Wednesday, September 22, 1999

As I have been travelling, I find myself remembering more of my dreams. This might because the trip is stimulating my imagination. I certainly see reflections of the trip in my dreams. However, it also might be that I dream this much usually, but I am remembering them simply because I wake up more frequently. I never sleep as well when I am out of town..

One dream was set in the future. A robot became intelligence enough to believe in God. He traveled the world, preaching the old sermons of Saint Anthony. The fact that a computer saw a great correlation between the old testament and Christ’s life made it suddenly more believable to other humans. However, the dream was sad. The robot found faith, but his faith was only in humanity. He believed that humans had souls. He did not believe that robots did.

I also dreamed about a successful prizefighter. He was the heavy favorite in an upcoming fight. He learned, too late, that the opponent was a distant cousin. He refused to fight, but gambling had been heavy on the fight. Gamblers threaten to kill him if he didn’t fight. His cousin urged him to fight. His cousin accused him of not wanting to fight because of fear he would lose, not because of any family loyalty. The fighter’s cousin was jealous of his success. He saw fighting as the only way he could equal the fighter’s success. The fighter could only see one way to prove his courage, assure his cousin’s career, and hold to his morals about not fighting family members. He let the angry gamblers kill him.

Last night, after one of these dreams, I noticed something interesting as I was falling asleep. I noticed that I have moments where I am aware, but not lucid. I am conscious, but I am not a thinking human being. So much of my brain was turned off that I ddidn’t have a thought in my head, but I wasn’t asleep. I didn’t even have the images of dreams, but I was aware. During this state of consciousness, I was only concious and nothing else. My mind was quiet. It couldn’t form a word of thought. I could have been a dog or a cat or a stone. Strangely enough, in this state, my awareness of myself seems the same. I am still me, the center of my conciousness. Thinking and recalling are very different than simple awareness. Perhaps DeCarte was wrong when he said, "I think, therefore I am." Maybe simple being aware doesn’t require thought. It is something more basic to our nature.

Of course, it is also possible that this state of mind was a dream as well.

. .

We packed up our bags and boarded the bus. Today we were going to Rome by way of Pompeii.

Pompeii is the city that was destroyed the last time the volcano, Vesuvius, seriously erupted. This happened about two thousand years ago. Lava didn’t flow order the town. If it had, there would have been nothing left. Instead, the volcano covered the town in about twenty feet of volcanic ash. The blanket of ash protected the city and saved in intact until the present day. Excavation of the ash to uncover the city began over two hundred years ago. It is still going on today.

Of course, "preserved" is a relative term. Pompeii’s ruins are much better preserved, overall, than Roman era ruins anywhere else. However, the city is still a ruin. Most of the buildings of the time were two stories and built of stone. A wood floor held up the second story. The hot ash started fires that burnt the city to the ground as the ash was burying it. What was preserved was what the fire spared. Fortunately, stone was the primary building material and it doesn’t burn.

The ruins are huge. In its day, Pompeii was a very successful city. It was a commercial center for the surrounding farmland and the south of Italy has always been the breadbasket of the peninsula. It was never a major city, but it was a good sized one. You could spend literally days exploring them and never see everything that has been uncovered. In our tour of a few hours, we saw only a few high points.

The problem with this particular tour was that it tried to cover too much of the ruins in the time we had. The guide walked fast and talked fast. Half of the group had a problem keeping up. The other half couldn’t understand him. One older lady dropped out before we even got to the ticket gate. Many others had wished they’d kept her company. We then ended up finishing about fifteen minutes early. Maybe the tourists’ shops bribed him to get us out with some time to shop. Of course, tourist shops in Pompeii really don’t make much since. You can’t buy any of the artifacts and the people of this particular city aren’t making anything anymore.

In and around the ruins, packs of downs prowled. As we entered, the guide explained that people rented houses in the area and then left their dogs. The tourists fed them. The authorities were trying to get rid of them by spaying all the females, but their program clearly wasn’t working. One of the females was in heat while we were there. She was being chased by a large pack of males as she fled through the crowd of tourists. Of course, you couldn’t help but wonder why they tried to spay the females when fixing the males was so much easier. I expect that some Italian sensibility was at work.

