Roamin' Rome!

Rome
Dec. 1, 2008

We organised an apartment rental for this last week of our European stint long ago... and it has shone in the future like a beacon, lighting our way when we were in grotty campgrounds or looking for a place to stay in the cold and dark! Happily, it has lived up to our expectations... I have a kitchen, there's a washing machine, the shower is great, and there's even cable TV with CNN! (Although getting caught up on world news is singularly depressing.)

We could be tempted to just hole up here for a few days and not stir a step outside, especially as (no surprise here) is has been chucking down with rain. It actually rained so hard they had to come and fix the roof outside our penthouse suite! ("Penthouse?" I hear you say, eyebrows raised. "Ah, yes," I have to reply, "the view is great -- when it's not obscured by cloud -- but it's six storeys up and there is no elevator!!!") Anywhere else in the world we probably would have just stayed tucked up inside, warm and cosy -- but this is Rome!


Rome! Armed with our trusty and well-used umbrellas, we made wishes at the Trevi Fountain, and went for out for spaghetti dinner! Just walking the streets is an adventure; throughout the centre of the city, ruins that are thousands of years old lay dotted in between newer buildings and bustling streets. And the Pantheon is exquisite. I have to confess that although I had heard the name, I had not realised that the Pantheon is the oldest building in Europe (it dates back to antiquity) still in use -- it is actually now a church (Roman Catholic, of course), but has served many other functions over the years. It is a huge, round building -- and the centre of its roof is cut out, so the church below is open to Heaven. This must make it interesting during mass when it is raining, and it is certainly not warm and cosy, but it is beautiful!


Our trip to the Colosseum was hampered by hostile gladiators... honestly! As we emerged outside the metro station and looked across the street at the huge structure, the boys were delighted to see a gladiator in full regalia standing guard. He beckoned them across and threw his arms around them for a picture, which Mitch was only to happy to take; but when we went to move on and find the entrance, he was suddenly asking for money for the picture -- a lot of money. The kids were upset, and I was embarrassed because we were pretty much out of cash... in the end Mitch deleted the pictures so he'd leave us all alone (all except the one you see here!). What a way to make a living -- as we circled the building, we saw dozens of these 'gladiators', all there for the sole purpose of extorting cash from tourists. By the time this little debacle had played out, we missed the last entrance into the Colosseum! I expected the kids to be really disappointed, but it is so impressive from the outside that they were perfectly happy; we circled the whole building and saw through the various gates into the arena. these were the very gates where thousands of slaves stood waiting to enter and fight other slaves to the death; where bull and bears and lions were penned up, tormented and them released to rip each other to shreds; and where early Christians were publicly executed amid cheers and festivities. I really wasn't too sad to not actually step within its walls -- to me, it is not a great symbol of human accomplishment, although the power that emanates from its crumbing walls is palpable.

Dec. 3

We went to Vatican City today. We are not Catholic, and in fact both my Mom's mother and my Dad's father rejected the Catholic faith after being very badly treated by the Church... but I still could not help but feel honored and impressed to see this incredible place. We were all overwhelmed and awed by the art... everywhere. A vast majority of the world's priceless pieces reside there -- most of them not seen by the public. We loved seeing the Vatican Swiss Guards with their funny outfits, and the Michaelangelo's Dome was of course superb... but the most breath-taking piece of art I have ever seen in my life was Michealangelo's "Pieta", a statue in the Bascillica showing Mary holding Jesus's dead body. Just thinking of it makes me want to weep... it was the most moving thing I have ever seen.

One of my favourite things about Rome has been to see such a huge number of nuns and priests (of various stations) wandering the streets, talking on cell phones, and just living like normal folks. In fact, many of the tourists at the Vatican were actually "of the cloth". Very interesting.

