in some protection against earthquakes into the building, and created the Colosseum as a powerful political message to erase some of the injustices of Nero’s reign.  If only Titus hadn’t had to sack Jerusalem to pay for it…

We also toured the ruins of the Forum and the palaces on the breezy Palatine Hill, but after the glory of the Colosseum and several hours in scorching Rome heat, these were great but not as exciting.

That afternoon we got a special tour of the Scavi, the excavations underneath the Vatican.  In addition to some of the best-preserved pagan tombs, the Scavi holds a unique and beautiful early Christian grave with stunning mosaics that still gleam with gold, some parts of Constantine’s 4^th century basilica, and, as the Catholic Church has always held, the resting place of St. Peter.  Excavations only began in the 1940s and originally were not supposed to go under the altar, and they were done by hand in secret.  The pope at that time was all in favor of the excavations and gave the go-ahead to excavate under the altar when they got close.

A brief aside about the layers of the Scavi, from the bottom up.  After Peter was crucified upside down, he was buried nearby in a pagan cemetery, since those were the only cemeteries around.  It was a cemetery for freedmen, and it was never a desirable place to be buried until centuries later under the Catholic church.  Peter was buried in a simple grave with two slabs in a V formation over his body.  Christians quickly started making pilgrimages to the site, even though it posed significant danger to them.  The pagan cemetery built up around his grave.  Either to disguise Peter’s grave, or to mark it as a grave that had been accidentally damaged, a small red wall and small temple (OK, I forget what they called it but it has two small columns and a roof) were erected over Peter’s grave.  Constantine built a basilica over the spot, taking the tops off of the cemetery rooms and filling them in with dirt, perfectly preserving the tombs for posterity, giving his church a firm foundation on Vatican hill, and mostly abiding by the Roman law that forbid destroying graves.  He built his altar on top of Peter’s tomb, and on the level of a basilica is a wall scratched with what looked like graffiti but a lay scholar took about 10 years (she thought it would take about 2 weeks) to determine that the scrawled writing said ‘Peter is here’ more or less and had symbols for Peter, Christianity, and the papacy repeated over and over.  They found bodies nearby; at least one was a woman, but one was a man with no feet whose general physical characteristics matched those of Peter’s.  Bits of royal cloth, cloth that pilgrims had dropped over the centuries, and soil that matched that underneath the temple-like structure below were all found with the body to give about as conclusive empirical evidence that the bones were Peter’s as we can really ask for.  On top of this is Bernini's masterpiece and the current altar of St. Peter's.  The tour was fascinating on a historical level as well as a spiritual one.

We hit up the Pantheon on our own.  Many guides will tell you it is their favorite building in Rome.  I liked it but did not see quite why it got such rave reviews.  Someone told me that the Pantheon is praised as a perfect building but upon further inspection, it actually has several flaws which we’ve copied in buildings around the globe for centuries.  Since the Pantheon was converted from a temple to all the gods into a church for all the saints, it survived being taken apart by industrious Romans intent on building projects so is the oldest building in continuous existence.  I mean, it is pretty cool.

We then toured the Vatican.  To be honest, while I did appreciate seeing in person some art I had only seen in books and on posters, I mostly felt anger toward the (mostly Renaissance) Catholic church that had spent its money on building a priceless art collection instead of carrying feeding the poor and taking care of widows and orphans.  It makes sense when you view the Catholic church as the heir to the power of the Roman Empire, but not as the church built upon a simple fisherman who walked with Jesus.  I got a much greater appreciation for St. Peter’s basilica the day before when I looked up into it from a medieval chapel built over the bones of St. Peter than I did walking around in it after seeing the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s masterpieces, and a ridiculous amount of ancient works.

We had a Context Walk of Ostia Antica the next day.  Ostia Antica was the port city of Ancient Rome and grew to have over a million inhabitants in its heyday.  The Tiber silted up and the town dwindled, with its streets and buildings astonishingly well-preserved.  Our guide was incredibly knowledgeable and even took us to the current summer’s archeological dig of the synagogue.  (Context Walk guides are academics and our guide has lived in Rome since he was a Fulbrighter there a few decades ago.  He’s even taken Rick Steve’s around Ostia Antica and other places.)  While it was pretty cool to walk around a real archeological dig, the painfully slow work, multiple comments about graduate students as the modern-day equivalent to ancient slaves, and blistering summer sun made me very glad I never decided to become an archeologist.

We also explored other nooks and crannies in Italy, tried the metro, threw coins over our shoulders into the Trevi fountain, delighted in strawberry gelato from the corner restaurant, tried new Italian delicacies, and bought our fair share of tourist gifts.

There’s much more of Rome for me to explore on a future visit but I enjoyed this first taste and have only written a basic account of our adventures.  I also realized how accustomed to the chaos of live in other countries I’ve become.  My father graciously paid for several taxis for our convenience but hated every ride because he was convinced we were going to die in a new accident every few seconds while the driving seemed downright sane after Georgia.  He also fretted over the line management (or lack thereof), which again seemed mild in comparison to Georgia.  The service at restaurants seemed better than what I was used to, since I was thrilled to be given my own personal menu with decent English translations, while my parents felt the opposite, missing the tip-induced service they were accustomed to.