Unlike the old parts of ancient cities we see today, they designed the city of Pompeii along a horizontal and vertical grid. Its streets ran long and straight at right angles to each other. It was clearly a planned city, like many of the cities build by the Romans all over their empire. All the building took place under the guidance of a community plan. Many of these planned cities followed the same official plan. In this regard, it looks today a lot more like a moderns city than it does other ancient cities. Most ancient cities grew without any plan. Their streets twist and turn, changing size and direction with almost every building.

It is a weird coincidence that the only preserved ancient city followed a plan while none of the surviving ancient cities did. In many ways, Pompeii looks more like the ruins of one of our current day’s cities than it does an ancient city. In this regard, it is like visiting the future as well as the past.

They calculate that only about a tenth of the population of Pompeii lost its life in the eruption. Most people had cleared out long before, heading the rumblings and smoke of the mountain. The falling ash didn’t kill those that remained. The poison gases that rolled down the broad slopes of the volcano's sides killed the population that hadn’t evacuated.

The still have the preserved forms of Pompeii’s inhabitants. The bodies of the dead long ago decay, but they left hollows in the ash where they once had been. One of the early excavators had the bright idea of pouring plaster into these hollows before digging up. The results are excellent castes of what the dying resident looked like. The bones are inside these castes though they often show through in the face or hands. You see real teeth in the plaster skulls.

Most of these forms are lying down or sitting down. Most are grabbing their throat or trying to cover their face as the smoke and poison gas asphyxiated them. They put these forms in various glass cases and caged areas. You run into them as you walk around the ruins. They add a particularly surreal air to the ruins.

Many of the body castes display a broad belt. Slaves wore this belt. Almost all the bodies you see are those of slaves. You can imagine that as the volcano erupted, the freemen all left the city. They left behind their slaves to car for their houses or pack up their goods. These people died. It makes you very away that when you see these ancient cities, you are seeing the result of slave labor in a slave society. One third of the population of the Roman empire were officially slaves and many of the rest were peasant farmers. They served masters and lived at their master’s whims. One of Christianity’s greatest gifts to the world was eliminating most slavery in the world.

As always, the modern aspects of ancient life impresses you. Th homes and many businesses had good plumbing, carrying the water down from the slopes of the volcano above with lead pipe. A system of cisterns held the water, provided water pressure to all parts of the city. The tour guide described them as geniuses to figure this out. Our course, we know today that the lead in their pipes was slowly poisoning them, but genius is also a relative term. They also used lead to store their wine in. Apparently it enhanced the flavor. Yum!

Of course, they didn’t have any sewer system. They tried to capture the human waste in containers and use them to fertilize the fields, but the system didn’t carry all wastes out of the city. They made their streets out of cobble stone. You can see the grooves of the wheels worn in the stone of the street. At the street corners, every other stone was raised about six to eight inches. They were low enough and widely spaced enough to allow carts to pass over. However, they enabled people to cross the street without stepping down to street level. I suspect that the reason was the stuff flowing in the streets. No one wanted to step in it with their sandals. You can imagine.

The city also had areas where they blocked cart traffic. The raised these crosswalk stones so that they were too high to let carts pass. This created large, pedestrian spaces in the heart of the city. There was a large plaza of public building, another that held the job market, another that held the food market, and so on. A powerful government clearly controlled the city and where and what people could build.

Some parts off the city hit us as oddly familiar. Along a major street off of the public plazas, we found a row of food service stands. These served hot food. They offered their food out of large pots in the counter facing the street. We can still see the large stone counter with holes in them for the pots of food. The food service stores had not seating. They were just like the fast food counters we have in shopping malls today, but without the glass.

One house along that same busy street has a mosaic in its floor showing a large, vicious dog. Across the picture, the words "Cave Canem," are written. It means "Beware of dog."

We toured the very well preserved public baths. The rooms still have their original curved stone ceilings decorated with the remains of frescos and mosaics. You can just glimpse a faint face looking down at you from the ceiling with men on dolphins at each side. One room was clearly the locker room. It had little niches for storing clothing. However, it was much more decorated than our locker rooms. The storage cubby holes were separated by a base relief of men. The men were either naked or wearing what looked like a hula skirt. I

In the last room of the baths, a broad, ten-foot wide fountain stood at one end. It look like a giant, marble bird-bath. The basic was made from a single, highly-polished stone. The names of the men who bought it and the amount of money of money they paid was engraved on the rim of the basin. They filled the names and amount of money with brass to make them stand out.

