Roman Holiday

Long-time readers of the blog will remember my long-ago posts about our trip to Andalucía, when we saw Córdoba, Seville, Cádiz, the pueblos blancos, and Granada in seven days.  The trip was wonderful, but quite the whirlwind, and we were quite conscious that we were only getting to see the biggest attractions in each place.  So when it came to planning our trip for Christmas vacation, we decided to take a different strategy.  This time we had nine days, and we would spend them all in one place, taking things slowly, relaxing along the way.  We asked the Kid where in Europe he most wanted to go, and he immediately said "Rome!"

There were two reasons for this preference. One was that the Kid had studied Rome in third grade, with his mom/teacher, and had learned all about the Roman Republic.  The second was that, back in 2007, Zoë had taken me to Rome for three days to celebrate my 40th birthday.  Three years later, the Kid was still resentful about being left behind, and wanted to "catch up" with everything we'd seen.  I won't bother to try to determine which of these motivations weighed heavier in his mind.

The trip was made possible by Zoë's amazing mutant power, which allows her to find the best airfares, hotels/apartments anywhere.  As in Barcelona, our savings came at a cost.  We flew Ryan Air, whose seats do not recline, and who nickels-and-dimes you for everything.  The most astonishing thing on sale?  Scratch tickets.  The money goes to charity.  We think it's the employee retirement fund.  Our apartment was roomy and attractive, but on a ground floor / basement, and ended up being rather damp.  Still the prices were right, and the location of the apartment could not be beat.  Right near the Castel Sant' Angelo, on the Roman side of the Tiber, 10 minutes walking from the Piazza Navona.

I will not burden you with a blow-by-blow account which few of you will read anyway.   Those of you with interest, time to waste, or papers to grade, can spend time looking at my Ricardo's Rome Google Map.  There, I have marked everything we saw, and just about everywhere we ate.  You can click on the icons to see our reviews/reactions/advice.  The map is meant to be part journal, part resource for any of you planning your own trip to Rome one day.  For the rest of you, here are the highlights:

• We saw 18 churches, including St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel.  For a full list, see the Google Map.  The Sistine Chapel, of course, was sublime.  I found myself very moved by it, just as much as the first time I saw it years ago.  St. Peter's was also spectacular.  It's not beautiful, but stunning.  What caught us all by surprise, however, were the Roman and medieval mosaics that you can see in Rome's oldest churches, like the Basilica of Cosmo & Damiani, or the Basilica of Santa María in Trastevere.  For pics of some of these, see Facebook.  We ended up going from one church to the other, on a mosaic hunt.
• We have long been fascinated by relics.  Not for devotional reasons, since we're all a pretty secular lot, but for the perverse fascination with this sort of fetishism.  We saw loads of cool relics, including the skull of St. Agnes, pieces of the manger, and the teeth of St. Martial.  Then there were the reliquaries containing cool relics that you couldn't see, like the heads of Sts. Peter and Paul, Peter's finger, and pieces from the table of the Last Supper.  Who knows if any of this stuff is actually what people believe it to be, but the ambiguity is one of the things that  make them so fascinating to us.
• We saw ruins.  Lots of ruins.  The Forum, the Palatine Hill, the Baths of Diocletian, etc.  The ruins in Rome proper were stunning, but what made our experience with all this really special was the day trip we took to Ostia Antica.  This was once Rome's port city.  It ended up getting buried by mud and silt over the years, and has now been mostly excavated, allowing you to visit a Roman city, as you do in visiting Pompeii or Herculaneum.  Ostia, though, is not crowded.  Oftentimes we found ourselves alone, wandering among the buildings.   Highlights included the theater, the tavern, the mill, and the latrines.  The Kid and I got to sit on 2000-year-old toilets.  "Sit," that is.  Notice there is no "h" in that word.
• We ate.  No splurge dinners to fancy Rome restaurants.  Just good, solid, affordable Roman food throughout the trip.  Lots of great pasta and pizza, and amazing gelato.  Great carbonara, artichokes in oil, fried zucchini, and some really good desserts involving marzipan, cheese, and fruit.

Now, attentive readers will have noticed a contradiction between the list above and the plans as set out in the first paragraph.  Did we take things slowly?  Relax?  Not at all.  You see, Rome is inexhaustible.  We are not, but we did our darnedest to test the limits.  My hip started to hurt.  Zoë's feet were killing her.  But we had a big fistful of naproxen sodium and we powered on.  Our last day we had an hour to kill before our transportation picked us up, so we went to the Castel Sant' Angelo and slowly, agonizingly trudged up its ramps and stairs to take in the view.  You can't tell from the picture we took there that we are all utterly and completely drained.

The best part of it all?  Witnessing the Kid's enthusiastic and engaged responses to everything.  He was thrilled as he entered the Colosseum (although later he found it a letdown).  He wanted to take pictures of everything in the Egyptian rooms of the Vatican Museums.  He was clearly moved by the Sistine Chapel.  He could not get over the fact that he was walking on the same roads that Roman emperors had walked upon in the Forum.  He wanted to take in every detail of every church.  He learned to distinguish at a snap between Renaissance and Baroque aesthetics.  He developed a preference for Bernini over Borromini.  He loved the pasta and gelato.  All in all, I think we made up for leaving him home three years ago.

The worst part of it all?  Enduring the Kid's enthusiastic and engaged reactions to everything.  Those of you who know my son know what a talker he can be.  Everything he sees and experiences comes accompanied by constant verbal commentary.  Sometimes he has wonderful things to say, like when he walked into a church, looked around, and said, "This is basically a Renaissance church with a Baroque altar, right?"  In our nerdy family, this is like scoring a touchdown.  Sometimes, though when the hour is late, and everyone is tired, it's all a bit too much for Dad with his sore hip and Mom with her aching feet, particularly if the naproxen sodium has begun to wear off.  I'll leave you with one example, a conversation had while exploring the crypt of the St. Peter's Basilica:

Santiago: I was just thinking.  When the Pope signs a check, does he use his Pope name or his real name?

Mom: Who pays for anything with checks these days?

Dad: Please, mi hijito, can you stop talking for the next ten minutes, and just look at the stuff?