Reunion in Rome!

Saturday, 7/31/10

Matthew and I at the Baths of Caracalla, waiting for Rigoletto to start

 The trip to Fiumicino Airport to pick up my son, Matthew, was fairly uneventful. His plane was delayed about an hour and a half because of mechanical trouble. The plane he was supposed to fly in on needed its engines replaced, something discovered during routine maintenance checks. So the flight could have been much later. But Continental Airlines found another plane ready to cross the Atlantic. It was a smaller plane, so some passengers were rerouted and others got bumped. But Matthew got here OK.

 After getting his things situated back at our hotel, including presenting his passport at the desk, which all of the hotels require  now due to a government regulation, we headed to the Vatican. We took a quick tour of the museums, visited St. Peter's Basilica, found a quick bite to eat, and headed back to the hotel so Matthew could nap for a couple of hours. His favorite snack so far is gelato. The chocolate was especially good. My favorite snack yesterday was a chocolate-filled cornetto, a type of pastry, and a cappuccino I grabbed on the way to the train for less than 2 Euros. It tasted too good to be true.

 In the evening we headed to the Baths of Caracalla for Verdi's opera, Rigoletto. It was fun together, and the baths are a fantastic setting for an opera. And the singing was fantastic. I like Aida better, however. That's playing tomorrow night but I didn't want to be up late on Sunday if I can help it, since we have a bus to meet on Monday morning. 

After the opera was an adventure! The late night transportation in Rome is rather spotty. We assumed, wrongly, that there would be some extra buses heading to Trastevere after the opera. There were not. According to a sign, a night tram runs from 11:30 PM to 3 AM but we waited a long time and saw no sign of it. Finally the group of us, about 10 in all, hailed a cab, who called two more cabs on the radio, and we got back to the hotel by 1 AM. 

Not too bad. 

Matthew must have been particularly happy to see the hotel room since he had slept only about 4 hours including his nap.

Cestus' Pyramid, Ostia, and the Opera!

Tuesday 7/27/10

The Pyramid of Cestus

This morning the group took the Number 3 Bus to a stop near the Tomb of Cestus in Rome. Cestus built his tomb right in Rome's ancient Pomerium, the sacred boundary line within which nobody was supposed to be buried. So his tomb is in the wall, visible from both sides of the Pomerium, but to keep it legal his body was buried in the part of the pyramid that was outside the boundary. He was quite wealthy. He must have been, to pull off a stunt like that! The pyramid, along with the mosaics, frescoes, and obelisks we have seen, show how much Egypt had captured the imagination of the Romans in the first century B.C.

 From there we took a train to Ostia Antica, Rome's ancient harbor. Os in Latin means mouth, and so Ostia means something like Portsmouth. It was located at the mouth of the Tiber River. It was a little shallow, so merchandise was warehoused there and reloaded onto smaller boats or barges to go up the river to Rome itself. It was important to Rome both commercially and militarily. Residents of Ostia were even exempt from military conscriptions in honor of its historical military importance. In its earliest days it was set up as a colony of Rome as a type of castra, or military camp, and it grew in size from there.

Lee demonstrating the use of a Roman latrine

 Ostia is similar to, yet different from, Pompeii and Herculaneum. Unlike the other two cities, it was very much a working-class town. Absent for the most part are the luxurious villas that are found in the other cities. Most people lived in apartment buildings. Artwork was simpler. Its mosaics are lovely, however, and give us a sense of the daily activities and mercantile aspects of the port. For more pictures, visit this set on Flickr.

Ostia is famous for its mosaics

While Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by volcanic eruption, Ostia died a slow death due to the silting up of the Tiber River. The river basically just shifted away from Ostia over time. Eventually a new port named Portus, or Harbor, had to be built to meet Rome's needs, and while people lingered on in Ostia, it was a ghost town by the fifth century A.D. What's nice is that the upper floors of buildings are better preserved than at Pompeii or Herculaneum because it didn't suffer the wrath of a volcano, and there are places where you can even walk on the upper stories. We also spent some time exploring under one of the baths and getting a better sense of its hypocaust, or heating system. We could have taken the train from there to Ostia Lido, which is a beach close to Rome, but a friend with a guidebook said he'd read it isn't such a nice beach compared to those you can see in the South, so I figured I'd hang onto my memories of my perfect afternoon on Ischia and skip this beach..

