Rome / March 2001

   The after-images of Rome still linger in my dreams and in my waking; the strange beauty and homeyness, the memory of slipping between the cracks and using the small red bathroom, more closet than bathroom in a shop near the Pantheon. It was there I contemplate the maps in my search for the grail, the little French restaurant run by lay missionaires called "l' eau Vive" where the cardinals of the church party and where, after dinner, comes the ritual singing of Ave Maria in French, sung in such sweet and childlike tones that the hair on your skin stands up. I found the little restaurant, where JPII had gone before his papal promotion and where discreteness is the word, but not easily. The little restaurant is a block or so from the Pantheon, just off a little medieval square where four streets conjoin and where I ask various people where "Le Monterone" is and one shrugs, seemingly amazed he doesn't know. A policeman knows but isn't telling, another tells but doesn't know. I walk the equivalent of a few more football fields and at last retrieve it from its obscurity (until I lose it again later that night when it is time to eat there). The pleasure of looking and finding was greater, and it is that little area of Rome I consequently remember most - the little café stop Le Euastochio where big shots sip cappuchino, where the sudden appearance of Swiss guards occurred marching to the beat of a distant drummer, where religious shops line the square like a geiger counters triggering the nearness of the eccleciastical restaurant.

We arrived at last that night, the late opening (7:30pm) eased by the delicious food and the best wine I would have in Rome. The red was eminently sippable, a wine so rich that to drink it fast would be a sin, and we waited to the bewitching hour when the lay missionaries came with programs and we experienced the novelty of prayer sung while eating, or just after eating. The only meal that came close to the enjoyment of this one was the final one, where the bathrooms were modeled after the catacombs we'd just seen (where else but Italy are there Catacomb bathrooms?) with an arched niche just beside the urinal that looked exactly like the grave niches of the catacombs. The language barrier was typical; I asked the waiter for a glass of wine (I'd gotten a beer with dinner) and he brought an empty glass to share in Mark & Sandy's carafe. They didn't mind me stealing their wine. The room was foreign and dripping with atmosphere. We had it to ourselves for awhile, until other guests began piling in. The food was divine, I had a sort of pizza with a delectable crust - food choices in Rome often seem limited to fish and pasta, and I'm usually not a big fan of either, but this pizza was as good as it gets.

The flight to and from Italy is a sort of barrier akin to fraternity hazing. On the flight home I sat in the aisleway (Mark & Sandy & I had seats all different places despite having made our reservations together). Sitting next to the bathroom, I was assaulted by the smell of some horrific "perfumed" soap that soon became nauseating. The constant parade of passengers to the bathroom, each taking care to bump me, made sleep something that occurred only in two to three minute increments. Next to me sat two teenagers one of whom quickly discovered that sitting in the last row has its advantages, namely the ready availability of unprotected sampler bottles of wine, which he proceeded to down at a pace Nero would be envious of. He eventually began saying the word "f*ck" every third word. He mercifully passed out the final three hours of the flight. Being in the last row had other disadvantages too; the food service cart would invariably start from the other direction and run out of the most desirable food just before the end. So I ended up with fish instead of chicken, and it was a fish covered with a sauce that I had been smelling since Milan. It had mingled with the smell of the urinal-cake perfume behind me for the past several hours and was distractingly unpleasant. I began to think I might actually throw up, so I didn't have much of it. The flight was almost literally purgatorial.

One night in Rome, I ventured out alone after a couple glasses of wine. The in-room refrigerator had provided the wine, at no immediate cost other than my signature on a sheet of paper. The television had offered only shows like a dubbed "Walker, Texas Ranger" or a scantily-clad woman showing enormous enthusiasm and so found myself suddenly immersed in the 3-dimensional world, but one no more real than a movie set. I walked in the light rain to a new (hundred year old) church. I peaked inside it's slightly ajar doors, and inside were the comforting images of saints, fragrant even to me. I steathily moved all the way in and saw that some sort of singing practice was going on. The language barrier being such, I could make out nothing of their sounds; it was completely opaque. I felt like a voyeur, an outsider, and lurked in the shadows, perhaps menancingly. A man in his late 40s, with a look of annoyance, began the long trek down the aisle. Reading body language, I scattered. I bolted out the door, delighted that I'd provoked a response, and then observered from a distance as the man looked left and right and left again, and then closed the church doors completely. I was on vacation, and if I could enter the locals lives, even in a perfectly annoying way, then at least I was impacting.

Rome, that particular March, was inhabited mostly by Romans. A brazen race indeed, evinced by the indifferent hard-body who sat on her cycle with her leather skirt split like the atom, her loins covered only by a panty's thin sheen. Romans lived life seemingly intentionally insulated from tourists by their language. They were mute subjects, oblivious and dense, imperviousness to clues and games of charades. With that came a sort of freedom - they were free-er to feign misunderstanding and ignore us and we were free-er to express outrageous sentiments. Romances could bud easily in the soil of misunderstanding, since misunderstanding invites us to project upon the other purely our terms. We can imagine the banal Italian waitress another Sophia Loren; she can project a Hollywood movie star on us. In the States this could never be so, for our language gives us away. Back in the USA, we become jaded by the sameness of our communication. The currency of the English language is immensely diverse but we use the same nouns and verbs with the same inflections, over and over and over again. All the nuances that can flavour things has been tried - the thyme starts tasting like the rosemary.

