Our wakeup this morning was jarring, to say the least. The phone rang at 6:00 a.m. from the front desk telling us that our car to Florence’s Amerigo Vespucci Airport was downstairs and ready to go. It was one of those disorienting moments that takes you a few minutes just to believe that you’re not in a bad dream. I had gotten a wake-up call, but I reflexively picked up the phone when it rang and sat it back down. And for some reason my phone alarm that I have used numerous time for all sort of other hotel alarms did not sound. And with staying up late the night before and my smart decision not to pack up all my stuff so it would be easy to get up and go for our early flight, let’s just say this morning was my least favorite moment of the trip! Not to mention I was sad that we were leaving our dream vacation. Daniel had actually gotten his luggage packed before we went to bed, so as the calm one in these situations he threw his clothes on to go downstairs. He was going to talk to the driver to see if he could wait for us, and then he’d come back to help me with my luggage. I raced around and managed to get dressed and packed in 10 minutes flat, and we were out the door on our way to the airport before sunrise.As we drove away from downtown I welled up a little over the beauty we were leaving behind but was filled with all the memories Daniel and I had created in one week in a different world. It left us with a yearning to see more of the surrounding countries and cultures that we have yet to experience, so there will always be another adventure for us. But for now, I had to say good-bye to our Italy, or better yet, “Ciao Bella!”
After a morning run taking us back by the Duomo, we had breakfast downstairs and went back up to the room to get ready. I was in the bathroom when Brandi was having trouble getting her hair dryer to work. We have a converter for it to fit into the European plugs, but it tends to operate with very little power for some reason. She was looking for a new place to plug it in to, when POP! There was a loud crack and all of the lights went out. When I went to Radio Shack to pick up a plug converter, the guy there actually sold me two, one adapter that is for appliances that are already at the right voltage, and a converter primarily for heated appliances like the hair dryer. When the converter wasn’t giving her the results she wanted, she decided to give the adapter a try. You see, Brandi has a philosophy that if she doesn’t have enough electricity to dry her hair, then nobody in the hotel should have enough electricity to do anything. It was really just our room that lost power, Daniel is just being double-headed two-horned jackass with a smelly butt.
Each of us had one thing that we had not yet gotten to eat while in Italy, so for our last lunch we decided to seek out a good restaurant for pasta alla carbonara (Daniel) and gnocchi alla Bolognese (Brandi). After some shopping in the rain, we went south of the Arno to Celestino’s, a restaurant recommended by our hotel. It was a perfect last lunch. We arrived right at noon, so we were the only ones there for a little while. I had spaghetti alla carbonara, which has bacon and egg yolks. Alla carbonara and alla matriciana are two pasta preparations you don’t see as often in the states. I think I prefer alla matriciana, but alla carbonara was definitely interesting and worth trying. The restaurant was great and their gnocchi was unbelievable! It was hearty and delicious, well-worth the traipse through the rain to get there.
The one thing Brandi requested for this trip was a wine tour in Tuscany. We spent the whole trip thinking that the tour listed for today (which included Pisa and Lucca and was slated for a full day) was going to have the winery tour. When I called the bus company today to see what the tour included, the lady said that it was just Pisa and Lucca with lunch in between. Not only that, but she told us it was canceled due to lack of interest (punctuated with another “Didn’t you get the fax?”). Luckily, when I mentioned that we’d rather sign up for a Tuscany tour that included a winery, the tour company happened to have exactly what we wanted.
We walked to the bus stop under a light but consistent rain---definitely not the best weather for visiting a winery. The bus took us along a similar route to the one we took to Siena, through windy, hilly roads and around some really tight corners. Once we got within a few kilometers of the winery, all you could see was vineyards on one side of the bus and olive trees on the other.
The winery is housed in a medieval castle that figured prominently in some of the Renaissance tug-of-war between Florence and Siena, and it’s about the most beautiful place we’ve ever seen. It looks very, uh, castle-y, with those little cutouts at the top of the walls (not sure what they’re called), as well as Spanish-style roofs and an amazing view out of the back. As if on cue, the rain cleared up and the clouds went away just as we were leaving so we could enjoy the view in all its glory. We walked inside and got to see the barrels that they use to age the wine, and then we got to see the wine cellar, an amazing collection of the winery’s production that includes bottles going all the way back to 1911.
We got to sample some of their wines (a chianti, a chianti reserva, and a dessert wine), plus some nice cheese and bruschetta. Then it was on to Greve in Chianti, a nice little town where we visited a butcher shop with very, very fresh prosciutto. They had these legs hanging in the window, and I don’t want to get too graphic, but I’ll just say that you could see the hoof. And some little hairs right by the hoof. Daniel is being polite; those legs were everywhere in the shop, so much so that he actually had to duck. I’m not a huge fan of meat on the bone (too graphically carnivorous for me), but I love prosciutto, and it ruined the mystique of not knowing exactly what part of the pig it comes from.