Our guide tried to tell us that these men purchased the fountain out of public funds and that they had forgotten to take off the price tag before it was delivered. Maybe he was being funny. He talked so fast that it was hard to tell. To me, it was obvious that these people had donated the fountain and wanted everyone to know what it cost. It was just like the marble engravings in walls of the Seattle Art Museum. Those engravings have the names of benefactors and the general amounts they donated. Public charity in every era deserves a little recognition.

In other ways, the city and the people that lived in it were strange. Many of the decorations in the houses are frankly erotic and often obscene. At the entrance to one large manor shows a man weighing his oversized phallus on a hand scale. This picture is somewhat famous. A wood door use to cover its mosaic. They only opened the cover to show it to adult men. We have apparently closed the immorality gap between the ancients and ourselves. The authorities have taken down that little door so everyone can see it.

More interesting still was the design of the ancient city houses. The large manors had not windows facing the outside. Instead, they had a courtyard in the middle that brought light into the building. Since there was no glass to let in light and keep out noise and people and the buildings were so close together, exterior windows were just impractical. Instead, they put pictures of windows in these exterior walls showing idyllic scenes in paint or mosaic.

Mom commented on all the rebuilding that they had done in the ruins. Now, many of the buildings have wooden roofs on them. These roofs duplicate the type of roofing that the fire destroyed during the eruption. They are slowly springing up all over Pompeii. The protectors of the ruin are building them both to recreate the city more accurately and to protect the interiors of the buildings that were left open to the elements. The old mansions are a particular target for roofing.

In one ruin, an artist has set up shop selling her replicates of one of the ancient frescos. The tour guide introduces her as the only artist who was allowed to sell her work in the ruins itself. Why would she be the only one? Did the authorities really know she was there? Or did she work with the tour guides. Perhaps they warned her to fold up her case if any authorities were coming. It remains a mystery.

By the end of the tour, those of us with sore legs—and that included everyone in my family—had had enough. Almost all the streets and sidewalks of Pompeii are intact, but they are far from level. You have to watch your footing constantly. By the end of this race through the street, our feet have had it. We barely have enough strenghth to limp back to the bus.

On the way out, hardly anyone on the group tips the guide. I noticed that when they gave us an evaluation sheet at the end of the tour, his name wasn’t even on it. Apparently more than one person expressed their displeasure at being race through the ruins.

Giovanni looked less than happy as he puffed on his Marlboros as the bus loaded. He didn’t smoke on the bus, be he was a serious smoker. At every stop, he lit up as soon as his foot hit the pavement. Strangely enough, only one other person on the tour, the Plastic Surgery Lady, was a noticeable smoker. As far as Giovanni’s mood went, we decided that there had been many complaints about the Parco. There were certainly complaints about the guide at pompeii. He may have heard other complaints built up over the previous part of the trip. By making himself more accessible, Giovanni was also making himself a target. Enzo had always been nowhere to be found during our free time.

However, his nature didn’t change. He still liked to talk. As we drove to Pompeii, the topic was cooking. Giovanni had spent some time working as a chef. He was full of advice and opinions about cooking.

His first opinion was that you couldn’t get good Italian cooking in America. He told the story of a trip to Little Italy in New York. A restaurant owner friend too him to an Italian restaurant he liked. Enzo tasted the food and said, "The chef here is Mexican." The restaurant owner checked and the chef was Mexican.

"How did I know?" asked Giovanni. "Because Italians never mix garlic and onions. Italians us garlic for highly seasoned dishes. We use onions in sweeter dishes. Only sometimes with fish do you mix them. In America, they are always mixing them."

The secret to true Italian cooking is keeping it simple, not mixing too many flavors to complicate the dish. You used only the freshest local produce. You mixed only enough ingredients to give the dish flavor.

He went onto give us some simple recipes.

