The Pope

April 9, 2007

Rome, Italy

We have spent Easter in Rome, which has been one of the best break experiences of the trip so far, for me. We have been completely on our own for the past few days, seeing exactly what we have wanted to see, waking up and sleeping on our own schedule, and seeing the Pope! My friend Lily also came to visit me, which was really exciting, and I have finally had the chance to do some laundry. So, all and all, a very good break.

Italy is one of those cities that I can walk around in forever. Every few intersections there is a piazza, a square, with a fountain or a statue or some beautifully ornate church, and the roads keep winding around. It is a huge place but it does not seem very intimidating because barely any of the buildings are more than five stories tall, and the straight endless roads of a city like New York are always interrupted here by a twist and a turn, leaving me comfortable to just stroll around and see the sights without getting overwhelmed by them. I have done more walking in the past few days than we have in a long time on this trip, and although my feet are complaining, I have been happy to explore with a wonderful friend in such a lovely and inviting city.

The first day we arrived we had to hike all of our bags from the metro station at Bologna to our hotel, arriving panting and sweating from all of the up the stairs, down the stairs hassle, and then the long walk down the shady apartments until we saw the welcome sign to the Hotel Silva. Finally. We thought that the hotel had internet but it turned out that it was false advertising, so I walked as quickly as I could to pirate some and emailed to get in touch with Lily for our planned rendezvouz. Then I was free to return and enjoy the Roman night to my fullest extent. We were all starving by the time we were settled in the rooms, so Ambrice, Jess Bradshaw, Katie, Jess Eisenberg and myself all went out to dinner, at the restaurant in a complex right next to the hotel. The lighting, as Katie was quick to point out, was a wonderful peachy color and the table settings looked sophisticated and the food was delicious. Scott had his parents in town also and they ended up seated at a table very close to ours, and we all introduced ourselves, happy to finally be in Rome and eating fine Italian food.

Scott’s parents decided to be very nice and order us all a bottle of the chardonnay, and at the end of the dinner they gave us all an after dinner drink of Lemoncello, a uniquely Italian drink that tastes like a shooter with lemon in it. By the end of the night, we were talking really loudly and laughing really hard, and ended up walking a little shakily out of the restaurant and back to our hotel, which, luckily, was right next door. We were initially going to continue the night, we tried to badger some of our fellow CSAers to come along with us to a bar frequented by Americans called the Drunken Ship, but they all refused. It didn’t matter anyway, we all ended up falling asleep (clothes and all) by midnight.

The next morning was greeted with a nice croissant spread for breakfast and some very good cappuccinos, and Ambrice, Katie and Jess Eisenberg and I began our shopping excursion. We went to the Spanish Steps, the major shopping area of Rome, which grows out of a large flight of white steps, flanked on each side by a cascade of potted plants. It was early, but there was already a large crowd of people milling about, next to the stores of high fashion: Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada, etc. We walked past window after window of hugely expensive clothing, bags, leather, until we reached some stores that we knew were in our price range, stores like Zara and United Colors of Benetton.

We spent a good deal of the morning shopping, or window shopping, going and trying on various outfits and laughing about how good or bad they looked. I saw a lot of things I liked but space and money are always a consideration on this trip and so I remained happy to just sit and watch, and absorb the fashion spree going on around me. The European women always astound me, they are incredibly well dressed all of the time. There is no room for a sweatpants day here, everything must be heeled and jacketed. I guess that will just be one of the mysteries of Europe. In any event, we enjoyed the experience, and stopped around midday to grab pizza at a local restaurant, the men at the counter took our garbled orders and shoved slices into wax paper, folding the cheesy sides together for a warm gooey sandwich.

Then it was onto more walking, with a break by stopping for some gelato (peach and mixed berry, yum!). After that, I got kind of shopped out, so I split off from the group and decided to do some wandering on my own. I ventured out away from the Spanish steps, with the intention of going to see the Piazza Navona, one of the largest public squares in Rome, complete with street performers, art sellers, and sidewalk chalkers. One of the funniest people we saw in our shopping excursion was a man drawing a reproduction of a Caravaggio on the sidewalk, his cup for change sitting next to him, and right beside the drawing, written in bright yellow chalk: “Directions for Lost Tourists”, pointing the way toward the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and the nearest McDonald’s.

I never made it to the Piazza Navona that day, instead I ended up walking through some of the more remote areas of Rome, turning off of the side streets and going into what was formerly the Jewish Ghetto, densely packed buildings made with whatever stone was available, including the ruins of old monuments. I would look up the stuccoed walls and see bits and pieces of Roman architecture stuck in at random in to the walls—pieces of architrave, column capitals, even some relief sculpture. I passed by a small art gallery exhibiting lovely black and white photographs, but the exterior was made of restructured colonnades from a Doric type structure, and the inside had been bricked up in ancient times, leaving marks of construction and reconstruction between the columns.

I moved on, down to the ancient agora, to the arches of Titus and Constaintine, and the remains of brick arches and passageways, exposed to the open air, and then finally on to the Colosseum. The massive amphitheater was at first visible only from a distance, a series of piers and arches rising in three great rows above. It arched around, slinging bits of brick and stone around it as it went, an impressive and imposing building. I stood for a while and walked all around the outside, before finally at 5 pm jumping on the metro to return to the hotel, where I met up with some of my friends, went grocery shopping and killed time until Lily arrived.