The theater at Ostia still hosts performances

 Tom got tickets for the opera this weekend for those of us who were interested and willing to pay. It is an easy ride from  our hotel to the stop or fermata across from the Circus Maximus on the Number 3 Bus. If all goes according to plan, I will be taking Matthew to see Verdi's Rigoletto on Saturday night at the Baths of Caracalla. I am excited about seeing him and have already bought my train ticket for Saturday morning to take me out to Fiumicino Airport to meet him at 7:45 AM. The train leaves at 7:00 from Track Number 5. I cannot use the pass that  takes me everywhere on the local bus and metro system. The ticket costs 8 Euros one way, which I consider ridiculously high, but it is cheaper than taking a taxi to the airport. I can save money for the ride back to the hotel with Matthew's bags. The ticket is also cheaper than taking the express train to the airport from Termini, the main Metro stop. That ride costs 14 Euros, I'm told. Rome really sticks it to the tourists. I guess that happens everywhere.

My thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this portion of my trip possible.

Baths of Caracalla, a Gladiator School, and Sacred Places

Monday, 7/26/10

Baths of Caracalla

 The group went this morning to the Baths of Caracalla. In their day they must have been magnificent. They are the best preserved baths of ancient Rome. When opened, they were the largest in the world, but the Baths of Diocletian, built later, were larger. The Farnese Bull and the Farnese Hercules, both huge, impressive statues that we had seen earlier in the Naples Museum, were found here, as were many mosaics, one of the most impressive of which I'd seen in the Vatican Museum. The bits and pieces we'd seen in different places began to come together so that I could imagine the magnificence of this setting in its day, even though they are ruins now. The black and white frescoes were originally from the second floor, which collapsed in past times. There are sometimes opera performances at these baths. I saw Aida here back in 1988, and it was an experience I'll never forget.

Gladiatorial School outside the Colosseum

 We stopped outside the Colosseum for a look at the gladiatorial school. Gladiators stayed there and prepared for the big show in the huge arena next door. They didn't live there, though. They were brought in for the games. The Romans felt it was too dangerous to have armed, trained gladiators living in Rome itself, especially after Spartacus' rebellion.

 Next, most of the group went to the Basilica of San Clemente. Sr. Theresa told us about Saint Clemens or Clement (she pronounced it both ways). St. Cyril, the inventor of the Cyrillic alphabet, is also interred there. There is a Mithraeum and the ruins of an ancient house or apartment complex. There is also an older church beneath the current structure, and we had the chance to visit what remains of all these.

"Christ yesterday, today, always"

 The group was free for the afternoon, so Susan and I went to visit the nearby cathedral of St. John Lateran. We rented an audio-guide, which was excellent. This church claims to be the oldest cathedral in Rome. It is hard to believe it is even older than what we saw in the excavations beneath St. Peter's. St. John Lateran was the seat of the pope before St. Peter's was built, and it is still his church in his role as the Bishop of Rome. It was built after Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, and there is a monument, an Egyptian obelisk, with inscriptions to Constantine in the nearby square. 

As we listened to the audio-guide, we were in awe of the history of the place. Handel played on one of the organs, the one over the side entrance, for example. We really got some feel for how old the place was as we strolled through the cloisters. The monuments, layout, and much of the artwork and tombs reminded us of what we had seen in the Classical tradition. I took pictures I thought would interest my students, particularly of Latin inscriptions. I thought several were easy enough for them to read. We stayed for several hours, until we were too tired to do any more, and then we caught the number 3 bus back to Trastevere. Our hotel is really quite conveniently located, close to the end of the line for this bus, which is at a major terminal.

For more pictures from this day, visit this set on Flickr. 

My  thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding this portion of my studies.