The first and most detailed was for Lemoncello. Lemoncello is the lemon-flavored aperitif that they make in Capri. This wasn’t really cooking, but drinking is important too. You start with thirteen to fifteen medium-sized lemons. You wash the lemons and scrub their skins. You then peal their zest, getting as little of the white as possible. You put this zest in a gallon jug. You add a quart of pure grain alcohol and shake. You then let it sit for about two weeks, shaking every now and then. You then warm a quart and a half of water. You add two pounds of sugar to it and mix in. You then let it cool and add to the gallon jar. You stir and let it sit for another five days. You then filter the contents twice through some gauze. You can use the zest in cooking afterward. You take the liquid, put it in bottles and refrigerator or freeze it.

He said that you could make the same liquor with oranges or tangerines, or, more creatively, with fennel to make a licorice flavored drink.

He then gave us some recipes for pasta sauces. He thought that Americans see too few types of sauce.

First, for Spaghetti Carbonara, he said that you fry up some Italian ham or, if you can’t get it, some Canadian bacon. When it is done, you cook some pasta, al dente and drain it. You then put the spaghetti in the pan with the bacon and add an egg and, if you want, a little cream. You heat it up and serve.

For something a little different, he suggested an orange sauce. You fry the zest from an orange in olive oil. You add onions. You ten add a little orange juice and a glass of whit wine. You let the wine evaporate. You cook the pasta al dente and drain it. You mix it with the sauce and serve, maybe with a little cream.

For a seafood sauce, he recommended a salmon sauce. You start by frying up some onions. You add some smoked salmon and cook until the salmon changes color. You add a glass of white wine. You boil some egg noodles three to five minutes and drain. You mix the sauce and noodles together with a heavy cream.

Then he offered a very simple dish. You cook some garlic in olive oil and then add some anchovies. When they are warm, you squeeze the anchovies until they make a paste. You mix that paste with the pasta of your choice.

Another simple one was gorgonzola sauce. You just head up some milk, and crumble in the gorgonzola and melt it into the milk. When it’s melted, pour on your pasta and mix.

The last recipe was for a shrimp salad pasta. You fried the shrimp for a couple of minutes in butter. You then mix them with some bitter greans like dandelion greens. You then mix this with the pasta.

By the time he was finished, I was read to eat, but instead we had our tour of Pompeii.

As we approached Rome, Giovanni returned to a popular topic of the housing shortage. He explained how many people wanted to build a house outside of the city, but it took ten years of red tape to get a permit. So instead, they planned it out so that they get a roof raised, ideally overnight. Apparently, if you get a roof raised, the authorities won’t tear it down. They will however issue you a citation and you will have to go to court, but since it takes ten years to hear your case, you can finish the house at your leisure.

With this general background, Giovanni told us his own story. He’d added a second story to his home. He got the roof up over night. The next day the police paid him a visit and gave him a summons. He was guilty, but it would be years before he went to court to have his case tried. Since he was guilty, he already knew what his sentence would be: four months in prison.

He said that he would serve his sentence if he had to. It was a small price to pay for a second story on his home considering the high cost of housings. The extra space was definitely worth more than four months.

However, it didn’t think that when the time came that he would have to serve. He expected a change in government first. Apparently, this had happened before. After a change in government, all the people in his position are given amnesty. Apparently, this kind of pressure assures a change of Italian government every now and then.

It is still interesting as showing where the real power lies. The people of Europe are heavily regulated by the state. Some regions accept this regulation more than others. When government regulation goes against personal economics, economics finds a way to win. If the jail sentence cost less than the value, people will pay in time, no matter how unprodutive that is for society as a whole.

On of the sad side affects is that jail loses its stigma. Giovanni wasn’t the least embarrassed about having to go to jail if it came to that. This means that everyone more or less accepts that violating the law is okay.

George Orwell predicted in the book 1984 that a state that made everything illegal so that everyone could be tried as a criminal at the whim of the government. I don’t know that in some respects Europe doesn’t approach that already.

As we pulled into Rome, Giovanni gave another example about the duplicity of government.

The traffic in Rome was a mess because there was no parking. Cars parked everywhere they could find, clogging narrow streets. The mayor of Rome was elected promising to create more parking places. He was elected and he honored his campaign promise. He created more parking by painting a line around all the place people were already parking and putting in meters. Now people have to pay to park where they used to more or less illegally park for free.

The mayor also banned buses from parking in many parts of the city. Now, they have to get a pass so that they can come in and pick up people at hotels. The permit allows them in only for a half-hour.

