Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 16-23: Rome, Ostia Antica, Tivoli, Narni, and Spoleto

I again have not had time to finish my post--the following will have to do for now.

I am going to have to write about Rome in the most disordered fashion, as I have a ton of notes and far too many days to cover for me to give detailed descriptions of each of them. (I am about to go downstairs for dinner at the restaurant at which I am staying and only have about fifteen minutes in which to write. While I often look at these emails as a burden, as they take a long time to write when I do them properly, I am starting to learn that diving in and writing for fifteen minutes, doing something else, and coming back to them is much more effective than thinking that I need to set aside, say, an hour to do them, as doing so leads me to put them off indefinitely, and one does not actually have to write them all in one go.)

So far, I have written a lot about my emails and nothing about Rome.

I arrived just fine. The station was crowded and, fittingly, chaotic—at first, I could not find any semblance of a ticket office, an information desk, or even a sign to either of those things, but I eventually got past all of the burger places and stores to a giant line-up of tired, sweaty people, one of whom, when I approached her, said that she had been waiting for two hours for information. A gypsy dressed in what looked like the official uniform of the rail service tried to con money from me; a Russian woman standing next to me (who must, embarrassingly, have heard me swear at the gypsy woman) told me not to trust such people and explained that I could get train information much more quickly from the ticket machines than from the information desk itself; and, when I passed by a pair of 18- or 19-year-old girls who looked suspiciously American and asked if they spoke English, I was given a city map, which I could not have gotten anywhere near the station, as Italians are not into tourist information bureaus. (The ticket machines here are, incidentally, pretty good; one can get trains essentially anywhere on them, and they list the schedule of upcoming trains to one’s destination, even giving one the option of buying (not at a reduced rate) a two-way ticket, with an accompanying schedule.)

Rome is incredible. While most of the city is an Italian mess, there are Ancient Roman ruins everywhere. (The park where I worked out—it had chin-up bars, &c.—was across the street from a massive bath complex, and the divider between lanes going in different directions had a column standing in it, unattached to anything.) I saw the remains of an acqueduct, monumental like the baths, and an arch (Edit: this was a gateway.) from the train en route from Salerno to Rome. I ran next to the Aurelian Wall, an extraordinary military achievement crowned, every kilometer or so, by giant gateways (behind one of which stands a triumphant arch). The Colosseum itself, as well as the forums (there are more than one), arches throughout the city, other bath complexes, numerous temples, and the Palatine Hill, suitably impressed me. I was intrigued, during my visit to the Colosseum, to learn that people in the stands sat according to their position in society, placed bets, played games (involving tossing dice and other small objects), ate, wrote graffiti, and did other normal human activities, like at sporting events today. Apparently, they did not realize that they were Ancient Romans and not ordinary human beings.

I have noted that the roads in Rome seem better-maintained than those in the south of Italy and that there are at least occasional sidewalks, some even wide enough to walk on. Drivers here are just as nuts as anywhere else, and even pedestrians are in on the act. In Palermo, I took up the habit of hitting cars (with my hand) that almost ran me over as a way of showing my dissatisfaction (a sort of empy gesture, as it was not going to change anything). At some point, perhaps in Rome, I occasionally started kicking them, though I soon quit doing that, as I realized that it could hurt my foot. Once, when an Italian driver tried to kill me as I crossed the street, I gave the back of his car a good smack and the pedestrian next to me gave me an angry look—Italians must consider their right to run people over so inviolable that even those who are almost the victims of this right get angry when anyone opposes it.

Food in Rome is vastly more expensive than in the south, and it is harder to find, as the city appears, on first glance, to be populated almost entirely by sweets shops, which looked fantastic, but from which I abstained until the second-to-last day of my stay. I quite enjoyed meeting tourists there—again, we are generally people with common interests and a common goal—but found the people in my hostel overbearingly friendly. North Americans in their late teens and early twenties come across to me as mortally afraid of seeming different, and they cannot accept one’s uninterest in going out drinking with them every night (Britons of the same age, on the other hand, seem much more comfortable with non-conformism, based on the people whom I met in my hostel.). I found it queer that people got so excited about being away from their parents and going out drinking, and I found that it interfered with my travel writing.

