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| Product of some kind of Google Photo Witchcraft. A panoramic photo knitted together by google photo assistant from photos I took at the Colosseum. |
No DeLorean, no Way Way Back Machine and yet we seem to have been transported to a time before time. A history so long ago it was a mystery to the middle ages and reconstructions feel more like colorful imagination than fact. It was hard to believe when we awoke on our second day in Rome that we could cross so little space and so much time, yet it happened.
There are many ways to travel. Sean and I prefer a hybrid method not as confining as meticulously planned itineraries and yet with more structure than flying by the seat of our pants. We generally research a city and make a list of possible things to do knowing not all will be accomplished. Generally we might make a list of 20 things and make it to 5 or so but Rome put this method to the test. Sean put together a 'Must-do' list of 10 items with another 20 in the maybe column.
It became apparent we couldn't just wing it and go to the Vatican. The lines famously long and the wait to see the Sistine Chapel nearly insufferable. So late our first night we booked tickets for the less crowded and relatively unknown Friday night opening at the Vatican Museums and planned our week around this scheduled booking and our Thursday night dinner reservation to a Michelin Star restaurant. Tuesday well rested after sleeping in late we decided to start at the beginning. Visit the Forum and Colosseum. Along the way hit an ancient roman church converted to Catholicism.
Dressed for churches in a short sleeve top with my shoulders modestly covered and in jeans we headed out towards the ancient Capitol. Our first stop was intended to be the Santa Maria in Aracoeli, this Catholic church resides in a former temple to Juno (Wife of Jupiter) built in 6 BC. The church once sat atop a hill but is now accessible by 124 marble steps. The guidebook said it is believed if you climb up these steps on your knees, you will win the lottery. Note: Do not try to look for anything in Rome with just Santa Maria, in the DK Eyewitness Rome guide there are 29 entries alone). So with a general heading and on the look out for massive marble staircase we set out. It wasn't long before we stumbled upon a massive and ornate building accessible by a seemingly endless cascade of polished white marble steps. After all how many buildings can have countless marble steps?
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| Marble Stairs of Il Vittoriano |
Well it turns out more than one. When we reached the top of the stairs past the massive bronze sculpture of a very well endowed horse, passed the armed guards with machine guns and through the doors at the end of the colonnade of columns and statues of unfamiliar political figures we realized we were at the Il Vittoriano (Altare della Patria). This immense and garish white stone monument was built in the late 1800s to memorialize the first King of Unified Italy. The building itself is contentiously viewed in history, as the white marble is so out of place it dominates the Roman skyline without being particularly tall. The building houses a museum although we chose to forego it. At the top we were met with impressive views of the city including the Roman Forum below and the famed Colosseum in the distance. We walked around the exterior to where the intended church should be and sure enough it was just on the other side of a locked gate. It would seem that while direct passage is possible it was not allowed or encouraged and therefore we would need to go around.
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| Collage of Il Vittoriano in Rome 2017 |
No matter how many marble stairs I had just climbed, I was determined to climb the 124 to the correct cathedral. The exterior of the cathedral was so unimpressive I didn't even think to take a photograph. Nondescript with an ancient plaster mix of cement and various stones resembling organized rubble the outside was clearly built before modern construction methods. No doubt the ancient Roman temple once had an impressive exterior (likely marble) that was pillaged over the long expanse of time since it was first erected leaving the solid but visually devoid exterior. The very steep polished marble steps lead straight up like an ancient ziggurat to an off-center door. The combination of steep staircase and bland building made it the anti-tourist attraction. The few who dared inside were rewarded by a surprisingly ornate interior and silent interior still functioning as a working church.
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| Interior Views of the Santa Maria in Aracoeli |
Like many Catholic churches, the rectangular center is lined with small prayer chapels each dedicated to a different patron saint or donated by a different tithing practitioner trying to buy their way into heaven. Curiously this cathedral features many electric candle lighting stations and I couldn't resist the urge to drop in a coin and light one up in front of a particularly macabre crucifixion scene. The distinguishing feature of this church was the dozens of large crystal chandeliers that lined the sides and the intricate box ceiling. The church's long history was exemplified in the varied works of art. A larger than life marble statue of a pope in a pose with one hand raised that evoked an almost Buddhist vibe. A primitive outline of a couple buried in the crypts below carved into the stone floor. Needless to say the church was well worth the double steps and set an appreciation for the preservation of ancient structures that follows continual re-purposing. For a temple built in 6 BC it looks nothing like its predecessor and yet the structure remains.
