Thursday, September 24, 1999

We were at breakfast the next morning at seven. The bus was leaving at eight for our tour of the city. An early breakfast was a good idea. The jackhammers working on the remodeling started at eight.

At the bus, we met our guide for the day was Georgio, a thin, small, gray man in his late fifties, who wore the world’s dirtiest, most wrinkled sport coat. Giovanni introduced him as the professor. He apparently was a real professor of art history. He was certainly rumpled enough to be a professor..

Our first stop of the day’s tour was the Coliseum, the Roman amphitheater. From a distance, the big stone building looked much nicer than I remembered it from twenty years before. They had just cleaned the old stone for the coming millennium celebration.

The bus left us in a parking area across from the Coliseum. We followed the professor into a walkway that led under the street to the Coliseum. As we walked over, the professor warned us about pickpockets. He told us not to let anyone selling anything to approach us. A lot of them were pickpockets who would distract you with their goods in one hand while picking your pocket with the other. It was still early and the other tour groups were just arriving like lamb to the slaughter.

There were plenty of peddlers offering their wares. More entertaining were the men dressed as Roman centurions. They posed with the spears and swords with people taking pictures. They might also have been picking pockets, but they added a nice charm to the area. They made the Coliseum look less like an ancient artifact and more like a movie set.

As we approached the entrance to the Coliseum, the professor directed us to look at the low, square building across from it. There was nothing remarkable about the building, but it was the ruin of the ancient Temple of Venus, the goddess of love. In Roman time, the temple also served as a house of prostitution.

The professor told us a story about the temple. In the times of one of the early emperors, the prostitutes at the temple refused to service midgets. The midgets of Rome banded together and launch a protest at the palace of the emperor. For six days, they kept up a racket so that eventually, the emperor relented. He hired special midget prostitutes and built miniature temple within the large temple to house them. And, of course, they only charged half price.

As we got closer, the large stones that make up the Coliseum look like giant moths had attacked them. They have large holes pitting them. When they After a few hundred years, the bars were forgotten. As Rome declined, they no longer used the stadium for free shows. Merchants gradually took it over. It became a large, outdoor market. To display their goods, the merchant hung wooden poles across the many doorways in the stadium. In making holes in the stone to support their poles, the merchants discovered the metal bars inside the stones. This created a new mining industry. People began digging into the stone of the Coliseum to retrieve the metal that held it together.

Of course, removing the metal supports weakened the structure. In the next earthquake, half of the external wall of the building fell down. The inner circle that held the seats are intact, but only half of the outer ring remains. After it fell down, people began using the stones for other purposes, including supposedly building St. Peters. Thus, the stadium became a quarry as well as a mine.

This was all stopped only when one of the Pope’s planted a cross in the middle of the amphitheater and declared it a religious site. Of course, a later pope planned to have the whole building torn down so that he could built a large causeway between St Peter’s and another major basilica. Fortunately, for the coliseum, that particular pope died before he could start his plan. The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

The biggest change I noticed, other than the stone being whiter, was the lack of cats. When I had been at the Coliseum twenty-some years ago, hundreds and probably thousands of stray cats inhabited it. Tourist fed the cats and they were everywhere, both tourists and the cats. I’ve actually seen a show on PBS about cats where they talked about studies of house cat society. Scientists had used the population at the Roman Coliseum for these studies.

Now, the cats were gone. I can only guess what happened. The authorities had removed them as part of the renovation project. The building was probably cleaner and more sanitary without them, but they did add some character to the place that tourists alone don’t give it. Well, at least I happy that they were able to find good homes for them all.

The biggest surprise when people go into the Coliseum is the lack of an arena inside. The center of the Roman Coliseum looks like the ruins of an apartment building. This was the holding area. They used to keep the animals that they used in the Coliseum here. A wooden floor used to cover the whole area, but over the years, the wood has disappeared.

At the Coliseum, Rebecca made the mistake of trying to climb the stairs up to the upper floors. I followed simply because I always follow Rebecca. I like the view. Walking up the stair was a mistake because each step is high and tilted slightly outward. The was the exact wrong design for someone who was trying to get over shin splits. By the time, Rebecca made it to the top of the first landing, she realized that she’d made a mistake. She turned around and limped down. She decided that the Coliseum wasn’t her favorite place.

After to Coliseum, we followed the professor wrinkled back to the bus. The next stop on the tour was St. Peter’s in the Vatican. Michelangelo initially designed St. Peter’s though since, many other artists and architects have been involved in building and expanding it..