We spent just a few minutes at Pieve di San Leolino, a hillside village that has a 12th century church another spectacular view. We had dinner at Trattoria da Pordo on Via Valigondoli (which seemed like a country house on the side of a solitary mountain that we walked part of the way down to get to dinner) and we sat by Chris and Natalie, a couple from Richmond, Virginia, who were also on their first anniversary trip. We had talked with them throughout the bus rides all afternoon. It was great getting to know them---we haven’t gotten much of a chance to socialize with the people on our tours, and we really enjoyed getting to spend time with a couple our age. Interestingly, another table had a couple that was getting married the following day. The other people at the table gave them a pretty good “rehearsal dinner”---they were laughing the whole time and taking pictures afterward. We ended the evening telling Chris and Natalie good-bye and walking through downtown for our last taste of gelato, which turned out to be a gelato gorge. We went to two different places just to make sure we had all of the flavors that we were so dearly going to miss once we left Italy. My favorite one was the gelato made from nutella and peanut butter….delicious!
Today we slept in until 8:00 and went downstairs for the hotel’s buffet breakfast, which I had heard was very good. It had eggs! Also, there was sausage and pancakes, as well as prosciutto and melon. And they made delicious cappuccinos to order---all in a lovely quaint room on the top floor.
Yesterday, we had a little trouble finding the bus (they are doing construction on the train station/bus terminal), but we figured it was productive since we needed to take a bus tour today. We were in the SITA (Florence’s bus company) bus terminal at 9:45, waiting for our bus, when a woman ran in, screaming to us and one other couple, “Hurry, the bus is across the street!!! It’s about to leave!!! Didn’t you get the fax???” Well, no, do you mean on the fax machine that I carry in my backpack? “You’ve got to hurry to get on the tour today, but if you miss the bus we can get you on the Saturday tour.” That’s good. Apparently SITA’s experience with foreign tourists is that they stay in Florence indefinitely. As we were planning to be going home on Saturday, we decided to run to the bus, leaving the other couple (one of whom was a gentleman who walked with a cane) in our collective dust. I thought we could warn the tour guide ahead that another couple was coming behind us, but Daniel makes it sound like we were in the amazing race!
The tour started at Piazza de Michaelangelo, which is a spot up in the hills overlooking Florence with an amazing view of the entire city, including Fiesole, a neighboring town that figures prominently in Etruscan history. We then drove across much of the rest of the city, stopping and getting off the bus for good near the city center. Except something didn’t get off the bus---Brandi forgot her sweater. She realized it and started getting upset just as the bus was driving off, and we were told there wasn’t a way to recover it.
This whole sequence had me worrying about spending the rest of the day with a very upset wife, until a woman in the back of the crowd started crying, realizing that she had left her camera at Piazza de Michaelangelo. Now, losing a camera is a horrible thing, and I felt really sorry for her, but it did mean that Brandi had to pass the Pout Pipe to her, which made me a little happy. Awful, I know. It was a taupe-colored goes-with-everything cardigan that fit my 5 ft frame perfectly and it was a bargain! He’s right, though, I can sometimes get a little upset with myself when I lose stuff…
We walked through the Piazza della Republica and toward the Duomo, the fourth-largest cathedral in the world. The Baptistry was built a couple centuries before the main church (between 1059 and 1128), and it is where Dante and several members of the Medici family were baptized. Built between the 13th and 16th centuries, the Duomo was conceptualized at a time when Florence had passed Rome as a center of European culture, and it was built to surpass the greatest churches of the time, though the new St. Peter’s Basilica clearly dwarfs it now. One of its best features is the fact that tourists can climb to the top of the dome, but unfortunately our tour did not go inside.
We walked on to the Accademia, which was originally meant to be an academy for the training of young artists. It changed into a museum, chiefly, in 1873, when Michaelangelo’s David was brought there, after previously being kept outside near the Uffizi, which sounds crazy. He was brought in to the Accademia to protect him from the elements, kind of like when my dad would tell me to bring the dog in when it had started raining, though I think it was more involved than that. The museum also houses several of Michaelangelo’s unfinished sculptures as well as a few other notable sculptures and paintings.
Unlike some of our pre-arranged tours in Rome, today’s tour had the feeling of being a little cheap. Our tour guide was pretty knowledgeable, but while most of the museum tours are equipped with little radios that allow you to hear your guide speak quietly, our tour relied completely on the lung capacity of the guide. If I had paid for a tour that included the radios, then I would be a little upset when another tour guide came in and started yelling at everybody, so it wasn’t too remarkable when the other tour guides started getting onto our tour guide. He started yelling back at them and being a little bit of a jerk in the process. He turned back to us and said, “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” These confrontations repeated a few times throughout our tour, which made us all increasingly more uncomfortable.
