Rome

Our plane arrived on the eastern side of the Mediterranean and on the outskirts of the city of Rome in the late evening. After the usual hassle of getting between airport and city we found ourselves at the main train station, Termini. We walked the short distance to our hostel and found ourselves in front of another apartment building with a buzzer noting the hostel’s name. We pressed the button on the intercom. There was no answer on the intercom, only the sound of the door being buzzed open into a dimly lit hallway dusted with construction debris. In front of us was a small elevator, the kind with the metal gate that you pull across, with a sign that said “All guests, use the elevator at your own risk, it’s not reliable.” Not wanting to test if “not reliable” meant possibly getting stuck or suddenly plunging us to our deaths, we opted for the stairs. At the top of the first stairwell we found a glass door that had the name of our hostel painted on it, except the ‘s’ had been scraped off. I guess that they had “upgraded” to a hotel in the time since we had made our bookings.

We were greeted by a friendly Indian gentleman who helped us check in while informing us that he spoke seven languages all of which learned solely “listening to people talk, asking questions, you know.” Upon inquiring about our majors he was glad we were not studying abroad for something such as language studies since that was stupid and “not a real subject.” After catching a bit more life philosophy we headed upstairs to our rooms. The second floor of the building were the living quarters of the hostel complete with three bathrooms, a kitchen, and a desktop computer.

By hostel standards, our room was huge. There were only three beds in a space that could fit six and the other half of the room was deserted and being used as a storage area for dressers and light fixtures. Since the wireless router was unplugged and sitting atop a dresser we correctly guessed that the building did not have Wi-Fi.

For two out of three nights we did not have a guest in the third bed in the room, but there was an older Spanish gentleman whose room was next to ours. To our knowledge he neither slept nor left the hostel since between the hours of 6pm and whenever we went to bed he was sitting at the desk in the common area using both the desktop computer and his personal laptop. We noticed him on a variety of websites including Spanish single men’s chatrooms, but none of which involved any pressing work as far as we were able to discern. Occasionally he would take a twenty minute break to ignore the hostel’s no smoking policy by lighting up a hand-rolled cigarette in the bathroom. He neither cared to let others use the computer during that time nor to ash his cigarette anywhere but on the ground in the bathroom. He took a brief break around 8 each night to cook himself food leaving both his leftovers and dirty dishes to be found by the cleaning staff the next day.

Undeterred by rude guests we made the most of our time by enjoying everything Rome could offer, especially great architecture and excellent Italian food. We found it interesting that Italian restaurants would have two courses: the first being a pasta dish and the second a meat dish with a side. Restaurants around the touristy areas of Rome (that is to say almost the entire city) stand outside trying to entice potential customers with food and drink specials. On our first evening we were standing in the plaza in front of the Pantheon admiring the exterior as a restaurateur near us had conversations with customers in Italian, French, English, and Spanish. I was just about to point his linguistic prowess out to Kaitlin when I saw him walk up to a Japanese couple reading the menu and say a friendly “Konnichiwa, O-genki desu ka?” or “Good evening, how are you?” Thoroughly impressed, we decided to have dinner there. Just as we were served our first course an accordion band struck up in the plaza and played for almost the entire meal!

Rome is a somewhat overwhelming city to visit. At first it is hard to believe that this is the actual city of the Romans, once arguably the capital of the entire civilized world. It is hard to miss the presence of thousands of years of history in the city. Monuments, landmarks, and ancient buildings are found on nearly every city block spreading out a very far distance from the city center.

It was still a surreal experience to be able to walk down a modern city with shoe stores and restaurants lining the sidewalks and to look to the left and see the forum where Julius Caesar was killed or the field where the great Roman fire began. Rome is known for having several distinct hills in the city that were once a home to the members of powerful governing families such as the Medici. The houses were constantly in a power struggle for control of the city for much of their history and the pope usually found himself in a balancing act to keep the peace. Much of our stay was spent walking around the city learning of its history and seeing the fabulous architecture some of which is centuries old.

Of course no visit to Rome would be complete without seeing the Wonder of the Ancient World found in the city, the Coliseum. After chatting with the staff of our hostel who told us that during the spring the site could become exceptionally crowded we decided to go in the late evening a few hours before it closed. This proved to be a good decision as the lines were fairly short at that time.

One of the most amazing things about the Coliseum is that the structure that one sees today is just the underlying framework of the building. All of the original seating, balconies, and concourses throughout the stadium were made of more fragile material and were either lost to the centuries or reclaimed for other building endeavors. Artist renderings of the show the intricate detail of the structure as it stood centuries ago.

The Coliseum actually has a very interesting history. The site originally was just a normal residential block of the city until the year 64 AD when the Great Roman Fire destroyed much of the quarter including the houses of the aristocracy on nearby Palatine Hill. On the cleared land of the hill and surrounding lowland areas the Emperor Nero designed his grounds and built his palace, the Domus Aurea (literally “Golden House” in Latin). After Nero’s death, his successors built the amphitheater to turn some of the lands of the Domus Aurea into a place for the people of the city to use, probably to help shake off some of the bad rap that the emperors got after Nero’s rule.

The tickets to the Coliseum also gave us access to the adjacent Roman Forum, a large park that is home to many old preserved architectural sites including active archeological digs. In the park we walked among houses of Roman nobility and their gardens, an old sports pitch that was still almost fully intact, and a stretch of the massive aqueduct that once carried water into the city from the far away countryside.

Among the preserved sites we encountered active digs with archeologists slowly cataloging finds in their sites. As with the rest of the ancient part of the city, the level of complexity in the architecture was astonishing. Despite being several thousand years old a large part of the structures still stood to this day (obviously with a little help from preservationists over the years). Just to engineer something as the aqueduct system must have taken a great knowledge of physics, architecture, and mathematics impressive for the day and age in which they were constructed.

Before we could leave the city we had to make a trip to the smallest country in the world, Vatican City. Lying in the northwest corner of the city, the head of the Roman Catholic Church had long been just another part of the city in Rome. In 1929, the Vatican was split for the rest of the city and made an independent city governed by the pope alleviating many socio-political problems caused by the conflict between the government and the pope.

The approach to the Vatican was impressive. Crossing over the Tiber, the road ahead of you leads straight to St. Peter’s Square with the Basilica and the city directly in front of you. Of course, most of the Vatican is not open to tourists, the only things that we could visit that day were the Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s Basilica. Security into the city was tight and everyone was made to wait in a queue to pass through metal detectors and to have one’s bags scanned.

In addition to the modern security officers at the entrance, one could find the Swiss Guards throughout the city guarding the entrances to important buildings in their traditional striped baggy dress and carrying large pointed pikes. Of course, if any situation calls for more than a sharp stick the guards also have a well-stocked arsenal of assault rifles just in case.

Our visit inside of Basilica di San Pietro took a while due to the volume of people going through. It was difficult to take a photo that captured either the size or intricate details of the building. Afterwards we made our way down to the Tomb of the Popes, a solemn and plainly decorated grotto beneath the basilica which contains the tombs of many popes from Peter to John Paul II. We also found it interesting that Vatican City is the home to the only ATMs in the world with Latin as a selectable display language.

Around the late afternoon of our last day in Rome I took a long look at our tourist guide for the city. After three days filled with walking, we had only made a dent in all that one could see. The city was simply too big and too historical. Taking solace in the awesome things we did get to see and do we boarded the train to the airport early the next morning to head to our next city.