My Road Leads to Rome

Last time I left things at just having crossed the border into Italy.  I remarked then what a change it was from Switzerland.  My time in Italy is not yet over, but I have moved on from my first stop here, Rome.  I was in Rome about ten years ago, and I remembered it as a beautiful city where ancient structures lay naturally around the whole place.

I remembered it wrong.

DAY HALF

Of course, at the point I left you, I still had two trains before reaching Rome – a regional train to Milano Centrale and an overnight to Roma Tiburtina.  Make note of the name of that train station.

The first train seemed pretty uneventful.  On the Swiss train I had been typing up blog roll in between being glued to the windows, but I decided to save my laptop battery and keep my computer in my bag.  And thank goodness I did.

About two stops, or half an hour, from Milano Centrale, a couple of young men entered my carriage.  One of them blasted straight through, while the other sat opposite me, smiling.  He spoke in Italian, and as often happens I had to admit to not knowing any.

“Ah, English!” he said, smile still there.  “Where you from?”

“Australia.”

“Ah, Australia.”

He reached out for one of those handshake/slide/high-five things that people who are trying to be cool do.  I shrugged and met his greeting, and was surprised when he forced a small carved elephant into my hand.  I tried giving it back but he wouldn’t take it.

“No, no, gift for you.”

“OK…”  I kept my hand out, palm up, with the carving still there.  I wanted to be able to quickly give it back if need be.

“Yesterday I have baby,” he says.  “I now a padre.”

“Oh.  Congratulations.”

“Si.  Grazie.”  He sat there, still grinning at me.  Suddenly he reaches for my other hand and puts a tortoise carving in it.

Of course I have no need for this junk, so as with the other I leave it in my hand so I can get rid of it quickly.  In slow, broken English, we had a brief conversation about going to Milan, Rome, Australia and all that.  It was at this point he revealed his endgame.

“Tomorrow is the festival of my baby.”

“Really?  How nice.”

“Yes.  You have present for my baby.  Shoes, shirt, trouser.”

I played it dumb.

“Sorry?  Not sure I understand you.”

“Present.  Not for me.  For my baby.  Present from you.”

“I don’t have anything to give, sorry.”

His smile dropped.  He leaned forward menacingly.

“Present for me, then.  I have nothing.  Shoes, shirt, trouser.”

(I interject at this point to mention the fact that he was wearing reasonably nice trainers, a branded sports jacket and tracksuit pants.)

For a moment I considered giving him one of my torn pairs of jeans (I think I mentioned previously I have a big hole over the right butt-cheek in two of my pairs of jeans) but realized that in order to do so I would have to open my bag, which was definitely not a course of action I was willing to take.

“I have nothing.”

With an angry sneer, he grabbed the carvings from my hands, stood and went to leave the carriage.  As he opened the door the carvings fell from his hands under the seat in front of me.  He ducked down to pick them up.  I watched him like a hawk, fairly certain that his intention was to try and grab something from my bag, which was under the seat.  He didn’t take anything (my bag had a lock on it anyway) and he soon vanished.  I noticed that he had left the tortoise under the seat, probably as its head had snapped off.

For a moment I thought about taking it, but decided against it.  I suspected it might be a further part of the scheme, whereby he would accost me later accusing me of stealing the damn thing.  So I left it, and spent the last half hour of my journey petrified that my carriage would empty (there were two people left besides myself) and I would be at the mercy of a gang of Italian muggers.  The carriage didn’t empty, though, and I arrived a Milano Centrale safely, and as far as I know without missing anything.

(I have to admit that my bag feels like it’s constantly getting lighter – I have a bit of a concern that I keep leaving things behind and not realizing it, but they mustn’t be that important if they have since I haven’t yet noticed).

Milano Centrale is supposed to be the most beautiful train station in Europe or something.  I don’t know about that.  It’s big, and its certainly ornate, but when you have to sit there freezing to death from 8pm-11:30pm its charms start to seem a little lacking.

Milano was the first place I noticed the Italian Contradiction.  This is a term I apply to the weird fact that everywhere in Italy seems to have an enormous police presence, yet they don’t seem to ever enforce the law.  I must admit that this is the least comfortable circumstance for me – European police officers have an austere look to them, and their uniforms make them seem almost like a military presence.  (I should mention that all of my interactions with police in Europe have shown that they are not like their appearance – they are actually very friendly.  Saying that, the only real interaction I’ve had with them was when one informed me the toilet was closed and where to find another one.)  In most places you either don’t see police all that often or you feel like their presence has an impact on the criminal population, cleaning up the streets.