Michaelangelo’s David was probably my favorite artifact that we saw in Florence! Just because you have seen it in a book, don’t second guess its perfection. It is truly breathtaking work.
After a quick lunch at a pizza by the slice place (our least memorable meal of the trip), we made our pilgrimage to the Dante Museum, a three-story Dante exhibit built in Dante’s renovated house. It’s definitely not a big tourist destination--there were two people there when we arrived, and the people who showed up after us just wanted to know where the American Express office was. But for a Dante fan, it was a real treat. We learned about Dante’s early life and his exile from Florence, and there were many depictions of his Commedia.
We tried to visit the Uffizi, but the line was about an hour long, so we went to the hotel and came back at about 5:00 p.m., an hour and a half before it closed. We got in right away, but unfortunately we were there after they stopped checking out the audio tours. I was wondering what we were going to listen to but Daniel was clever---before the trip he downloaded some Rick Steves podcasts of notable places in Rome and Florence, and this was one of several places where they came in handy. We saw Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as well as numerous other Renaissance works, but unfortunately many of the works on the back half of the tour were missing descriptions.
As we were just about finished with the museum, a woman sidled up next to us, asking if the piece in front of us was marble or ivory. Turns out that she was an American who had spent time in Houston. Oh yeah, and she was annoying. She spent some time telling us how bad Houston’s museum scene used to be. (They only had an art museum and an opera, she said, which, last time I checked, is still ahead of Peoria and Siberia and a bunch of other places.) She kept up a 90/10 talking-to-silence ratio, telling us about every member of her family and the fact that she was in Italy for three weeks before asking us how long we were here. When we told her we were on a one-week trip, she said, “Oh, that’s better than nothing.” Thanks, lady.
It’s funny how quickly things can change in a tourist destination. The guidebooks are very helpful, but if you go to the places they recommend, you will find many more Americans than you would have if you happened upon it before it was “discovered.” Our dinner tonight was at Acqua al Due, a restaurant my friend Adam recommended to me. When he found it a few years ago, it was an unknown restaurant where nobody spoke English. When we went, pretty much every customer was an English speaker. So much so that in the middle of our dinner I distinctly heard the words Beaumont and Austin. We both popped up out of our chairs to go and introduce our selves to the two couples because it seemed so odd to run into someone from our own backyard!
The food was still very good, though. In addition to a bottle of wine, Brandi ordered a salad sampler (three different types of salad), and I got a pasta sampler (five different pastas). For our main course, I got their popular blueberry steak, while Brandi ordered cannelloni with ricotta and spinach. My first four samplers, vodka macaroni, blue cheese gnocchi, eggplant rigatoni, and spicy fusilli, came out before my steak, and they were all very good, as was the steak. I figured the fifth one was on its way, but when it didn’t come after a while I asked the waiter for it. After a couple minutes, he brought out a plate with “cannelloni”---a dollop of ricotta covered in red sauce. Besides being what Brandi ordered, it didn’t actually have any pasta. Brandi asked him about it, and he said, “Yes, it’s pasta with cheese and sauce. It’s very good, do you like it?” We pointed out that there was no pasta. “Oh, yes, that’s right. That’s how it comes.” We’re guessing he didn’t like it pointed out that they had forgotten 20% of the pasta sampler. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the waiter because I really felt like he needed to know that we know what pasta looks like but I still really enjoyed our meal there and our walk back through the cobblestone streets!
After dinner, we grabbed a Bailey’s on ice and went up to the rooftop patio to hang out. It was a great, relaxing end to our evening that mirrored the serenity of Florence. Since we had all sorts of extra battery space left on our camera, we both started taking silly pictures of each other. (Then I forgot to recharge the camera that night. Sorry we don’t have any pictures of the Ponte Vecchio, winery, or Tuscan countryside---but we hope you enjoy the million pictures of us mugging for the camera!)
On our last morning in Rome, we put on our Human Race shirts and took a run by Vatican City, our third visit to the sovereign nation in four days. We got to see people milling about and crowding together for the Pope’s Wednesday visit. Breakfast was pastries and cappuccino (for Brandi) and orange juice (for Daniel) at a little café near our hotel. We spent the rest of the morning shopping, and Brandi got a Morellato watch. And Daniel is an awesome husband for entertaining my need to shop and buy a nice anniversary gift.
The train to Florence was nice and relaxing. The signs and staff at the train station tell you that there are no porters and not to let anyone take your bags, but once we got on the train there was someone offering to find a place for our large suitcase, and he had basically taken it and put it up before I had a chance to refuse (it was actually fairly helpful, though). The dumb move on my part was letting him put up my backpack, which allowed him to ask for an extra euro in tip.