You approach the front entrance from a plaza that is surrounded by a huge colonnade. The columns surround you on both sides like two broad arms reaching out from the church. From the center of the plaza, it looks like a single row of columns, but there are actually four rows of columns. Walking from within the colonnade, they look like a forest. Like everything at St. Peter, the proportions are heroic. You feel dwarfed as you approach any of the buildings.

From the plaza, the professor pointed out the window in the church where the Pope appears to bless the crown every week. He also pointed out a smaller high building to the right side of St. Peter’s. This is the Sistine Chapel. It is where the cardinals meet to elect the pope. We were to visit the chapel on the next day.

Scaffolding covered some of the side buildings, but the front of St. Peter’s itself was free and beautifully clean. They had already finished with its millennial scrubbing. It looked better than it had in centuries.

I immediately noticed something different about the plaza. The last time I was here, priests and nuns populated it. Now, there wasn’t a cleric to be seen. It was like the cats of the Coliseum. I hoped that they hadn’t met with the same fate.

The professor took us up the broad stair leading to the entrance to the church. Rebecca’s shin splints were still bothering her. We walked by all types of barriers to hold the crowds. Fortunately, there were no real lines. We more or less went right in.

If I felt dwarfed by the huge columns outside, St. Peter’s itself in even more oversized. It is a huge, dramatic interior space, especially since it is so highly decorated. You don’t even notice the crowds of people as you look up at the monumental walls and ceiling. We crawled like Lilliputians, well below the natural eye-level of the building. There are forty-four different chapels within St. Peters, but you don’t really notice them because they have tucked them into the corners. Just walking through the interior space is overwhelming enough.

Of course, St. Peter’s is very proud of its size. They actually have the size of other major cathedral memorialized in the floor of St. Peter’s to show you how small they are in comparison. The Duomo of Florence only comes up to here. Notre Dame in Paris only comes up to here. St. Patrick’s in New York only comes up to here. Nah, nah, nah-nah, nah, I’m the biggest cathedral of them all!

The first sight inside was Michelangelo’s Pieta, the statue of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus, just taken down from the cross. It is one the right as you come in. However, not having any binoculars with us, we couldn’t really see it. We took the guide’s word that the little statue in the distance was actually the famous Pieta. Since a crazy person attacked the statue some years ago, they put it behind a Plexiglas shield. They keep the crowds a good hundred feet away from it, behind a barrier. I suspect that guards were poised to take you out if you jumped the barrier and went up close so you could actually see it.

This is sad because it is one of the most dramatic works of art anywhere. It was so perfect that it was the only work of art the Michelangelo every signed. Of course, it is only one of a handful of pieces that he actually finished.

The next important statue was one of St. Peter’s. His feet are worn from pilgrims putting their hands on them to pray. A line formed to the right of people waiting to touch his feet. I got in line with several others from our tour group. As my turn came, I prayed. My hands rested where they had been proceeded by millions of other hands.

As I asked for faith, it occurred to me that all of the apostles dies as martyrs without seeing how Christianity had changed the world. Faith should be so much each for us who can see the power the Christ’s ideas have had and are still having over human history. After seeing Pompeii, it was clear that the biggest change was from a world of slavery to a world of freedom and this change wasn’t finished yet.

St. Peter’s only has one stained glass window. It is in the very back of the church over a huge artistic throne of St. Peter. It showed a picture of a dove, the Holy Spirit flying toward you. The dove looked small in the church. Its wingspan is over six feet.

There are so many works of art in St. Peter’s that I couldn’t even list a part of them, much less describe them. One thing that struck me was that, unlike any other church, a lot of the statues are of past popes. One shows the pope stopping the visogoths from sacking Rome. Another showed another pope in the miracle of the Eucharist. Dead popes aren’t of that much interest to most congregations, but they are important here.

One work, a picture of the miracle of the Eucharist, is a huge mosaic. In it, the pope at the center stands ten feet tall. It took a group of artists ten years to complete. I believe that it was a mosaic because our guide told us that it was, but it looked like a painting. Each piece of the mosaic is only one-sixteenth of an inch square on the face of picture. However, each piece was set two-inched deep into the picture.

There is a huge stature of another pope in marble. In front of him, there is a skeleton, raising one hand reminding him the he is mortal. On one side, there is a statue of a mother and child. On the other side, there was a very erotic statue of a naked woman. According to our guide, the statue was so erotic that after some dozens of years after it was installed, the pope had the woman’s body covered up. He hired an artist who covered the marble woman in clothes of metal. The artist did a wonderful job. Unless you were told, you would never know that the metal had been added afterward.