I noted the war memorials in the city. While Italy was absolutely incompetent during the war and did nothing, as far as I know, to facilitate its liberation in 1945, statues everywhere commemorate the heroism of its people and the glory of the country’s liberation. Italians seemed to me obsessed with Emmanuele Vittorio (sp?), based on the number of roads and other monuments named after him; when I asked someone why that was, she explained that he was the last king of some prominent part of Italy before its unification and that the Italians actually like Garbaldi, its first leader after unification, much more. I met a greengrocer from Cairo, with whom I could not talk except to explain that I was from Canada, and saw a baptism here. On the way from the Colosseum to an ancient bath complex I passed through a park full of unconscious drunkards, garbage, families with children, dog-walkers, and African migrants, all just a few blocks from one the country’s busiest tourist centers. The migrants played a mean drum and seemed at ease despite having, one assumes, not a penny to their names and not being in any wise a part of Roman or Italian society. (One of them said something like, “Are you a good boy?” to me as I passed by, after which his friend passed me a soccer ball, which I passed back without turning around.)

I visited Ostia Antica, an Ancient Roman port that is now four kilometers from the sea due to the accumulation of silt at the shoreline, on my fourth day (I think) in Rome. I wish that I could describe it in depth here—I wish that I remembered it with absolute precision. Besides its having a ton of well-preserved buildings and streets, what struck me most about Ostia Antica was its being so much quieter than Pompeii. While Pompeii’s being crowded was, in a sense, more realistic than its being empty would have been, as there would have been hordes of people there in antiquity (as at the Colosseum), I found that I could not imagine people’s screaming and running from the lava when Mount Vesuvius erupted or, conversely, driving carts down the street and chatting with one another after work. In Ostia Antica, on the other hand, I could imagine such things, as the silence allowed one to think of what would have been there, as opposed to what was there in the present. A few other tourists and I strolled the streets. Nearby birds sang. I took my time and even sat down, at one point, to eat lunch. While it is a pity, given the majesty of the site, that Ostia Antica not be better-known, it was nice to escape the noise of larger tourist sites and immerse oneself more fully in reflections about the past. The ruins of the port did not so much remind me, as some sight or other reminded Percy Shelley, that all majesty must crumble, so much as it reminded me of everything that much change: languages, families, and our own lives.

I realized, today, when a building reminded me, suddenly, of those old, green apartment buildings just off of the Burrard Bridge (if one is going from the downtown region toward UBC, they are to the right), that the sites that I have been visiting have periodically reminded me of home. One of the most striking effects of my visit to the Amalfi Coast was remembering what it felt like to be driving back from the mountains when I was twenty-one years old. For some reason, the evening light and the winding of the road reminded me of that specific time, when I was still largely free to hike with friends, and I thought of all that has changed since then. I have tried to describe the bliss of returning home along the Sea-to-Sky Highway from, say, Lions Bay or Garibaldi and will not attempt the feat in this email, with so little time; it would be extraneous regardless, as all of you have made that drive and know how good it feels to come home after a long hike. I look forward to finishing my post about Rome as soon as possible and, one hopes, finishing up with Florence and the first part of Bologna in short order so as to get closer to being caught up on my emails.

I believe that I visited Hadrian’s Villa the day after seeing Ostia Antica. I remember little of the train ride there except that, as we approached the train station of Tivoli, the city in which Hadrian’s Villa is located, we entered the foothills, making it clear why Hadrian chose that location for his palace (lots of other rulers seem to have liked living a little outside of big cities in more pleasant areas—e.g., the rulers of France, for a long time). When I got out at the train station, there were, naturally, no signs pointing any which way, and there was no tourist office. I walked a short ways downhill, asked someone how to get to Hadrian’s Villa, was directed the wrong way, and, along with two Chinese tourists from Helsinki, where they worked, walked back uphill, eventually being directed across a pedestrian bridge to an area with a little more activity—the city center. There, we missed the bus, found the nearest tabacconist, bought return bus tickets, and finally settled down on our way to Hadrian’s Villa.

My memory of my trip to Hadrian’s Villa is surprisingly clear. Unfortunately, I cannot think of any interesting way in which to describe it. The day was hot. (I stepped away from this a few days ago and do not remember exactly where I was planning to go with it.) I sat down by one of Italy’s innumerable faucets, washed a bunch of cherries beneath it, and ate them. (Italy has free faucets, much like our water fountains, everywhere. While they have not yet discovered the public restroom except in extremely rare instances, they are still miles ahead of much of Europe, oddly.) A Russian tourist yelled at his wife and child, or maybe it was his wife yelling at them. (I am really in a bit of a bind here: I have nothing to say about my visit, but I want to say something.) Hadrian’s Villa included a small temple, the remains of a Greek theatre, a watchtower, a couple of libraries and bath complexes, and the remains of guest rooms, servants’ quarters, and a couple of lavish rooms for banquets. It is curious to think that, just a couple of thousand years ago, Hadrian was in the bloom of health and was ordering that his villa be made—it is strange to think that he actually walked its grounds. I wondered, as I visited them, if he would have had the villa made in the first place if he had known that he would die.