What was the Rome like? Let's start with the hotel and explore outward. The hotel room was "cleaned" by a couple of middle-aged matrons who chimney-smoked in what was officially a no-smoking room. Though it was almost 4pm on check-in day, they weren't yet done, so I waited impatiently in the hallway, trying to call Mark on a phone that didn't work. The byzantine elevator looked like every load might be its last, so we took the steps,even when we had baggage. The front desk combined as a bar, where the locals suddenly gathered like a flock of birds on some pre-arranged signal. Their foreignness was fetching but off-putting, and they spoke and drank with glassy eyes and mouths that shut immediately when we came in, causing us much embarrassment. They would all speak at once if we asked a question. I couldn't tell if they were thought us a necessary inconvenience.

The scene outside my hotel window became literally my little window on Rome. I tried to imagine all the catacombed people who lived just within view - like those with laundry hanging outside. What made them tick? What made them groove? Apparently not my singing. The moon and the wine and Rome had gotten to me and I lustily sang out my balcony something I can't recall - until the neighbor's shutters banged shut. The weather was always mellow, never harsh, very civilized. The windows lent themselves to being open. The sun beat down during certain days, days we walked till we were dizzy from fatigue and hunger. We arrived in our tennis shoes at Trattoria's, reeking of tourists, incongruously drinking fine wines and good food in our familiar American clothes.

Rome is most of all a Catholic Disneyland - chills and thrills abound. I remember fondly the first time I saw the vision of the main castle at Disneyworld in Florida. I was almost as if it wasn't real, and that is kind of how I felt the first time I saw St. Peter's.

Colliseum-bound

The great Colliseum was our first stop and what a dominating presence it makes. You have to gasp when you first see it, to think that such a long dead civilization could leave such a big architectural remnant. It occured to me that isn't it amazing Rome couldn't see their demise coming, that they couldn't think to shrink their vast empire and marshall their energies in order to defend it. All it took was the Barbarians to cut off the Roman acquaducts and Rome was without water and instantly toast. No water, no Rome. I guess by that point they didn't care.

Ostia Antica

We spent a day amid the ruins, and what ruins they were. A whole town that gave glimpses of life so long ago. Strolling amid this fallen world, I came across unexpected little gems - panoramas on walls, baths floored with mosaic tiles of half-men/half-animals, a bar run by a fellow named Fortunateous with the Latin phrase, "Fortunateous says, If you are thirsty, drink from the Crater". (The crater was a large cup with two handles). You began to wonder if they ever worked - slaves apparently did the work while the Romans played and socialized, had orgies or took baths. Very social people, they rarely spent a moment alone - not even to go to the bathroom! We came across a huge room with about twenty or more marble holes for toilets, each one extremely close to the other (no stalls here). Ironic too, was finding the dillipadated altar statue of their main goddess with her foot resting upon the earth, a message in stone that said, "Rome rules the world" but now an equally vivid message that Rome no longer rules. Adjacent lay a temple to the Emperor Ceasar(at first their gods were the Greek gods but then they made their emperor gods, I guess with the feeling of "what's one more god gonna hurt?"). This temple was also half-way destroyed with the message-in-stone "what God doesn't build, doesn't last".

San Pietro's:

It felt lighter, airier, and architecturally warmer than I expected. Of all the big churches I've seen - Dublin's St. Patrick, Notre Dame in Paris and NYC's St. Patricks - St. Peter's felt the most …well, homey.  This is probably due to the fact that those other churches are Gothic and St. Peter's doesn't have the dark stained glass windows and severe grey-stone pointy arches. There was a huge mosaic band of lettering around the interior that lent a kind of literary feel to this largest of all churches. I didn't know what the lettering meant, not knowing Latin, but thanks to "reverse tourism" I learned later that it was the scriptural verse from Matthew 16:18. It wasn't a baroque church, with teeming masses of statues and paintings competing for attention, a taste which I once had but seem to have lost (less can be more). Instead it was a prayerful place, well-lit and awe-inspiring. We went to Mass there, a special treat although it was disappointing that it was said all in Italian. Here we were worshipping where for almost two millenia Christians have worshipped, giving sense of solidarity with previous Christians and making the past come alive. Only Jerusalem and the Holy Land would be more special. Vivid images linger - the reassuring cadences of the elderly bishop, the dove representing the Spirit over the altar, the high windows, the pushy Italian nuns who formed an impentetrable line for Communion making it difficult to merge, the procession at the start and end (finishing in a mini-Adoration service)….The day before we'd strolled around and come across  Michealanglo's "Pieta", behind glass, and what surprised me (but shouldn't have) was how much is missing in reproductions, like the expression of Mary, the tilt of her head and sorrowful innocence.