Of course, that is only the first, step, next year, they won’t allow regular tour buses in the city at all. Instead, they will have the tourists transfer to special buses outside the beltway. Only one company will be licensed to take tourists to their hotels. Of course, the person who owns that company just happens to be related to the mayor’s wife.

This may, of course, be a case of government killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Tourists are the primary source of income for Italy. The more difficult they make touring, the fewer tourists they will have in the future.

As the bus dropped us off, we gave our goodbyes and tips to Silvano, our driver. We would still have a couple of local tours, but we would be using different buses for those. This was the last we would see of the bus that had carried us through Italy. Silvano had been a good driver, especially after the Florence when the redhead moved to the back of the bus.

When we got in the hotel, the Leanardo da Vinci, we discovered that they were remodeling the lobby of the hotel. They had a temporary lobby set up in their convention center. We had to walk about a mile to the elevators. All along there corridor, there were ir conditioners every ten feet. It was a long, but cool walk.

When we got into our room, the room was very hot. It didn’t seem like the air conditioner was working. Mom and Michele’s room next door was pleasantly cool. Our room was like a warming oven.

I made fun of Rebecca for calling the front desk. I really didn’t think they would respond. I thought that they would just say that they were sorry, but that was the way Italian air conditioning worked.

I was wrong, they told Rebecca that they’d send a mechanic right up. This shook me, but I was still suspicious. Rebecca wanted to wait in the room until the mechanic arrived. I thought the mechanic would come the next day if we were lucky.

I was wrong again. The mechanic knocked on our door within an hour. He looked at the air conditioning. He fiddled with the knobs. When he was done, he explained what was wrong.

"Italian air conditioning," he said with an apologetic shrug.

The strange thing was what happened with our air conditioner the next day. When we returned from the day’s outing, our room was cool and Mom and Michele’s was hot. It was just the reverse of the day before.

What was going on? My first theory was that the air-conditioners in different rooms worked on alternate days, but the next few days proved me wrong. Our air conditioning kept working. Mom and Michele’s had stopped. My new theory was that while we were out, they’d switch our broken one for their working one. Therefore, Rebecca was right to complain all along.

Of course, no air conditioning worked if you left your metal shutter open. Metal shutters covered the outside of the window, leaving the room in darkness durnig the day. You closed them by pulling on a strap. They rolled down like shades, except, of course, they were metal.

Outside, the Hotel Vinci looked as well sealed as the batcar when Batman locked it up. I found myself wondering if riots and rock throwing was common when they built this hotel. At first, this theory seemed unlikely. It was in a nice residential neighborhood near Saint Peter’s, the home of the Pope. It was hard to imagine this as a center of riots.

Then I started reading the local graffiti. It wasn’t anything like Milan, but it was worse than the other cities. It was different from Milan, however. It all seemed political. Things like the communist hammer and symbol crossed out with notations saying that communists were serving the interests of Americans. Then I noticed that there were several embassies in the area. Apparently, these embassies were a potential lighting rod for protests.

The hotel had wisely foreseen the possibility of problems and put in the window shields. Or, perhaps more likely, there had been a few protests in the past and they had lost a few windows.

We’d gotten to our hotel in Rome late in the afternoon. It was too late to really do anything, but too early to get ready for dinner. Michele, Rebecca and I decided to get to know the neighborhood and find a place to eat. Giovanni had recommended a restaurant called Dante’s down the street, but we were a little wary of recommendations.

The Hotel Vinci was in a residential neighborhood, but on the next block there was lots of local shopping. These weren’t tourist shops, but places that the locals would buy. There were several Italian book stores, dress shops and so on. Of course, since it was still afternoon, many of them were closed.

We saw a number of pizzeria’s, but no nice restaurants. We walked by banks and antique shops. We saw a young, unwashed couple on a bench in front of a bank. Their bench had about six dogs tied to it, sitting and lying around. The couple and the dogs seemed to be living on the bench. They had backpacks. They might have been what I think of as "dirt-bag" tourists, people who travel around earning their way by begging or less savory activities.

Nearby, watching them, was a man on a motor cycle in a semi-official looking uniform. His motorcycle said "vigilantes" on it. I don’t know if he was a real policeman or simple a fascist left over from the last war. He definitely had the fascist look, but since he was carrying a gun, he had to be a part of the government. If someone has a gun in Europe, it must be a government official.