I am creeping toward the end of my notes! My trip to Narni and Spoleto was interesting, though it was not enough to give me a good sense of the charm, or lack thereof, of Umbria—my visit was too rushed. Of Narni I saw exactly what I wanted, which was the remaining arch of the biggest Roman bridge ever built (it was not that interesting), while I would have loved to have more time in Spoleto. (In brief, it was a hill town with a castle, a cathedral, a few museums, and other things for which I had no time given the exigencies of returning to Rome at a reasonable hour.) I saw a bed of light military vehicles and some boy scouts on my way to Spoleto; I have gotten quite used to the presence of the military in Italy, as armed guards are often posted near major tourist sites. (I have nothing interesting to say about this.)

I have a few more general observations. One, which I will extend to the present day, is that I have occasionally wondered how certain of the cities that I have visited came into their wealth. It seems fair to generalize that capital cities, and large cities generally, were historically established near favorable trade routes (by the sea or large rivers) or in areas that were easy to defend. Smaller cities, like Spoleto, might come into wealth because of industry (often tied in with natural resources, including rivers, one imagines) or their location at the crossroads of trade routes between larger cities established before them. Some cities have grown in prestige because wealthy patrons settled, somewhat arbitrarily, in them and enjoined that they be developed further. Perhaps other cities arise amidst the ruins of former ones, which might afford them some premdae infrastructure. (I just noticed two other notes that I forgot about, respectively, Hadrian’s Villa and Spoleto. The first was that contemporary Tivoli itself is, like modern Agrigento, a preternaturally ugly scattering of visually identical apartment blocks—the Italians have sucked at architecture since they ran out of marble. My second note was that the train back from Spoleto broke down three times and got in thirty minutes late. The woman sitting across from me, an Italian, was visibly frustrated; this must be a regular occurrence.)

I spent my last day in Rome by the remains of a giant aqueduct that I first saw on my arrival there. I was alone except for a few cyclists and people walking their dogs, and I can positively say that a gentle wind rustled the reeds nearby, as I distinctly remember it. (I found being alone meditative, but I did not have any particularly profound thoughts.) There are bums everywhere in Rome. There are also men everywhere who hold out little sticks for one’s camera and say, “Selfie? Selfie? Selfie?” I have noted that pennies are no longer used in Rome and that much of medieval Rome was built on the plundered marble and other building materials of Roman ruins (again, the value of the physical preservation of antiquity seems like a very recent idea); in fact, the Romans themselves seem to have done much more damage to Ancient Roman sites than all of their invaders put together. (They would build housing complexes on the sites of former theatres, &c., in addition to destroying many of them altogether.) Early modern Rome reminded me a great deal of Vienna—there must have been similar architectural fads when their 17th- and 18th-century centers were developed. Rome is a city glutted on itself, like Pizza the Hut from the movie Spaces Balls; it has several crypts, which I missed out on (I apologize to Rome for having done so; I also missed the crypts in Paris); and I noted that silence brings one closer to God, which sounds impressively portentous to me (and I actually believe it, in a sense, as one cannot access one’s own conception of God, or worship, or what have you when other people are telling one what to think). This brings me to my next point, which is that the Catholic church, as it is represented in Rome, is anathema to many of my dearest values.

(Again, I stepped away from this and came back to it. I do not have anything of note to say about the Catholic church except that its focus appears, based on what I have seen, to be on what that Norwegian with a funky name referred to as invidious wealth, or something like that—spending (or, in this case, possessing) lots of money to show off. Most of the Vatican’s objects of worth appeared to have been stolen from other places (one might, in fairness, say the same about the base materials for the Greeks’ and Romans’ greatest monuments, but they at least made those monuments themselves once they had the materials); it even had a bunch of Greek statues (with their dicks carefully concealed by sculpted fig leaves). The Sistine Chapel was not bad—it was neat seeing the part of the painting on the ceiling in which God touches someone’s index finger, conferring knowledge or power (or something) to him, as I had read about it in a class on art history in high school—but I was hugely disappointed by Saint Peter’s Basilica, which a friend had said would awe me. I expected something, I suppose, of architectural ingenuity or innovation, and I was instead assaulted with masses of marble, paintings of cherubs and clouds, and gilded candleholders. Forgive the following analogy with food. Saint Peter’s Basilica reminded me of one of those cheap birthday cakes that one can order from Safeway: they are all sugar and have the consistency of cardboard, as there is no sophistication whatsoever to their makeup. Consider, now, say, one of the coffee cakes that we get at home, which have blends of various flavors and a consistency arrived at through careful weighing of milk, flour, eggs, baking soda, &c., &c.—a good cake takes a lot more than sugar. Saint Peter’s Basilica was as showy as those ugly sequined shoes that people sometimes wear, which are meant to look nice but were clearly bought for $20 and are in awful taste. The Pantheon, by contrast, was awesome for its austerity. Its proportions were masterfully laid out, and its architectural embellishments, such as recesses for the pagan statues that people subsequently smashed and repurposed, were designed with an attention to the building as a whole, creating a harmonious unity antipodally opposed to the hodgepodge of treasures thrown together at random in Saint Peter’s Basilica. (Perhaps some people like it and my judgement of it was unfair, but to me it evinced only gaudiness and venality, and it struck me as entirely out of spirit with the values presumably espoused by Christians.))