We were seated next to a couple Australian girls who were doing a three-week tour of Europe. They had about half our luggage. Daniel commented to me that he thought they probably hadn’t brought their 1800 watt hair dryer and diffuser on the trip. But I am still pretty proud of myself for filling only one suitcase for 8 days. The Italian countryside was very beautiful, and we crossed through a number of tunnels as well.
Florence is different than Rome, but the same. You see many of the same types of buildings, but it is much smaller, more laid back, and easier to navigate than Rome. I left Rome after four days still pretty unable to get my bearings, but Florence felt pretty comfortable after a couple hours. Streets that run north-south and east-west are a sight for sore eyes. Immediately when we arrived in Florence I realized that this was going to be the more relaxing part of our vacation and I knew immediately I was going to love Florence.
Brandi had mentioned on the train that we might want to go to Siena that night, which sounded fun but a little quick to be going to a new city. But with nothing planned for the evening, we headed back to the train station after dropping our bags at the hotel and grabbing a quick lunch at a wine bar with, yes, a touch of wine.
The bus to Siena was a little over an hour and took us through some hilly terrain in central Tuscany. Rather than ending up at a station as it had started, the bus dropped most of its passengers on several stops on the outskirts of Siena. We got off at the final stop, unsure of where exactly we were. We started heading downhill, taking in some amazing mountain views along the way, and eventually saw signs pointing us toward Il Campo (the large piazza at the center of town that is the biggest tourist destination) and the Duomo (the big church; actually the name of every town’s big church). The Duomo is a very impressive cathedral, with a mix of different colored marble that is characteristic to the region. Il Campo is one of a million things in Italy that pictures do absolutely no justice.
Siena was even more of a country town than Florence and felt a little sleepier in many ways. This one pottery shop I walked into fit perfect into my idea of what a country store would look like in Italy. The potter was managing the store and let me alone to walk into the different rooms to shop his wares. While I was marveling at the way the shop looked like an old house with almost rounded walls and ceiling made out of stucco, I heard something happening at the front of the shop, and the potter was groaning in Italian as a grey kitten scurried out of homemade pitcher. I couldn’t help myself as I immediately felt like I had to help the guy get this cat out of his shop and I also just wanted to hold a cat from Sienna. I came out of the store with a cat in my hands and I think Daniel thought I was going to ask to take it home with me! I let the cat go and we headed off to dinner.
We decided to eat just off of the piazza, as you usually have to get a little distance away from the touristy areas to find the best food. In the case of the Piazza del Campo, you don’t have to travel very far.
Trattoria la Torre is a tiny family restaurant that occupies a single room. As we walked in, the son was in the corner making fresh pasta while dad was serving customers and mom walked us to our seats. The dad came up to us to take our order---he started rattling off six or so pastas, and then just looked at us. I asked for a menu in Italian, and he said, “I am the menu.” After he repeated the choices for me, I got the tagliatella (it came alla Bolognese), and Brandi had the ravioli (filled with cheese in a fresh sage and aioli sauce). The food was out quickly, about two minutes after we ordered, and it was amazing. Pretty much all the pasta we’ve had in Italy has been an order of magnitude fresher than anything we get in the States, but this was something else. We also had a bottle of wine (of course) and finished the meal off with prosciutto and pecorino cheese. This was kind of a weird “dessert” but it just looked so fresh at the table next to us I couldn’t pass it up!
When we arrived, there was one other group eating, plus about eight empty tables. By the time we were close to finishing our meal, the place was packed, and people kept coming in to try and get a table only to be turned away. We felt badly that we were causing these people to lose business, so we asked the owner for a check so we could clear the table. He looked offended: “No, no, finish!” It was so admirable—an Italian cook and restaurateur who was so dedicated to his craft that he won’t fill your seat before he’s ready, even if you volunteer it.
But we did eventually get out, finding our way back to a bus stop and enduring a very bumpy ride back to Florence. We stopped for gelato, which, for me, was the best yet. Panna cotta is like caramel, but they do it as ice cream a million times better than any caramel ice cream I’ve ever had.
Without a pre-purchased tour to go on this morning, we slept in, and we didn’t get out until lunchtime. It doesn’t mean anything that we didn’t get out of bed until almost 11AM---it certainly has nothing to do with jetlag! We decided to ride the bus down to the Colosseum, and we purchased a couple of panini (in Italian, “panini” is the plural of “panino”) at a nearby café. They were excellent---we ate them on the bus. The bus was interesting---you can purchase tickets at bus stations or on the bus itself, but it seems to rely on the honor system more than anything. The machine you use to buy a card or get your existing card punched is in the middle of the bus, so you’re already past the driver and can pretty much do what you want.