Pompeii

Pompeii, Nov. 29

We took the ferry back across the Adriatic yesterday, arriving in Ancona, which was reasonably handy for Rome... but today was our only possibility to see Pompeii, which I had mistakenly located just north of Rome. To my chagrin, I was way out of whack -- Pompeii is actually just south of Naples. So we ended up driving two hours past Rome in -- you guessed it -- the foulest weather imaginable. When we had had the ferocious wet weather on the way from Florence to Venice, the motorway was at least fairly quiet. The drive to Pompeii was absolutely treacherous, with four to six lanes of traffic jockeying for lane space and hurtling along at 130 km in the dark and pouring rain. Eventually -- inevitably -- our poor van started to hydroplane, and with a less-skilled driver than Mitch our adventure may have come to an abrupt end then and there. That was it... we started looking for the next roadside hotel, whatever the price, before we paid with more than money! And as a result, we spent the night in a lovely hotel room in the middle of nowhere, Italy -- we stayed up late watching CNN and feeling luxurious.

Pompeii has been a big deal, "must see place" for us since Caelan started reading, as the first 'read-it-yourself-book' we got him was about the ancient eruption of Mount Vesuvius which buried the Roman town in its entirety in a matter of hours. As one historian I read put it "the rapid eruption was the best thing that could possibly have happened for Europe -- unless you happened to be a citizen of Pompeii"... because it has left a complete ancient city, incredibly preserved under layer-upon-layer of ash.

But I find it interesting that when I was rhapsodising about going to see Pompeii, the majority of people I talked to stared blankly at me -- it seems to remain off the charts of the must-see spots in Europe. Certainly, whoever made the road signs in Italy was pretty indifferent to its importance as a sight!! And our darned Google directions took us on a short cut off the main roads that left me cursing technology in language my children should not have heard and lamenting our lack of a decent map. We spent a good hour scrabbling around on little back roads with Mt. Vesuvius leering malevolently above us through a tattered cloak of dark cloud. (Why would people rebuild in the same spot that had known such tragedy? It's only a matter of time before it happens again...) After asking directions three or four times (in our fluent Italian!), we finally made it to this immense site -- and I mean HUGE! By that time, we only had a few hours to spend where one could easily wander for days -- but we made the best of it.


The horror of Pompeii's destruction was that by the time the people finally realised what was happening, there was no escape -- they were trapped between the volcano and the sea, and the fumes must have driven them to the ground as the ashes softly rained down upon them. The eruption happened in about 300 BC, so the bodies that were buried where they fell had long disintegrated before excavations happened. What they found as they excavated were only cavities showing where bodies would have been. On one street, before clearing the rubble they injected plaster into the cavities and were left with perfect moulds of thirteen people. Seeing those people as they lay smote my heart, particularly a painful grouping of an adult with a child pressed up close to her, as another adult (her husband? mother? sister? brother) a few feet away clearly made one last desperate effort to reach them. I didn't find this macabre, but poignant; what this time exploring other countries and histories has shown me over and over again is that life on this planet really is nothing without that interaction and love between people -- and this little unit of family or friends seemed to immortalise that the human condition is about reaching out to others.

After that, it felt like a gift to be able to see the homes and culture of those people, who radiated emotion almost two thousand years after their demise. Honestly, it was so interesting in such a non-'museumy' kind of way; almost like being on an ancient House & Garden tour. Cachell and I admired the kitchen designs and especially appreciated the little extras that some houses had -- a particularly intricate mosaic on the floor, or a tiled counter-top in jewel tones instead of just plain terra-cotta.


The gladiator stadium was of great interest to Caelan and I, as his book on Pompeii discussed the gladiators in detail. And it was there, in the very arena he first learned of in relationship to gladiators, that his mother showed him it will take more than a scrawny eleven-year-old to take her down! Bring on the gladiators!!

Their designs to manage water were also extremely interesting -- more than a thousand years later, my ancestors in the UK (birthplace of the next Empire) would still be dumping their chamber pots onto the streets below and using pipes and drains that were hopelessly inadequate and disease ridden. (in fact, Queen Victoria's husband, Albert, who was a champion of improving the quality of British drains, succumbed to typhoid brought on by the terrible quality of the sewers at Windsor Castle.) In Pompeii the pipes and channels are still plainly visible along the edges of streets, and what intrigued us more were the garden and roof designs. All the homes we saw (which perhaps did not include the poorer citizens...) had a covered garden. In the centre of the garden there was a box-like structure -- some very utilitarian, others obviously once ornate fountains). Above the fountains, the roof had a square hole, and the roof itself sloped down on all four sides towards this central opening; water then was collected on the roof in great quantity, and stored in the fountains below. This would cut down on run-off and provide a source of water. And all this, in the days before sheet metal and eavestroughing...