Satisfied with our detour, we continued towards the Colosseum stopping for a light lunch of panini and coke along the way. It was difficult to get sidetracked now, the Colosseum clearly visible in the distance. As we approached, the crowds thickened. We stopped at a large public water station with two taps to fill bottles with cold filtered still or sparkling (fizzy as it is commonly referred to) water. As we approached there was an obstacle course of private tour guides trying to sell their services. They promise tours in English that would allow us to skip the hour wait into the ancient structure. While I have no doubt there was earlier in the day an hour wait, by the afternoon the crowds had thinned and were inside the ancient monument in under 20 minutes (including tickets and metal detection). Avoiding the constant salesmanship of demanding tour guides. Between street vendors and tour guides you come to appreciate how much of life in Rome revolves around the hustle.
There is nothing quite like the Colosseum. Standing on mezzanine looking into the labyrinth of walls that made up the underground its simultaneously impressive and difficult to imagine. The floor of the arena is missing and so the center of the fighting pit descends to the basement level down to the bedrock of an ancient lake basin. The seats of the stadium long removed you have only remnants of staircases and partial roofs. The entire exterior once cased in polished marble is built of the same brick/cobble cement mixture of the ancient temple. To a geologist like myself it looks vaguely like man-made breccia. Informative signs throughout the site inform visitors that the Colosseum was built in just 9 years (they conveniently leave out the detail that to accomplish such a feat in 9 years it took the blood, sweat and tears of 60,000 slaves to build it).
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| Views of the Colosseum |
The views from the arched windows reveal the unearthed Roman Forum. The area largely devoid of modern buildings as this portion of the city was mostly unused following the Roman Empire. The ruins of the ancient city were buried under wind-blown dirt and grown into hills. If not for Rome being the center of the all powerful Catholic church, this ancient history would likely have been lost forever. While the structure itself is impressive and the views unmatched, I found myself most excited by the timeline exhibit in the museum portion of the monument that followed the Colosseum's history.
It was used as a primitive apartment building with multiple family dwellings in the earliest years AD. The catholic church owned the property and during the middle ages rented it out to a wealthy patron of the church who fortified a portion and built it into an estate. In the time of Bernini (the 1600s) the church considered commissioning the favored sculptor and Baroque architect to build a chapel in the structure. While the design was completed the structure itself was never built.
During all this time the Colosseum was in various states of disrepair. In 1654 botanists wrote the first book on the plant life in the ancient arena. The steps collecting wind blown sediment leading to pocket biomes that supported different plant life throughout the structure. Paintings in the Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris by Robert Hubert in the 1750s show the Colosseum was a ruin covered in green ivy and littered with debris. The large interior was used as a park. In fact it wasn't until renewed interest in restoration of the monument in the late 1800s after Rome became part of the Unified Italy did they discover that 18 feet of dirt covered the bottom layers of the arena. Having played many many hours of the sci-fi video game Horizon Zero Dawn that follows a female heroine living 1000 years after modern times in a landscape covered in the ruins of our civilization largely taken over by the wilds. Her people are hunters and gatherers in a slowly modernizing society battling unforgiving creatures (robot dinosaurs) and wilderness. I found myself thinking just how close the Colosseum came to this fate. Covered in plant life, shrouded in mystery and lore (Indeed in the middle ages it was widely believed the Colosseum was a pagan structure dedicated to ancient gods and was the source of much mysticism. It was during this time there are tales of the structure being used in medieval times for devil worship and necromancy among fringe groups). Nothing reminds you of the fragile nature of immortality more than knowing that a massive structure like the Colosseum was almost lost to the ages.