Well… Italy doesn’t work like that.  The police are just kind of… there.  In all the train stations are signs saying not to smoke.  That doesn’t seem to worry anyone.  I sat near (thank God not next to) a guy who was smoking like a man on fire, jeering and hissing at any police officer who walked by.  I’m pretty sure they were actively ignoring him – there is no way they were not aware of him.  But they did nothing.

Anyway, I was extremely hungry having been on the trains all day without time to grab something to eat, so the first thing to do was to get food.  I went to Burger King.  I know, I know, I’ve been paying out all the people who have been eating fast food, but I didn’t want to leave the station and there’s a limit to what’s available.  I justified it to myself with the fact that Burger King isn’t called Burger King in Australia, so it counts as a cultural experience.

Just before I passed out from hypothermia (it was impossibly cold) the train arrived at the platform and I got into my compartment.  I’d booked a sleeper using the automatic ticket machines in the station, which were incredibly user-friendly.  And they let you make the discounted reservations for my train pass!  They need to introduce this to all stations in Europe.

The sleeper was kind of crowded, but it was comfortable.  They even gave us a tropical fruit drink popper.  The only complaint I have is that, when the conductor took my ticket he bent the cover the wrong way, so now my eurail pass cover is in a very delicate state and I half expect it to tear apart any moment.  I guess it was bound to happen at some stage, but I think they could have been more careful.  This thing needs to last me another two or so months!

For once I managed to sleep properly on the night train, but I was woken up at 7am o announce the arrival at Roma Tiburtina.

DAY ONE

For those who don’t know, the main station in Rome is Roma Termini.  Notice that this name is different from the one I arrived at.  Tiburtina is about five kilometres from Termini, and I wanted to go to Termini in order to drop off my bags and have a quick explore before going to the hostel.

Getting to Termini was easy, though.  Trains leave every half hour, and they are, of course, free for me, so I just hopped on one and ten minutes later was at my destination.  The luggage hold area is the first I have come across that isn’t just self-service lockers.  They actually have people who take your luggage and put it in a large luggage room.  You then pay when you come back to collect it.

By the time I had worked all of this out it was around 8am.  Time to see Rome.  I drank the popper from the train for breakfast and off I went!

A short stroll took me by some fairly uninteresting buildings.  Half an hour later I looked down a narrow alleyway to my left and there was the Coliseum.  Last time I hadn’t gone inside the actual structure itself, so I decided that this would be my Coliseum day.  Walking a little further I discovered the Roman Forum and Palatine.  Ok, great.  The place had just opened, and some people dressed as ancient Romans were setting themselves up for the tourists.  I briefly wondered how much they thought they were going to make in off-season.

The ticket for the Roman Forum and Palatine included the Coliseum.  So I bought a ticket.  And here’s where I have a bit of a tantrum about one of the most irritating parts about Rome: the way attractions are charged.

See, a ticket covers entrance only.  There are audioguides available, but they cost five euro (that is, five euro for the Forum and Palatine, and another five for the Coliseum).  Not only that, but in the Forum and Palatine they had a notice saying that you were only allowed to have the audioguide for two hours, after which they would charge you ANOTHER five euro.  I knew I was keen to take my time, and wasn’t interested in being out of pocket ten euro for one audioguide.

For some comparison, let’s examine the audioguide situation in Great Britain.  Ordinarily the guide is included in the price of admission.  Edinburgh Castle was an exception, though I think the guide cost around a pound or so there and was fantastically detailed though not essential as much of the information was provided in free guided tours and on information boards.

In Spain you may remember that audioguides had to be paid for.  They had a special price for students – thirty cents, and the guide was well worth the money (in fact it would have been worth the full price of three euro).  Not so in Rome.  So I skipped the audioguide, which turned out to not matter that much for the Forum and Palatine, as they were interesting enough without having any information about them.  There was a temporary exhibition about Roman conquest and cultural integration, which I found very interesting.

It argued that the strength of ancient Rome came not solely from its military strength but also from its willingness to integrate other cultures into their own.  They were, apparently, proud of being a ‘mongrel race’ – very different to the Greeks, who prided themselves on the purity of their racial descent.  Romans had an interesting attitude to culture – clearly Roman culture was the best and everyone should want to be Roman.  They therefore didn’t care if other people practiced their own cultural rituals within their conquered provinces, as those people were just inferior and really wanted to be Roman but couldn’t.  Thus people weren’t forced to integrate, but could if they chose to (and many did, as the benefits of being a Roman citizen were quite great).  This attitude also prevented ghettos from being built up, which seems to me the ideal balance between cultural integration and variety.  Pity it only came about because of the Roman arrogance and not as a broader cultural policy.