The Colosseum was bustling with people, and we were prepared to wait in a long line until someone approached us saying that an English-speaking tour was about to start. The tour was led by an Italian woman who initially looked like she was going to be good but showed her inexperience early (we later discovered it was her first tour to lead). After a grueling two-minute, 100-meter walk past the long lines and into the Colosseum, several people indicated they needed a bathroom break. Our guide pointed out the restrooms and stood with the rest of us for about 30 seconds before saying we should go on in. What the third of our group that was in the bathroom missed was an amazing view of the Colosseum, with a fascinating commentary provided by…hmm. I thought the little radios we had been given were so we could hear interesting facts from our tour guide, but instead we got to hear her responding to the older British couple that was peppering her with questions. “Yes.” “Over there.” “80 A.D.” “I don’t think so.”
We went back by the restrooms and found some (but not all) of our group, and the guide muttered something about how foolish it was for people to use the bathroom at the beginning of the tour. The British couple perked up: “Bathroom? Where’s the bathroom?” She pointed to her right, and they scampered off. Our inspiring tour guide commented, “This is like being with children,” before taking us up to the upper level of the Colosseum. More great views, more lacking tour information. It was obvious that our tour guide was lacking as a guide but she looked good doing it. She was fantastically Italian, like she had stepped out of a movie with subtitles. We saw some other groups enthralled with their tour guides, and we thanked ours and walked on to the second half of the tour, the Palatine Hill. We handed in our radios and were transferred to our next tour guide, not knowing what to expect.
Observing the difference between our two tour guides was like observing Bullwinkle pre- and post-Kirward Derby. If you didn’t get this reference, don’t worry, I didn’t either. It’s one of those moments in time where Daniel gets to be the only one laughing at his own joke. The second guide was a Ph.D. student from Denver, studying in Rome, and he was incredible. Every piece of information was relevant and interesting, and he linked everything together to give a pretty complete narrative on the Roman Republic and its place in the history of Western culture. A few tidbits (paraphrased):
What allowed the Romans to conquer such vast territories was their ability to move men and equipment. They built roads and an infrastructure to get places fast, and then they built aqueducts and sewers in conquered territories to help keep them loyal.
If you were coming to Rome from another land, and you saw the structures they had built and the visual record they kept of the battles they had won, you would have no choice but to think that these people were superhuman.
When people think about what made Rome great, what they’re thinking back to is the Roman Republic. The only people who look on the Roman Empire as a great example are Hitler, Napoleon, and Mussolini. The Roman Republic is the foundation of Western civilization, and that is what Brutus was trying to save when he killed Julius Caesar.
Apart from the tour information, Palatine Hill itself was remarkable. To walk across a marble floor that’s been standing there for 20 centuries is unreal, and although the hill itself is much sparser than it once was, everywhere you look from atop the hill is amazing, from the Colosseum to the Arch of Constantine to the Forum to a panoramic view of Rome to the north.
Our daily gelato stop was at Ciampini, a more upscale shop in a nice little piazza along Rome’s main shopping street. Brandi had banana, chocolate chip, and lemon, and I had banana, peach, and cherry (with cream on top, which is apparently what they do in Italy, even on cones). We then did a little shopping and headed back to the hotel.
My aunt had suggested a place called the Supper Club for one of our Rome dinners. Supper Club is like a cross between a speakeasy, a massage parlor, and a restaurant (you lounge on a bed while you eat), and unfortunately they were closed (a barely noticeable door along a tiny alleyway was shut, with about seven motorcycles parked in front of it), so we visited Pierluigi.
Pierluigi is a very nice restaurant tucked away a few blocks from the Tiber. We started sitting outside with an English-speaking waiter, but Brandi got cold, so we moved inside, where our waiter spoke not a word of English. For the pasta dish, Brandi had risotto alla crema di scampi (with a whole crawfish on top), and I had some oriecchette con broccoletti (ear-shaped pasta with broccoli). Both were very good. All of the fish dishes were priced per etta (100 grams, or about a quarter pound), with a 3 etta minimum. So we asked our waiter for 3 ettas of the sea bass. He took the order and, after a couple minutes, came back telling us something about the fish and “pochino” (a little bit). With a little difficulty, we determined that the sea bass is not a fish that can be subdivided into small portions---you have to take the whole thing. He weighed the sea bass for us: 0.96 kilos. No sale. He pointed out a few fish that you could get 3 ettas out of, but we were so confused with what was what (and a little eager to not look at all of the fresh fish on ice (the lobsters were still moving around)) that we just ordered scallops, which were also excellent. The tiramisu we had for dessert, though, was half frozen. We also had a nice bottle of wine and toasted our 1st year anniversary feeling blessed to have the opportunity to experience another wonderful day in Rome.
Today’s morning tour brought us to the Vatican Museum. We had a very good tour guide who used something that comes in very handy in Rome---the microphone that transmits to individual radios held by each tourist. It was a little crackly but an excellent way of communicating in a place like the Vatican, where there are just too many tour groups for people to be shouting over each other.