Anything to do with good rain management is of interest on this trip -- we see a lot of it! IN fact, we're starting to feel a certain moral obligation to travel to the drought-stricken parts of the world...!

Meteora Mystery

Meteora, Greece
Nov. 27, 2008

We left Delphi bright and early today, bound for the ferry port of Igoumenista and the ferry connection across to Italy. We didn't get on the ferry until 11:00 p.m., so this gave us the whole day to explore our way through Northern Greece... and particularly, visit the monasteries of Meteora that I had been reading about with great anticipation.

Generally, in Greece, we were not terribly interested in OLD sites (you know, dating back through the last millennia or two) when we could see ANCIENT sites... but even the kids were interested to see the Meteora monasteries. In this part of the Greek mainland, up deep in mountain country, there are some amazing rock formations; giant 'hoodoos' as we call them at Drumheller, conical up-thrusts of rock with with almost sheer, straight sides. They look like weird galactic mushrooms. Alone, these would be very interesting -- but it was on top of these crazy rocks that the monasteries were built.

I like to imagine back to the first hermit monk who wandered into Kastraki village in the 1400s, saw the hoodoos beyond, and felt an irresistible pull to the strange pinnacles. I can see him, beard tucked into his belt, robes flapping, starting to climb, pickaxe and rope slung across his back. He must have been so frustrated in his first attempts. A villager or passing farmer would have noticed him, and watched discreetly from a distance. After the observer went to town for siesta that afternoon and told his cronies around their pot of blisteringly strong coffee, the crowd of onlookers would have grown. Then when the monk finally succeeded and made it to the top -- perhaps with a bit of help from the local lads -- the villagers would have begun to worry how long he could possibly last up there without water. Husbands would have been dispatched by their wives with jugs of water and wine, entreating the monk to throw down a rope so they could send him up some supplies... Stories of the hermit monk would have spread through the small and devout villages, attracting other young monks interested in the ultimate seclusion... until within a century or two, the barren and strange rocks sprouted the monasteries that we can see today. What a labour -- hauling the bricks and timber up by rope, piece by piece. The buildings are quite beautiful, and the half-a-dozen remaining of the original 24 that are still inhabited and used are incredibly well-preserved.

But there is an undeniable spookiness to their beauty. There is a strict dress code, no shorts or short sleeves fro men, and only skirts for women. Visitors nowadays are not hauled up in baskets as in days of yore, but the hundreds of steps up does not make for a warm welcome! When we arrived, slightly out-of-breath, there was absolutely no one to be seen, anywhere, although there was eerily beautiful Gregorian chant playing softly in the background. Our guidebook had mentioned an entrance fee, so when no one appeared we just left our money on the desk and quietly made our way into the chapel, and then up onto the rooftop garden. As we stood u there in the wind, admiring the tiny toy car that was our trusty Peugeot far below, I happened to notice some neatly stacked firewood just behind a little building we had passed on our way up.

"Look at that wood," I said to Mitch. "Isn't it cool -- it almost looks like femurs." I had been laughing as I said it, but we both looked and grew quiet as we realised what we were seeing. "And those round things...," I gulped. "Are they skulls?"

Certain we must be wrong, we made our way down to the entrance, where a grumpy old man was now sitting. We explained to him that we had left our money on the desk -- and he denied having seen it. So either he, or someone else, stole coins placed on a table in a living monastery. By this time, I was feeling quite icky over our discoveries, and just wanted to leave... but as we passed the shed with the "firewood" stacked beyond, Mitch and they boys made their way purposefully around back. Sure enough, neatly stacked, there were 13 complete and several partial human skulls, as well as a number of femurs and other large bones!!!! It's not like the monastery may have boasted a little graveyard which they had dug up for some reasons -- it's solid rock! Who were we looking at? And why were they being treated in such a cavalier and disrespectful fashion -- in a monastery, of all places?! Trafficking in human remains is still a popular black market activity... Should we call the police?


Eventually, given the language barrier, the dubiousness of the Greek police force, and (hopefully not misplaced) ingrained sense of respect for the a religious order, we decided to leave the bones in the hands of the monks... and the mystery of who they belonged to remains just that -- a mystery.