The other interesting component of the exhibition was about the way Hollywood has created an idea of the Romans that is quite different from the reality, based on 1930s-40s politics.  The salute that we think of Romans doing from the movies?  That’s based on the fascist salute of the Nazis and Mussolini.  The Romans as pure and racist?  That’s a fabrication invented by Mussolini’s government in an attempt to gain support by developing a protectionist attitude towards Italian classical culture and linking their policies with those of ancient Rome.  A journal named something like In Defence of the Races compared the facial structure of Roman emperors with that of African and South American descent in order to try and prove that white European was somehow better.  There were some clever, if morally bankrupt, fascist political cartoons on display as well, promoting the idea that black Americans did not appreciate culture and would butcher Rome and Italy’s past (Americans were always represented as negroes).

The Forum and Palatine ended up being much larger than I had anticipated.  Every time I thought I had reached the end, more would appear.  I saw a lot of ancient ruins, some statues, and walked along cobbles dating back to the time of Hadrian.  Eventually, though, it was time to move on to the Coliseum.

Over the course of the morning the Forum and Palatine had slowly been filling with people.  With the Coliseum right next to it, it wasn’t a long walk, and I was shocked at the queue.  It was long.  I hadn’t given those guys playing dress-up enough credit.  I could not believe the number of people that had turned up in the off season.  Luckily I already had my ticket, so walked straight in.

Again, audioguides, videoguides and guided tours were available at a cost.  I considered it here, but in the end five euros was too much, and I had survived well in the Forum and Palatine without one.

I didn’t realize at that point, but as it turned out access to the top floor, underground area and onto the actual arena was restricted except by guided tour.  So when you buy your entrance ticket it isn’t inclusive of the entire structure.  I thought that was a bit of a rip-off.  Outside the Coliseum there are people dressed up, selling reams of postcards and tacky tourist trinkets, and offering rides in a horse-drawn carriage. 

I still had some time to kill, so walked down to a monument I had seen earlier with a giant bronze statue of someone in a horse-drawn chariot on it.  It turned out to be the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a very important and respected monument to the Roman people.  Of course it was covered in ant-like tourists snapping pictures of the guards, the eternal flame, and the tomb itself.

Behind the tomb there appeared to be the entrance to a museum (aka art gallery) so I went in.  Didn’t find the art gallery, not that I was really looking for it that hard, but I did find a church that must have been an important one because it was beautiful and huge.  A sign out the front read ‘Please respect the sacredness of this place by dressing appropriately and refraining from photography or videography’.  I believe in respecting the faith of others, so I took off my hat (I know) and popped the camera away.  Then I saw the tacky little stands with a small money slot connected to a series of electric candles.  You put one euro in the slot, a candle lights up, and that somehow means you’ve done your part in worshipping Baby Jesus (or whichever particular figure is represented by this stand).

You could tell by the number of candles lit how popular a particular saint was – Virgin Mary was one of the most popular.  There were at least eight of these, though probably more.  They’d somehow managed to turn a sacred place into little more than a penny arcade.  I may not be religious, but I am offended on behalf of all the people who actually have faith who are being taken advantage of in this way.

Somehow this made Rome feel a whole lot less… authentic than I remembered.  I moved on from the touristy haven pretty quick smart in order to get myself to the hostel where I would be staying for two nights – Happy Days Hostel.

Yes, that’s the real name.  And yes, it is exactly how you would imagine a place called Happy Days Hostel to be.

I walked up to the 5^th floor (because why not?) and was greeted by a pair of… Pakistanis?  I think that’s right.  They greeted me with very warm hospitality, gave me a bed and I started to do all the important online stuff that I had been missing for two days.

It wasn’t long before I had some roommates – a Polish couple called Matthew and Joanna (although their names on Facebook are spelled differently, I’m just going to go with the anglicised version).  We had a bit of a chat and I discovered that the next day the Vatican Museum would be free, as it was the last Sunday of the month.  As it is normally closed on Sundays, I was pretty lucky.

It was at about this point that the hostel owners came into the room and announced that tonight was sangria night.  Apparently every night in this place was sangria night.  This involved an enormous bowl of sangria being made, put on the table, and drunk by everyone.  Then they played music in the common room and created a dance party.

I couldn’t quite figure out who was staff and who was just visiting.  One of the girls there, who I was almost certain was a staff member, turned out to have only arrived that day.  She was letting people into the building when they buzzed up, choosing music for the dance and everything.  Then one of the other guys, who seemed to just be a long-term client, was actually an employee.  Hmm.