And she did, coming in earlier than I thought she would, panting from the long walk to the hotel. We jumped in the air and shrieked and gave each other huge hugs. I was really really excited to see her, and I showed her the hotel room and introduced her to the folks that were on the trip, really briefly, before having a picnic lunch, it was late and neither of us wanted to go out. And we proceeded to talk and talk, late into the night. I told her, along with my roommate for the week, Katie, all about the trip and the people on it and some of the craziness that comes along with spending 4 months with just 20 people in 8 countries with one professor. By the end of the night she could give impressions of just about anyone, was very impressed at the lengths we went to get the internet, and the amount of clothes that we have to wash in the sink. But it’s the price that we pay for seeing as many countries as we do, in the amount of time that we have.

The next morning was Easter Sunday, and all of us had decided that we were going to wake up very early, scarf down some quick breakfast and take the metro to a stop close to St Peters. It was 7:45 am, and about 13 or 14 of us were chatting, Lily by my side, as we walked up and down the stairs, handled all of the people on the train, and then walked several blocks until we entered the vicinity of the church. The mass did not start until 10:30, but there were tons and tons of people there already, crowding the arms of St Peters as they reached out in their grand arcs to embrace us. There were rows of plastic seats set out, and we arrived early enough to snag a row, close enough so that we could see the platform of the mass without binoculars. The sun had not come out yet, but the fountains were already singing, and looking at the roofline of the colonnades many many statues could be seen. On the top of St Peters itself, Jesus stood in a magnificent contrapposto, holding the cross in one arm, crowned by a halo disc, the saints flanking him on either side. The façade of the building itself was in the classical tradition, large Corinthian columns spanning multiple stories in increasing intervals as they moved out from the central doorway. The windows were tall and crowned with elaborate moulding, and the entire thing was capped with a magnificent dome, not perfectly spherical like the mosques at Istanbul, but elongated along its vertical axis, so that it appeared to be reaching toward the sky.

We sat there for the better part of 2 hours, waiting for the service to begin as more and more people filled up the space. The place became noisier and noisier, people were waving flags and jabbering away in a multitude of languages. And then a half an hour before the mass was supposed to begin, we heard a fanfare of trumpets and in marched the swiss guard, up the arms of the outreaching collonade, now at our backs, and then up to the platform. There were so many people there that I could only see the tops of their hats, with black and red feathers, as they came marching in perfect unison. It almost felt like a parade, and people stood on their chairs and talked and pointed excitedly. And then it was time for the Pope to arrive, and he came flanked by robed figures and slowly ascended the steps leading up to the platform. All of the noise and movement ceased, as people felt the hush of the moment. We were seeing the Pope.

And then the service began, a long service that would last until past noon, in many many different languages. But I was impressed that everyone stayed perfectly quiet, the choir music ringing from the speakers in the vast throng of people, and at the passing of the peace I shook hands with people from all over the globe. It was a truly magical moment, one that I would not have missed for the world. Definitely worth getting up early for. I spoke with some people later about it and they all agreed that the passing of the peace was one of the coolest parts of the whole thing—in one of my math classes one year we talked about connectivity, and the degrees of separation between people. There is some statistic about the minimum number of handshakes it takes to shake hands indirectly with everyone in the globe, and I think the number was 6—6 degrees of separation between me and everyone else. I think I bridged that gap that day, at the Easter mass in Rome.

At the end of the service the Pope gave a long speech all in Italian, and I only managed to catch bits and pieces, but I think he was talking about all of the problems and war in the world, calling for peace world wide. I heard the names of Iraq, Darfur, the middle east, poverty, hunger, terrorism—the Pope was calling for an end to it all, and the brotherhood that I felt at the place was enough to give me hope—that maybe something could be done about it all. If all of us gathered there that morning could pardon our differences in the name of Easter then perhaps good could come in the world. I left the whole event feeling much better about humanity.

The whole thing was beautiful and moving, from the spectacular location to the brightening spring sky, which when the cloud cover burned off early in the mass turned into a brilliand cloud-dotted blue. And the magnificence of St. Peter’s itself is something that cannot be underestimated, it reached out and enfolded us all in its impressive stone arms, and at the front ascended to something higher, a masterpiece in stone.

At the end of the mass the Pope gave a blessing in every single language, and the people that spoke them cheered and waved their flags as they were each recognized in turn, and then Lily and I escaped, into the crush of people standing behind the seats, and out of the arms, and into the bright afternoon. We watched as the band marched along the streets, and wandered for a while in search of a restaurant, making our way back to another church, I think its called the church of St Angelo but I cannot be sure, until we reached the bridge over the Tiber river and an open air market filled with tents of vendors selling fake designer purses, belts, and another stand with dried fruit of every different type.

