[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
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.
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