At midnight one of the owners rumbled into the room, glancing erratically at his watch.  A muttered conversation between them ended with the music being shut off and the other saying, “OK, we must go out now.”

To begin with I considered going with them and said that I would, but after a couple of minutes I changed my mind and hid in the toilet until they left.  I planned to get up reasonably early for the Vatican Museum the next day.

DAY TWO

I got up about an hour later than I had planned, at 8:30am, meaning that we had only about an hour before the museum opened.

“Eh, it’s off season,” I assured the Poles and Li-Ying, the Taiwanese girl that was also joining us.  “There won’t be that big a queue, even if it is off season.”

Still, I recognized that there was a need not to dawdle, so motioned to leave immediately.  The Poles had scouted the area the night before, and had discovered a slightly more direct route to the entrance, so we made our way in that direction with the intention of beating the small crowds of people heading for the Vatican.

Their shortcut managed to take us to the middle of the line, forcing us to backtrack to the end, which was where we would have gone had we not taken the shortcut.  Ah well, you live and learn.

Up and down the line stalked hawkers.  Every time one of us commented on the length of the line someone would swoop over and say, “Want speedy entrance to the museum and church?  I’ll do you a guided tour, only 70 euro.”  Seeing as the whole point of going to the museum that day was that it was free, my reply was, “No thanks, I like lines.”

There were also an insane number of people walking up and down the queue trying to hock strips of 20 postcards with a Vatican or Roman theme.  They would just kind of stand there, staring at you, willing you to spend your hard-earned euro on their wonderful, one-of-a-kind postcards.  Then they would move on and the next postcard salesperson would try to sell exactly the same cards for exactly the same price.  What, do they think we’re waiting to buy from the guy with the best mustache?

The line moved fairly quickly, and we were in within an hour.  The reason there even was a queue was that you had to walk through metal detectors and put bags through x-ray scanners.  Pfft… who’s going to bomb an art gallery?

…

We didn’t get the audioguide (if the catholic church really cared about educating people about their faith, they would offer it for free.  It’s not as though they need the damn money – I’m sure they get plenty in their 1 euro worship arcade slots).  The way the Vatican Museum works is you get shepherded (see what I did there?) through a series of rooms with art in them.  Sometimes the art is interesting, but more often than not it’s a stupid number of vases or maps or something equally uninspiring.

Basically the museum is one gigantic queue for the Sistine Chapel (though you are able to skip ahead at designated points).  And the Sistine Chapel is basically a big, dull (dull as in dark) room filled with people trying to take photos without the security guards seeing them.

So I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Vatican Museum is not my favourite place in the world.  We’d lost Li-Ying a while back (she had to meet a friend, though apparently that didn’t work out so well and they ended up being at different train stations, so she waited a whole day in the train station’s McDonalds) and planned to go get some pizza from a place the Poles had liked the day before.  As we went around to the main Vatican plaza we noticed a crowd of people chanting about something.

To be honest, I’m not sure what it was about (there seemed to be two separate protest groups, one calling for peace in the Holy Land – good luck with that – and the other, more organized group calling for something in Italian) but I do know what they were doing there.  We’d stuck around until just before midday, and soon a countdown began.

Five… four… three… two… one…

The bells struck the hour and a tiny window in one of the Vatican’s apartment block-style buildings slowly slid open.  And the Pope popped his head out.

In a big, booming, electronically magnified voice, he said stuff – a prayer I guess.  It was in Latin or Italian, not sure which.  He did translate it, but by the time I realized he was speaking English now I’d missed it all anyway.

When he got to the ‘Amen’ part, huge swathes of the crowd started to participate, following some script that I don’t know and responding to his words.  Then, awkwardly, a lot of people suddenly bowed their head, got down on one knee and made the sign of the cross.  I suddenly found myself the only standing person in a crowd of prostrate figures, camera held conspicuously up at the Pope’s tiny figure.

So as to look a bit more respectful, I did a vague sign of the cross, which, because I was concentrating on holding my camera steady, ended up being a bit loose and probably looked a lot like flipping the bird to the Pope.  Luckily he was too far away to see.

Once he’d translated his prayers into English, German and Spanish, the Pope threw a dove out the window.  It panicked and tried to claw its way back in.  Then he threw another dove out the window.  It landed on the windowsill beside the one it had exited from.  Then he pulled his head in and disappeared.  Everyone applauded (because he could speak multiple languages fluently?) and the dove got attacked by two seagulls.

I can’t tell you if it survived or not, because I honestly don’t know.  Those seagulls were really going for it though.  I guess the Vatican is into the whole tough love thing, because they didn’t open the window for it, even though it was desperately, desperately trying to get back inside.