As far as most people are concerned, the Vatican Museum tour might as well be called “The Sistine Chapel and a Bunch of Other Stuff.” But much of what is in the “other stuff” is quite fascinating and does a good job of illustrating the artistic and political relationship between the Catholic Church and Rome.
One thing you notice a lot going through Rome is that along with the date in Roman numerals, most buildings of a certain age have a pope’s name, preceded by “PM” or “Pont. Max.” This goes back to the Latin for “high priest” and originated in Pagan times, but the title was carried over for the reigning pope, most notably in the 16th through 19th century. Even buildings like the Colosseum carry the names of Popes who undertook restoration projects (which, to me, kind of goes against the idea of restoration). At the Vatican, you see over and over again the great art that was commissioned during the Renaissance by powerful popes as well as the impressive collections they amassed from previous periods.
The Vatican’s Official Shooshers have a daunting task: to keep people quiet. Though you’re reminded numerous times that there is no talking or photography of any kind allowed in the Sistine Chapel, it turns out to be a rather loud room with a number of flashes going off. However I must point that it is rather easy to forget the no talking rule as I found out when we first entered the Sistine Chapel. I was so awed that I kept looking up and then at Daniel and couldn’t help but say I can’t believe we are actually here! So a handful of men in suits walk around saying, “Shhh!” and giving scornful looks to people who take pictures. And really, it’s not like you’re going to take a better picture of the chapel than one that could be found on a post card. Your time is best spent just taking it all in.
Michaelangelo’s nine scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and final judgment on a short wall are absolutely magnificent, but the two long walls, painted by well-known artists from the same time period, are great as well. One side shows six scenes from the life of Moses, while the other shows six scenes from the life of Jesus. They are not chronological---I think they are meant to parallel each other, or at least that’s what the Latin verbiage around them seems to suggest. That’s right, he even knows a little Latin which is definitely another plus in Italy. That’s three languages that he works his way around if you are paying attention. Like me.
A quick aside, one of my favorite things to see plastered all over the place was four little letters, SPQR. I learned in Latin class that this stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, which stresses the link between the Roman people and the government in the old Roman Republic. SPQR was on a purple shield that was in the back of the classroom, and it was burned into my brain. It is really cool to see it all over Rome.
Lunch was good but not great. Brandi had a buffet that included mostly vegetables, and I had fried veggies and a cheese pizza. I would like to point out that my half bottle of wine and Daniel’s Coke were each 3 euros which is good enough excuse as any for me to have a drink at lunch. We took an afternoon break in the hotel room, and Brandi got in touch with her parents, closing the last chapter on the uncertainty under which we started the trip. They are without power, but they’re all right, which is pretty much the story with all of our families. Brandi also took a nap, her second in as many days, but she wants to make it clear that this was not due to jet lag. Nope, no jet lag, I was just enjoying the opportunity to sleep during the day, thank you very much for the clarification!
For dinner we decided to try Il Posto Accanto, a restaurant a decent distance away that was recommended by Lonely Planet. Despite some pretty hard rain, we decided to walk it, and I ended up getting us lost in a not so great part of town. We did have one umbrella that we tried to share but it was interesting (read: near impossible) with the tiny height difference between us. But it definitely felt like an adventure which is worth getting a little wet for any day. Rome can be tough to navigate because a) the roads tend to be short, at odd angles, and prone to changing names every couple blocks, b) street names are not always displayed where you would want them to be, and c) landmarks are not entirely helpful. They provide a good visual cue, but they often have ten or so streets radiating out from them, and you sometimes have to travel a couple blocks to discover you’re gone down the wrong one.
The restaurant is basically a little house with seating for about 20, and the waiter told us the menu verbally but did give us a hard copy when we requested one. We surveyed the unconventional menu and started with a pumpkin ravioli, thinking that we might leave and have a more traditional “second dinner” at a nearby place. But we were impressed with the homemade quality and decided to stay, finishing with pumpkin-covered pork and a side of eggplant. Now reading this it sounds funny that we ate more pumpkin in one meal than I usually eat in Thanksgiving, but it was delicious! We then walked to the Colosseum, which is incredibly beautiful (romantic) at night, and back to our hotel via the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps. We left the Spanish Steps just in time---a crazy man broke a bottle in some sort of dispute and started yelling random craziness.
We got up at about 6:00 and headed down to our hotel breakfast at about 7:00. Many American breakfast favorites, like eggs and bacon, were not available, but there were some breakfast cereals there to cater to American tastes. Italians don’t eat big breakfasts---a typical breakfast consists of a cappuccino and a pastry which isn’t really my cup of tea so I decided the protein bars I brought would be the way to go for me on most mornings!