They even have bodies of dead popes preserved in glass cases with silver masks covering their face and hands.The professor told us a story about Pope Innocence. He’d died and million of people were waiting outside St. Peter’s to view his remains. When they went to put his body in a glass, case they found that the case had been built too small. It had been sized to a niche in the church, not to the tall former pope. They needed to do something quickly since millions were waiting outside. The solution was to shorten his legs to fit the coffin. You can still see this plainly today once the guide pointed it out. The reclining dead pope’s legs are clearly much too short for his body.

Near the entrance on the left was the most recent addition to the art of St. Peter’s. It was a three dimensional relief of Pope John the twenty-third blessing some prisoners. It was created for St. Peters a dozen years ago be the artist Claus Greco. Our art historian guide claimed that the artist had caste it backwards, since the pope faced the wall instead of into the center of the church. He claimed that he got into a lot of trouble because he’d pointed this out in an article, but that the artist had later admitted that it was true.

After we left the church, we visited an supposedly official Vatican gifts shop right at the entrance to St. Peter’s Square. . According to the professor, this was the only gift shop where you could buy holy medals blessed by the Pope. Later we heard that the Pope doesn’t allow stores to sell medals that he has blessed. Perhaps the Pope accidentally blessed these medals as he as he was blessing the crowd in the nearby Vatican. Maybe it was a drive-by blessing as he entered or existed the Vatican.

I suspect what really made this an official gift shop was .that our guide got a cut of anything we spent. The owner of the shop was an old man seated in a rocking chair in the middle of the store by the cash registers. An old dog was lying by his side. Our guide paid his respects to the old man and petted the dog. It looked like a scene from The Godfather where the mobster paid his respects to the don.

The guide was very specific about telling us what to buy in the shop: the holy metals, crystal—not glass—rosaries, and some fine mosaics by the only two living masters in the art.

He also recommended on specific video tape. They called it "All Italy" and it explained the major sights in Italy, starting with Milan and going down to southern Italy, in roughly the order we’d seen them. We bought on of these tapes and watched it when we go home. It was fascinating because a lot of the video footage was from the early fifties. The crowds of tourists were tiny and with very few cars whizzing by on the streets. Other parts of the video, like that showing the recent damage and repair of the Pieta was much more recent. I imagie that the video was quite profitable since most of its production cost must have been paid decades ago.

He explained that when buying mosaics, you should have the advice of an art expert. As an art historian, he would show us quality work. He took us in a back room to show us little mosaics the size of a small postcard that they were selling for a thousand dollars. For some reason, I wasn’t impressed.

Of course, one of the primary reasons for visiting this particular gift shop is that they had a public toilet. It struck me that we hadn’t been in a single toilet that was out of toilet paper. This is very impressive. In previous trips to Europe, I’d been impressed by how stingy they were when it came to paper products in general. They still don’t ever have paper towels—electric hand dryers are the thing—but we never ran into a shortage of toilet paper.

Of course, there was a shortage of toilet seats. Very few of the bowls actually. It does strike me that they eliminated seats as a public cleanliness issue. I didn’t see disposable seat covers anywhere. The idea is to use the bowl without actually touching it. This, of course, isn’t as much a problem for males, but life isn’t fair.

I suspect that the ladies care less about the seats than the lines. More and more of the bathrooms we saw, including the one at the Vatican gift shop, we unisex to balance the load. Urinals were less common. Everyone had separate stalls.

Thinking about bathrooms, it occurred to me that our bathroom in Rome was the first that didn’t have the emergency pull chain. Were the noble Romans to courageous for such devices? Perhaps the Roman major didn’t have any relatives in the emergency pull chain business.

The tour finished a little after midday. Our little family group walked down to a nearby pizza restaurant for a lunch of real Italian pizza. I mentioned before that pizza in Italy is thin, almost like a cracker. This is what you get when you order it in a restaurant.

You can find the thick, doughy bread that we eat as crust here in the U.S. but not in restaurants where the pizza is baked to order. Grocery stores and what they call tavola calda, or hot tables, serve a thick crust version that is more like American pizza. They have it pre-cooked on large, square pans that look like cookie sheet. You buy a piece of it at a time.