From the look in his eye, he didn’t care for the dirt-bag couple. If they were bothered by his intent stare, they didn’t how it in the least. One of them was napping on the bench while the other played with one of their dogs.

The vigilante got off his motorcycle and moved toward them. Nothing happened. He stood there, staring. They ignored him. It was a standoff.

We hadn’t seen any restaurants on the shopping street. We turned the corner to get back to the street our hotel was on. One the way, we walked-by the restaurant Dante’s that Giovanni had recommended. It looked okay, but it wasn’t calling out to us.

For some reason, that particular block had three different ice cream parlors or gelaterias on it. Gelato, or Italian ice cream, is different from the ice cream we get here in the U.S. The flavors are much more intense. It isn’t especially rich. Some of the flavors—such as lemon—are almost ices. They are often based on Italian candies and deserts that we don’t see very often, like torrone or crema They have a few fruit flavors, but they tend to be based on melons and citrus fruits. The chocolate is very dark and intense. Actually, all of it is very dark and intense.

In the Seattle area, Italian ice cream was a fad for awhile a few years back. Everywhere was selling it like they were selling Italian coffee drinks—lattes and cappuccinos. However, for some reason, the Italian coffee and Starbucks went national and Italian ice cream died out. This is a loss to my taste buds, but fortunately also a little bit of a loss to my midriff.

After indulging ourselves with a ice cream cone, we walked back to the Vinci. We didn’t see any alternative restaurants on the way. We asked the hotel staff if there was anyplace that they would recommend. They gave us the name of a trattoria with an unfamiliar name down the street. They pointed in the same directions as Dante’s. We must have missed it.

We went back, looking for the alternative restaurant. They said it was only a block and a half and we went three blocks. We passed an Italian occult book store, a shoe shope, several bars, Dante’s, three ice cream parlors, a fabric store, but we didn’t find any other restaurants. We turned around and came back. As we passed Dante’s, we looked at their menu again. Rebecca looked at Dante’s sign. In smaller print was the name of the trattoria that they’d given us. It was the same restaurant. We went in and made reservations for later in the evening.

When we returned to the restaurant later that evening, Mom was with us. We sat down and were looking over the menu. It seemed like a very good quality restaurant. It was already quite busy. When we were about to order, Michele noticed something.

A page in the front of the menu described the restaurant as a part of the Associatione Restaurante del Buon Ricordo, the Restaurant Association of Good Memories. If you ordered their special meal, you would get a commemorative plate included in the price of the meal. It gave out the plates that Mom had read about before the trip. There are only seventy of these restaurants out of the thousands in Italy. One had just happened to be the only restaurant near the Hotel Vinci. After trying to find an alternative, we’d finally been forced into going to it.

This is the kind of luck that only Rebecca has in my experience. We were just fortunate to be with her.

We changed our minds about what we were eating. We ordered the special meal to get the plate. The meal was seafood pasta. Unfortunately for Michele, it had shellfish in it. She is allergic to shellfish. She couldn’t order it. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the meal wasn’t great. The food was very fishy or perhaps just too long out of the sea.

The three plates that we got at the end of the meal were great. They came in a box that showed the front. The front had a hand-painted design showing two happy Italian chefs. The rim had the full name of the restaurant. Under the picture, they had the name of the dish that we’d ordered. Since Rebecca and I had two, she gave one of ours to Michele. I didn’t mind. For some reason, getting that collector’s plate just isn’t as critical if you are male.

More importantly, Rebecca thought to have me ask if they had a list of the other restaurants in the association. They brought a little book with all the restaurants and a picture of the plates that they gave. There were two other restaurants in Rome. This just happened to be the number of nights Mom and Michele had left in town. There were also two restaurants on the outskirts of Rome. Rebecca and I just happened to be staying two extra nights. It was a strange and wonderful coincidence.

The ladies were has happy as birds in spring returning to the hotel with their plates. They showed the plates to the other women in the tour who were in the lobby. Some of them had eaten in Dante’s in well, but they didn’t read about the plates. This made our family’s discovery all the sweeter.

When I got back to the room, it was my job to find out where the other restaurants were in Rome. Neither were close, but neither was across town either. We planned to go to the nearest the following night and the other one the night after, our final night together in Rome.