It was pizza time.  We went past the Castel Sant’Angelo, and I vowed to enter it.  The pizza place that the Poles had vouched for served their pizzas by unit weight, so it became very difficult to judge how much I was going to end up paying.  I asked for one slice each of two pizzas and he kind of just cut each (rectangular) pizza in half, folded them over and gave them to me.  Oh well, they weren’t bad.

I was keen to go into the castle now, but the Poles dragged my reluctant form back to the Vatican in order to make a dash for St Peter’s Basilica.  We waited in line for a while before Matthew decided he needed to pee.  The line hadn’t really moved, so it seemed safe.

As soon as he left the line took off.  Long story short, we ended up having to leave the line to wait for him, and I decided ‘screw this, I want to see the castle’ so left them to their own devices and entered the Castel Sant’Angelo.

This time I got the audio guide, since I only paid 3,50 euro to get in and it was a historical place.  The guide was pretty good, actually.  The castle was originally built in the time of Emperor Hadrian.  By Emperor Hadrian.  In order to house his remains.  So it has some old bits, though over time various Popes have added to it, creating a fairly impressive medieval-esque structure with some more modern bits (for example an 19^th century lift allowing the Pope to get to the top without having to walk).

By the way, for those who have played Assassin’s Creed 2, the Castel Sant’Angelo is the structure that has the special secret walkway between it and the Vatican that Ezio has to run down at the end of the game.  It was an escape route for Popes, as Castel Sant’Angelo is a really well-fortified structure.

Finishing up here I realized I hadn’t had any gelato yet, so the next hour was devoted to finding a spot with lots of Italians in it and getting some.

Walking down one of the large streets (actually, the same street my hostel was on) I noticed a lot of confetti on the ground.  I assumed there must have been some kind of festival recently and thought no more of it.

I soon came across a bunch of small children dressed in adorable little costumes (pirates, ladybeetles, princesses – all sorts).  They were throwing confetti at each other to the adoration of their parents.  Cute, I guess.

Perhaps because of this it wasn’t hard to find a chockers gelateria.  I had chocolate and – erm – another flavor.  I’m pretty sure I just pointed to the darkest, chocolatiest looking one and another random one.  Whatever, it tasted good.

Getting back to the hostel, I made a slightly bizarre discovery.  I had locked my bag to the bed for the day (they didn’t have lockers here) and on my return it was no longer connected to the bed.  Further, there were different people sleeping in different beds.  Apparently the staff had moved the beds around, so people were now in different positions.  I couldn’t quite figure out the logic of this.  My bag had been detached from the bed while they dismantled them, I guess for cleaning?  Utterly bizarre.  Nothing was missing though, so oh well.

That night, Matthew and I went on an adventure.  We had realized that we lacked wine, and, it being Sunday, there were few stores open.  I looked up directions to the nearest 24 hour store and we headed off.  We barely even got lost!  I’m good with directions.

Anyway, at the store I was ready to just buy the cheapest wine we could find (we were going with the “3 for 6,20 euro” deal) but Matthew was interested in picking a specific type.  I kind of asked him, “white or red,” because I could tell, and he wanted to know which were sweet and which were semi-sweet and all sorts of complexities that I don’t really think about when selecting wine (for me it’s red or white, bubbly or not).

He tried to ask the checkout clerk, but they didn’t speak English (and I don’t think they knew that much about wine anyway – it’s a damn convenience store) and then proceeded to ask every single customer he could find.  I didn’t quite get the point – it’s the cheap shelf anyway.  Plus I couldn’t quite work out whether he wanted red, white, sweet, semi-sweet or dry.

Eventually we got three bottles – two whites and a red.  When we got back and I poured it out, he exclaimed in surprise, “Oh!  It’s white.”

“You didn’t want white?”

“No, I thought it was red.”

“I could have told you it was white.  It looked white.  I didn’t know what you wanted.”

We drank it anyway.  Three bottles between three.  Gurgle.

I met an American couple that night who were doing the backpacking thing, though they had even less of a plan than me, and had done some couchsurfing and hitchhiking as well.  Having said that, they seemed to have had fewer transit incidents than I’ve had…

They were planning to go to Naples the next day, as was I.  They’d also been through Eastern Europe already (Italy was an expensive aside for them) and had loved it, so I’m now looking forward very much to that part of my trip.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find them the next day, so went to Naples alone.  For the first time I had an uneventful trip, so that was a nice change.  And that gets us out of Rome and into the city of Naples, which means that this tale is

TO BE CONTINUED