Our morning tour today was called “Classical Rome,” and it picked up at 8:00. While Brandi waited inside, I stood outside and looked around. A woman came up and asked me (in Italian) where something was, and I told her, “Non parlo italiano, mi dispiace.” That was my most complete Italian sentence so far this trip! I also saw a big tour bus loading up with people from our hotel. There seem to be two activities that occupy the guests at our hotel: getting onto and off of tour buses during the day and sitting at our hotel’s bar and chatting with each other at night. It could be a generational thing, but it seems like a lot of the adventure of going to a new place comes from getting lost, screwing up the language, and otherwise making yourself uncomfortable. Of course, there’s a spectrum along which people are going to immerse themselves into a culture, but I would say that saying “buon giorno” and “grazie” is pretty much a bare minimum. Surprisingly, they’re not in everyone’s game plan.
Anyway, I was very excited when our ride pulled up and it was not a giant bus but a smallish van, with a couple of British couples and a Spanish couple. So I was a little disappointed to find out that this van was just shuttling us to a bigger bus, and that English speakers and Spanish speakers were segregated onto different buses. Oh well---it was good for tour logistics, if not for my dreams of a United Nations tour of Rome.
The tour was a great one, filled with lots of information and amazing views. We first saw the Trevi Fountain, which we had already seen, but I was more than happy to visit again. I had a nice mini-conversation with a man from Spain. His English was very limited, but he knew enough to tell me he had been to New York and DC in the spring. Just a little tidbit, it was especially sexy to watch and hear Daniel attempt to speak two different languages in one day. His Spanish is not bad and he understands a lot more than he lets on. It was great to see the Trevi Fountain again, and I know it is cliché but the pictures don’t do it justice. We took pictures during both visits to the Trevi Fountain, but you can’t really tell because we’re wearing the same clothes!
We then walked to the Pantheon, which was another pleasant surprise. To be walking in and around something as old and storied as the Pantheon felt like stepping through time. I’ve visited some really old historical sites, like Aztec pyramids and Hindu temples, but nothing that’s part of the narrative of Western civilization like the Pantheon. And that, to me, is what Rome is all about. I tried on the flight over to describe to Brandi how BIG the visit to Rome is to me, but nothing can make it hit home like the Pantheon.
It was really incredible to see---I hardly even knew it existed before I got here and to see it really was the first artifact that made me catch my breath and say, wow, we really are in Rome. The original Pantheon was built in 31 BC and was destroyed in a fire in 80 AD, and the one we saw was then rebuilt in 125AD. (How often do you get to use BC vs AD in a sentence, so I took the opportunity!) The current Pantheon is mostly intact and is sitting in the middle of a courtyard. Since the 7th century it has been used as a church. In fact, we had to time our visit to fit around the mass schedule. Also, having Raphael’s tomb there is a nice bonus.
We next walked to Piazza Navona, a picturesque square with all sorts of restaurants and artists and people watching. Then we got back on the bus to head to the Vatican. Vatican City is so small that if you wanted to fit the world’s one billion Catholics comfortably within its boundaries, you would need to stack them 75 feet high (made-up statistic). St. Peter’s Square is huge, however, with hundreds of columns on either side of the huge basilica.
We had a relatively short wait that included our only view of the Swiss Guard, and once we got past the metal detectors and the dress code enforcers we were in the church. Built in the 16th century and decorated in the 17th, the “new” basilica is built on an absolutely massive scale, with more statues than you can take in, plus seven-foot lettering going around the top representing every quote Jesus spoke to Peter in the Bible. Pretty much the first thing you see, off to the right in the back of the church, is Michaelangelo’s Pieta, created when he was 23, or 24, or 25 (the guide books and tour guides are not in agreement). I snapped a couple pictures of the Pieta and then put away the camera. The basilica is really too big to do justice to, plus for me there was a very spiritual aspect of being there, and it took away from it a little bit to have people treating it as just a tourist destination. Seeing a girl having her picture taken next to a big, stone holy water container was especially bizarre.
We attended 12:15 Mass at the basilica. I’m hoping that Alitalia, the official airline of the Pope, CC’d God on their decision not to return our luggage, because otherwise He probably would have been pretty disappointed with our appearance. The staff had the whole front of the church blocked off for the (almost hourly) services, and they were being very strict about letting in only the people who were headed for Mass as well as hurrying along the people coming from Mass so they wouldn’t stick around to take pictures.
Mass was very nice, though it was in Italian with a little Latin thrown in. A few “moles” did happen to slip in however. A guy right in front of us was taking pictures (with flash) of every part of the Mass. And as I was taking part in Holy Communion, another woman tried to take the communion home with her as a souvenir. She walked up in line, grabbed the host and tried to leave with it, and was told by a server to put it in her mouth. This is quite a weird exchange for a cradle Catholic to see, maybe even slightly weirder than being in church in clothes I’d been wearing for three days.