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| Collage made from images from a google image search. The top left and right are the works of Robert Hubert. The left found at the Prado and the right at the Louvre. Both depict the Colosseum. The left middle is an screenshot of ruins from the video game Horizon Zero Dawn. The bottom left is an unaccredited painting of the Colosseum in ruin. The bottom right is a photograph of the lowest level of the Colosseum below the fighting floor covered in green moss. |
The ticket to the Colosseum included both the Palantine Hill and Roman Forums. These ancient sites were directly in our path home so it only made sense to take our time walking back through the ruins. Like many of the other attractions in Rome, the Palantine Hill and Forums seem to purposefully lack signs encouraging even Italian tourists to hire guides to get a handle on which pile of rocks are suppose to be which thing. Thankfully we had our smart phones with an inexpensive data plan and were able to wander leisurely through the expansive park and figure out the general purpose of most ruins. Although I might argue since most of archeology is a guessing game anyhow we could very well have invented equally plausible and more interesting tales for the various structures. Many portions of the monument including the Palantine museum were indefinitely closed with no explanation. One portion of the forums looked like the ruins of a museum likely built in the 1980s and appeared to be closed for some time. A ruin of a museum of ruins. I think this further stresses the historical limbo most ancient structures in Rome face. The cost to restore and upkeep these sights is immense. Their previous lack of preservation makes them limited in archeological usefulness and yet they must be 'preserved' in some capacity even if that capacity is to build a fence around it and say 'restoration in progress' with no obvious signs of work.
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| Collage of photos from the Roman Forum |
Sore, tired and hot we treated ourselves to our first serving of gelato. Gelato shops in Rome outnumber Starbucks in Seattle. It is almost impossible to walk down a street and not find one. The streets with many hotels near the biggest attractions have the large heaping mounds of artificially flavored and candy colored gelato the guidebooks recommended avoiding. Thankfully the shops near our apartment seem to favor a more traditional approach. Small cones with two flavors each allowed us to sample 4 varieties and start the count on gelato servings for this trip.
Given our first meal in Rome was good but a bit underwhelming we decided to try again. This time we found ourselves at Le Streghe which translates to Witches. I was familiar with this word in Italian because a friend of mine online from Italy once called me Strega piccalo. Which when I put into google translate came out as "little witch". I was confused and he explained to me the word strega can also be used to describe someone who is spoiled rotten. Basically he was calling me a spoiled brat or trying to suggest I have a bit of a princess complex. Which is entirely true but the translation was quite amusing.
The food...
Le Streghe was a few blocks from our apartment down a windy black cobbled stone street. An arched doorway lead to an empty restaurant with white linen tablecloths. All the diners has chosen to sit outside under the awning at slightly slanted tables with blue gingham tablecloths. We too chose to sit outside enjoying the cool evening air as it was now dark at 9pm. Sean ordered a bottle of Barbera d'Alba, a DOC wine from the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. We enjoyed a plate of melon and prosciutto as we looked over the menu before deciding on two courses a pasta primi and a secondi. Sean ordered the ravioli off the standard menu the center of each freshly made dough pocket filled with a creamy herbed ricotta. Each morsel a tasty bite. I ordered the tagliatelle with ragu off the daily menu and could tell from the moment my fork touched the noodles it was going to be divine. The pasta was cooked perfectly giving it a supple but chewy texture. The sauce a tomato-based meat sauce so lightly applied that the noodles still seemed weightless. The pasta fresh enough that the Parmesan cheese freshly grated on top melted to my fork and required a change of silverware between courses.
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| Collage of our two courses. Note that Sean's shirt matches the table cloth! |
For our second course we both ended up with pieces of fresh fish. The Italian menu requiring our phone to translate the species reminding us of how far we had come from 2013 where we desperately tried to figure out the name of the fish in the fish marker in Nice before resorting to using our precious limited data to find out it was grouper. The daily menu included two fish dishes that a quick google search revealed was a fillet of sea bass and a grilled yellow tail tuna. Sean ordered the fillet of sea bass the generous portion moist and flaky in a tomato broth with assorted olives. The acidity of the olives pairing beautifully with the briny stock. I ordered the grilled yellow tail and was met with a massive portion of fish cooked to a crispy exterior that crunched lightly as I bit into it. The fish moist and tender. I have only ever had yellow tail with a rare preparation that leaves the center uncooked and pink so I was surprised to see a fully cooked fillet. The temperature needed to get the crispy crusty exterior left no room for pink but the wish was perfectly done and flavorful. Both dishes simple and highlighting the delicate flavors of each fish. The meal was exquisite but sadly with such generous portions there was no room for dessert.
After an evening stroll by the now familiar Piazza Navona four rivers statue we felt confident we could squeeze in one more serving of gelato for the day. Most of the gelato stands were closed at 11pm but we found a small artisan shop boasting daily batches and listing the sources of all their ingredients.Two more small cones each with two flavors and we are now at 2 servings of gelato in 2 days!
Day two was a magical time traveling experience but the best is yet to come. Stay tuned for Day 3: Bernini and Charcuterie!
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