The above paragraph was starting to get a little unwieldly, so I cut it off, but I am not quite done with this subject. Often, when I see a church, my thoughts are brought back to the one that I visited in Bergen, which had a ceiling of unpainted wooded crossbeams and white walls blackened with incense, which hung thickly in the air. This church seemed to me a real evocation of faith, as there was nothing unnecessary or showy in it—it appeared designed strictly for worship, and nothing more. Saint Peter’s Basilica, and basically every Catholic church that I saw in Italy, appeared to be designed for showing off and had no obvious relation to a belief in God or in the teachings of Christ. Again, I may be off-base, but I do not see how gilded candleholders, flowery pictures of flying cherubs, and statues made of marble would remind one of goodness, worhip, or any other Christian value. (I am now in Lindau and saw a Catholic and Lutheran church side-by-side. Suffice it to say that the former one, which I saw second, outraged me and threw me right back into Rome.)

Biblical allegories themselves are interesting—they feature prominently images of salvation, destruction, sorrow, miracles, submission to a higher power, &c. I gathered from my visit to the castle of Angers that they were largely tied in with political doctrine and events; for example, the famous tapestry in the aforesaid castle depicted events from the Hundred Years’ War, and one can easily interpret images of devotion to Christ as propaganda enjoining that one submit to one’s rulers and do as they say. I certainly think that depictions of supplication strip people of their sense of self-determination; it is as though they were saying, “You are helpless to change your own life, but if you beg someone else to do so, things might turn in your favor.” At this point, I am probably just bashing religion, and I do not think that I am saying anything that no one else has said before; these are merely the thoughts that have occurred to me over the past few weeks as I have gone from church to church, and to which I am now trying to give some clearer form (without much success). My original point was supposed to be that the allegories are interesting, as they seem to relate directly to what is happening on Earth, and they may very well have been a form of propaganda. (Perhaps one’s writing is always worse when one injects too much emotion into it, as that clouds the prose. I do not have time to clean up what I have written. Sorry.)

(I noted the power of Biblical allegories in my notes. I think that they could really take hold of one’s imagination.)

I have more notes about the plundering and debasement, in medieval times, of Rome’s greatest monuments—even the Pantheon had a Christian church appended to it, while parts of the Colosseum were torn down for newer building projects. The idea of cultural preservation, as I noted while I was in Rimini (and elsewhere), seems to be fairly new—I remember that a Roman gateway was knocked down in Lincoln in the 19th century to make room for something else and that a lot of old houses were cleared away entirely in Norwich in the 1960s. Interestingly, many of the medieval streets of Paris themselves were completely swept away, giving rise to the wide boulevards with multistory buildings that I can only describe as in the style of wedding cakes (for their fluting and scalloping), which was then imitated in many other capital cities, such as Vienna and, later, Madrid. People in the middle ages—at least, in Italy—seemed to have no sense of building anew, for they merely trashed what they had when they wanted to build. This frustrated me, as has become obvious, but also stood to remind one of cities’ continuously evolving. The Romans themselves, in fact—the ancient Romans—often redesigned buildings or pulled down what they had built to erect something that they liked better. Perhaps this sense that everything that existed before should be left as it was reflects a predilection for stagnation and meaningless conservatism.

I noted the Vatican’s stuffiness—I spent most of my time there trying not to faint and wishing that the Vatican’s citizens had discovered the water fountain—and I noted not even bothering to try to see all of the Roman bridges along the Tiber; I continued the trend started earlier on this trip in which I lessened my tendency to try to see it all. I noted not liking rushing from place to place nearly as much as I used to, and I noted how unfamiliar I was, before this trip, with the difficulties of travelling through third-world countries. Undeveloped countries require more forbearance than developed ones; one cannot approach them with the same expectations. I also noted having started counting down the days until I could leave Italy—I think that I mentioned this in my post about Naples—and I noted that I hated Italy generally and had lots of racist things to say about Italians, but that I should keep them to myself so as not to discourage readers from continuing to read these letters.