The recommendation our tour guide gave us for lunch was Il Matriciano, a restaurant almost on the way to our hotel from the Vatican. It was very good---we had an antipasto plate with all sorts of fried veggies, and I had linguini funghi while Brandi had tortellini soup followed by prosciutto with figs. When we arrived, every table was speaking Italian (the ladies next to us were conversing with the waiter in both French and Italian for some reason). We felt like the Americans who had found the local hotspot. Even better, it began to rain, I mean pour, as we were sitting outside under the awning, almost as if Italy were convincing us to have our second three-hour traditional meal and not without again meeting great people along the way. As the rain started to slow we met a couple vacationing from London—she was British and he was American. They were super nice—they asked us all sorts of questions about our trip, and he was especially keen to find out the scoop on Sarah Palin and the presidential race. The British woman gave us some good advice on our luggage but I never caught her name as I’m afraid we never introduced ourselves. She also happened to be event planner as I am. Oddly enough, so was Jill, the woman from our flight to Rome. Anyway, she gave us good advice on our luggage: we should call American Airlines since our flight originated with them and we have points with them. Of course, why hadn’t I thought of this, being the recent past frequent flyer with American! They also said that nothing was likely to happen today, because nothing happens on Sunday in Italy, and tomorrow could be tough as well.
The rain dried up and after picking up some gelato and walking to the hotel, the front desk told us that one of our bags had arrived and had been brought up. They did not know whose bag it was. Now, when today began I thought of the four luggage possibilities and ranked them. I think if you’re married you can understand the preferences I came up with:
1) Both bags arrive. 2) Brandi’s bag arrives but Daniel’s does not. 3) Neither bag arrives. 4) Daniel’s bag arrives but Brandi’s does not.
Thankfully, we got the second best outcome instead of the worst outcome. I hated to be overly celebratory when Daniel was still in a bind, but WHOO-HOOO!!!!
I called American Airlines, at the exorbitant international-call-from-the-hotel-room rate, to find out about the bag. The number for lost baggage is a toll-free number, unreachable internationally, so I called an 817 number and was transferred a couple times (on hold a few minutes each time) before getting disconnected (we think the hotel puts a time limit on the calls). The second time around we reached Tina, a representative whose sarcasm and rudeness knows no bounds. Brandi explained our predicament to her, and Tina explained her side, something about an agreement among airlines that the destination airline would be wholly responsible for the luggage. Then she said that if we couldn’t speak Italian well enough to get our bags back from Alitalia then we shouldn’t have come to Italy. I took the phone, and she said that no information on a bag becomes available until it reaches its destination. I asked, from the perspective of American Airlines, whether that would be Paris or Rome. She responded, curtly, “Excuse me, sir, where are you right now? Did you not land in Rome?” I reminded her that Alitalia was not an airline we had asked to be put on, and she was unfazed, saying that if I was going to be uncomfortable with the baggage policies of the airline then I shouldn’t have accepted the connection. (Just writing it down here makes me so mad all over again---AAAHHHH!!! SERENITY NOW!!!!) So the next time you have an international flight, be sure to thoroughly research the baggage records and policies of every major airline in case you have to make a quick decision while running through an airline terminal.
So we headed to dinner, Brandi in clothes she had been wearing for five minutes and me in the clothes I had been in for 53 hours. There we toasted to never worrying another minute about luggage.
Le Coppelli Taverna is a perfect little pizza place not too far from Piazza Navona. It’s situated off of a little cobblestone alleyway, with checkered tablecloths and a large, grey-haired man working a wood-fired oven in the back. I couldn’t believe my eyes when we first saw the restaurant. Seriously, it was the cutest pizza joint I’ve ever seen anywhere and I’m not just anywhere at this moment, I am IN Italy (and in clean clothes). We had bruschetta (with olive oil and with tomatoes) and fried mozzarella (theirs is in balls instead of sticks) before splitting a great, super thin sausage pizza (with a cheap but good bottle of wine, of course). Strangely, my credit card was denied, another thing you don’t want to have to deal with 5000 miles from home. (It was working the next day, thankfully, after a second denial later in the evening.)
After dinner we happened along this great gelato shop (Della Palma) that had just about every flavor you could imagine, along with a bunch of interesting candies. Brandi had "after eight" (mint chocolate chip) and spicy chocolate, and I had peach, strawberry crème, and banana. We walked back and stopped at the Pantheon and hung out on the steps of the fountain across from it, watching all the teens and tourists while eating some of the best ice cream we’ve ever had.
When we got back to the room, my luggage had arrived! I had all my stuff, but I had lost an airtight excuse for being a slob. The first two days of our trip were wonderful even with a giant cloud hanging over them, so we couldn’t wait for what the rest of the week would bring.