In restaurants, the pizza is completely different. They sell each pizza as an individual serving. It is maybe ten inches in diameter, but so thin. The thinnest American crust is twice as thick. It has only the thinnest of toppings. The most basic topping—on pizza margheritte—is just a little cheese, tomato sauce and basil. You can eat it with a knife or fork—as Europeans commonly do—or you can try to eat in by hand in slices. The slices are kind of floppy but workable

I suspect that they sell thick crust pizza by the piece because this thin stuff wouldn’t hold up to a warmer. It is so fragile that I suspect that it would be useless in our home delivery oriented market.

When you eat this thin pizza, you just get all the flavor of pizza with none of the bulk. I ordered a Neopolitana, which is a plain cheese pizza with about fixe thin anchovies laid out in a star design under the cheese topping. When the pizza comes, you might not think you can finish it, but it is so thin that you are satisfied without feeling full.

Italian pizza is a light meal comparable to having a salad here in the states. I have always liked the American version, but I find myself wishing I could get the Italian version here in the states.

That night, we’d planned to take a cab to the nearer of the two other Buon Ricordo restaurants. We asked the front desk to call us a taxi. They said it would only take a few minutes. We were in a bit of a hurry because we had reservations at our restaurant.

Another person was already outside waiting for a cab. After about five minutes, a cab appeared and they took it. We waited another five minutes and still no cab. We asked the door man. He checked to make sure it was still coming. He came back and said it was. Two Italian men came out. They also seemed to be waiting for a cab. Ten more minutes passed. No cab appeared. We were getting close to our reservation time.

Finally, a taxi pulled up. The two men cut in front of us to take it. I was shocked and amazed at the audacity of the thing. We were obviously waiting first. Our group included three women, one of them obviously quite ancient. Anyone could see that Mom didn’t have a lot of years left to wait around for cabs. Where was the famous Italian courtesy to women? I cut them off and told them that this was our cab. We clearly first. They ignored me and tried to get in. I held the door closed.

The doorman was no help. He first tried to convince me to give the cab to them. I have no idea why except the seemed more aggressive. My Italian wasn’t good enough to debate the issue so I just got loud and angry. Apparently, agression was what was required. For a moment, it looked like it might actually get physical. Apparently, I won the battle of hostility. The doorman switched to my side. We pressed the men out of the way to let the ladies get into the cab. .

Once we were safely aboard, we told the cab driver where to go by simply showing him the page from the Buon Ricordo booklet. It was about a fifteen-minute drive.

It was a lovely little restaurant. Because we had reservations, they took us inside and gave us a nice table by the fish tank. Like Dante’s, the specialty of the house was fish. From the picture in our little booklet, we knew what the plate look like. It had a smiling fish in the middle.

This restaurant reminded me of the nice seafood place that we’d been to in Florence. It too had excellent service and very high prices, but we were hungry. The pizza that we’d had for lunch had evaporated long ago. We all ordered appetizers, pasta dishes as well as our special dinners.

The service was very nice. They started us with an aperitif of Proseca. They kept our mineral water cold in a champagne bucket. It was a good thing that we’d ordered a number of courses. The servings were small. The fish specialty was almost just a taste. It was something of a gormet restaurant. Everything was very well prepared. The flavors were subtle. It was all very good.

More importantly, we all got our second plate at the end of the meal. This time Rebecca gave our extra one to Mom. She already had one of her own, but she’d been the one who found out about these restaurants and wanted to buy the plates as gifts.

That night, Rebecca tried to call her family. She’d called on a phone card from Milan and Florence with no problems at all. This time, she tired seven different times with no success. At first, she couldn’t get the MCI operator and had to have the hotel operator connect her. Then, the MCI operator kept connecting her to a busy signal. When she got as far as where she was suppose to enter the card codes, the hotel system would interrupt her.

On every proceeding call, she tried to explain to the hotel operator and the MCI operator everything that had gone wrong thus far. The list kept getting longer and longer. She tried to have the operators enter the code for her. With every failure, she was more frustrated. She was torn between her natural tendency to see it through and, more reasonably, calling some other time and place. Finally, she was mistakenly connected to AT&T and not MCI. She tried her AT&T card that she happened to bring along. . It finally worked.

Lest you think that this is a comercial for AT&T, I should mention that the next day, we head that several other people had also found it impossible to phone out of the Hotel Vinci. All the ones we talked to had eventually given up. They were all using AT&T. Apparently, AT&T only works if you are trying to use MCI.

On the call, she found out that our cat was still alive, her brother more our lawn, and nothing had burnt down. We’d also gotten our first order for our books.