The previous day we'd also taken a tour of the necropolis ("city of the dead") below the main altar of St. Peter's. The Romans called it "necropolis" but the new Christians called it a "cemetery" from the Greek "koimeterion" meaning "sleeping place". They apparently thought time was short before the return of Christ. On the tour we saw a cross-section of altars, going back to Constantine who in 300-something A.D. covered what he considered to be the grave of St. Peter in a marble box. Inside the marble box there is what became known as the "graffitti wall", which contained scrawl from the 2nd century saying "Peter is within". It contained an opening where bones lay of a 60 to 70 year old powerfully built man. The early Christians took care to bury and venerate their dead probably in response to the belief in the resurrection of the body and the conviction that Christ would return soon. What is amazing is that there were ancient drawings of "Constantine's box" but no one knew if it actually existed until around the time of the 2nd World War. Peter's bones lay undisturbed for over 1500 years until excavations in 1939 found the Roman necropolis just outside the present basillica. They followed the narrow Roman road, which traveled in a direction along the east nave of the Church directly towards the main altar. It was there Constatine's box was found. When I was a kid I used to love to tease Doug or Jean by putting their present in a box and then wrapping it in another, inside another, etc…It was held the fascination of a secret within a secret, and then a secret revealed. This was the feeling I got looking at that cross-section of altars - and how incredible it must have been to have come across the Roman necropolis by accident.

Holy Steps

That first day we ascended on our knees the Scala Sancti or "Holy Steps". There is some reason to believe they are actually the stairs outside the gov't building of Pontius Pilate which Jesus walked up just before his crucifixtion. I'd figured it was the stuff of legend, but in our usual manner of "reverse tourism" - i.e. reading about something after you visit it - I leared that the underlying marble is of the type used in Jerusalem at the time of Pilate and that Emperor Constantine's wife went on a spree in Jerusalem looking for objects that Christ may've touched.  Even if it isn't the actual steps, popes have ascended these steps on their knees since the 1600s and it was on these steps that Martin Luther had a sudden intution that these "works" were worthless and that faith alone mattered. In Rome, so many famous persons of history have been here that every place and monument has a history!

Pantheon

After a short subway ride from the Spanish steps, we came across another architectural jewel from around 120AD; the Pantheon (meaning "all the Gods"), the main religious temple of the Romans. It is a perfect sphere - as Sandy was fond of pointing out - as wide as it is tall. They built it by using increasingly lighter materials as they moved up, till the very top of the dome is a very light pumice-like stone. The Romans built it up under dirt with coins interspersed. Why? So that when it came time to empty the huge dome of earth, they simple asked the people of Rome to do it which they gladly did in order to collect the gold within. It was emptied in short order!

40,000 Bones

The "Church of 40,000 Bones" as Mark called it was actually Santa Maria della Conceizione. Here, not quite entombed, were over 4,000 monks who donated their bones as the raw material for macabre decorations that illustrate biblical imagery as well as the brevity of life. (For example, the sacred heart with a crown of thorns adorns the walls via a unique combination of bones.) When I read about this place I imagined it much more dark and dreary, a scary Halloweenish place. But I thought it was about as cheerful as you could make it, especially if you forgot for a minute the archway decorations were bones. The message is the "as you are/ so was I/ as I am/ so shall you be" and is intended to give a sense of urgency in the spiritual life. The psalmist asks in Psalm 30 what profit is there in his death - "Will the dust praise you?" and I thought this place really tried to have these dusty bones praise God by showing the faith of these holy monks had in not fearing death but by taunting it and saying "where is thy sting?". Another thing that I love about Rome is that all the characters of history have seen it. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain both visited this church of 40,000 bones and both came away appalled. It's not for the squeamish.

Connections

I liked how things tied together with things I'd previously knew. For instance, in London I'd been struck by a very moving statue of a woman who lay on the floor either dead or in a posture of supline obedience. I took a picture of it though I didn't know the story behind it. Then in the Catacomb of San Callisto, we came across that very statue! The original was found here, in this particular Catacomb (there are many around Rome), and it marks the grave of St. Cecillia, a marytr beheaded during the Roman persecutions. The tour guide explains that there is a visible line on her neck (symbolism for how she died) and one of her hands one finger is pointing (symbolism that there is one God, instead of the Roman formulation of many gods) and her other hand holds out three fingers (symbolizing the Trinitarian three persons in one God).

In preparation for Ireland, there was a picture of a statue of a dying Celt warrior. It was the first art representation of a Celt, and it was done by a Roman artist and in a Roman museum called "Capitoline" we found this statue.

I'd seen pictures of Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Therese" years ago and it was quite a surprise to see the original when, while trying to find a Metro subway, we came across the church that houses it, "Santa Maria de Vittoria" I think.

In the Chicago airport (of all places), I check out a bookstore and come across a familiar painting - the Last Supper scene that was painted on a grave at the Catacomb of San Callisto.

Subway Robbery