Lily and I filled our bags with dried kiwi and passionfruit, pineapple and chocolate dipped orange, before moving on along the waterfront, over the bridge and into a district with crowded streets, passing by a number of fanstastic neoclassical palaces topped with bronze statues and absolutely covered in ornament. Then we entered the narrow streets, where we saw a number of open air cafes and pizzerias, alive and bustling with activity. We stopped in one that looked incredibly busy, figuring that it was that way for a good reason, and found a small table where we ordered a nice salad and a Pizza Margerita, which we both split and ate with gusto. And we walked on, down to the Piazza Navona, which I really wanted to see.

The Piazza Navona is like every other square in Rome, except on a much larger scale. It a huge oblong space, the center occupied with a number of street performers and artisans, a few giant statues, and an obelisk that looked as though it was taken directly from Egypt and topped with a cross. Which it probably was. Istanbul clearly was not the only city to find Egyptian monuments attractive. We walked around the whole square, milling around the crowds of people, before finding a sign that directed us toward the Pantheon.

Of course, we had to go, so we walked with a crowd of people out of the Piazza, down a narrow side street and followed the general direction until the buildings opened up again, this time to frame a much smaller courtyard and the Pantheon itself, a majesty in brick and stone. It was a very round, fairly plain building from the outside, impressive for its sheer mass. The brick outside was straiated at intervals with bands of relief, straight up the curved walls and forming the lip where the domed top met the cylindrical base, the dome rising in a series of stepped intervals where it swelled into a shallow curve.

The porch of the pantheon was the most interesting, it looked like the front of a temple stuck onto the circular domed space, marked by its massive Corinthian columns and inscribed along the architrave with latin. The name of Marcus Agrippa was the only thing I could read. Lily and I did not go inside the building, but walked along the outside, feeling very very small and insignificant next to the majestic temple dedicated to all the gods.

And then we moved on, out through another narrow windy street and across a major road, winding our way to the Trevi Fountain, which was packed with tons and tons of tourists. This massive fountain stood three stories tall with shell-shaped niches and tall graceful columns topped with statues. The water spewed out of a huge bowl surrounded by prancing horses, with triton standing tall in the niche with his drapery swirling around him. The place was absolutely packed full of people, we had to push our way down to the water front, where we each threw in a coin or two in a promise to return to the city. I will be coming back in 10 days, and she threw in two, which, according to the saying, mean that she would come back a married lady. It was a wonderful sunny day, but it was too claustrophobic by the fountain, so we hurried away from there and continued on.

We walked down a huge wide boulevard past the brick fortresses crumbling away, the maze of walls rising on either side of the street, punctuated in places by a forlorn collonade here or there, capped with the remains of columns. And then, at the end of the street, the Colusseum rose in all of its majesty, cutting off the sightlines and standing in its raw power at the end of the street. Lily was amazed, and I was impressed yet again, and we stopped in the sunlight to people watch for a while before continuing on to stand underneath the massive arches that opened onto the bright sky. We walked around and around it, stopping occasionally to watch the crowds of people milling around us.

Finally, to exhausted and with our feet in some serious pain (we mistakenly wore cute shoes to the mass because we expected to go home immediately afterward, but ended walking for hours and hours), we boarded the metro and returned to the hotel, where we hung out and watched some Desperate Housewives (Lily has been deprived since she has been abroad) and hung out and talked again late into the night. We did not even feel like going out to dinner, so we finished some of the leftover food that I had bought a few days ago from the grocery store. We could have spent the entire night talking, but what with the early wake up and the long long day of walking, we ended up falling asleep around midnight.

The next morning was the last day that Lily was in town, so we woke up and had a breakfast with the group, before taking the metro down to Spagna, where the Spanish steps were, and then following the metro line to a place where four fountains met on the corners of the street, and a church on one corner, rising in scrolled beauty up to the morning sky. And then it was on to a huge plaza, where a huge hotel rolled out in a semi circular arc of windows and columns to embrace a humongous fountain that sprayed water in huge arcs. There was another fountain later, that had a muscle bound merman holding a huge conch shell up to his mouth, the water overflowing from the top and dripping down his upturned mouth and down his front, glistening in the sun. It was a wonderful morning, but upon reaching Termini it was time for Lily to go, so we got back on the metro to head back to Bologna, where our hotel was.

Along the way we passed a park that we had discovered early on was a good spot for wireless internet, so we stopped to chat for a while. It turned out that the night before, a group of CSAers went out to dinner to a Thai restaurant and were served bottomless bottles of wine, resulting in some very drunken stumbling on the street and a fall leading to a broken tooth. So it turns out that not everyone had as boring an easter night as we had, and now the girl was calling her parents on Skype to tell them that she was going to have to get a fake tooth in Rome.

We continued on, returning to our hotel and doing final packing, and I said goodbye to Lily as she boarded the metro to catch her flight back to Grenada. It was wonderful to see her and I was sad to have her go, but I desperately needed to register for classes and get some homework done.

The rest of the day was spent doing that, more or less. I called my parents, did some emailing and downloading on the wireless in the park, and went out to dinner later with Chris Vincoli, Scott, Sam and Anne, to one of the few restaurants open that Easter Monday. We all ordered Margerita Pizzas and split a nice bottle of red wine before returning to the hotel around midnight and turning in.