ils sont fous ces Romains!

When I returned from my trip, a very highly educated colleague of mine, a person who is a polyglot and a polymath and an expert in the history of New York City fire escape design, said to me, "Rome is a city of palimpsests, isn't it?"

I couldn't remember what "palimpsest" meant, so I just said, "In a way, yes."

Later I looked up the word.

I booked my flight on Lufthansa, since I didn't like any of the direct-flight options available for travel from New York to Rome.  This drove Asaph crazy, since my flight was quite expensive and I was unable to add any miles to my primary frequent-flier program.  But I have never used frequent-flier miles, except for one time when I went to visit a dying friend in San Francisco, so I am very skeptical about the possibility of their redemption.  (This begets the question: am I so cheap I can't pay for a flight to visit a dying friend?)  Ever since the unexpected and unexplained descent of the small plane on which I was flying from Ohio back to New York this summer, I have relapsed into the terrible fear of flying that plagued me in my twenties.  I didn't want to fly Alitalia, because of its mediocre reputation, and I couldn't bear the thought of flying on some dismal American carrier that didn't even have a screen in the seat back or free drinks.

My Lufthansa flight was fine, although I was alarmed when I first went to use the lavatory to see that I had to go down a flight of stairs.  I was a little worried about that last step.

I landed at the bright, airy, and modern Munich airport.  Unfortunately, I exhausted its charms during my five-hour stay.

I looked down out of the window on my flight to Rome as the continuous cloudiness that blankets the German-speaking world broke up over the Alps and gave way to more spotty and dramatic formations.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, from the air, Italian villages and towns look just like they do on the programs shown on American public television during fundraising drives.

Fiumicino Airport was unsurprisingly grubby.  I followed the signs to the train station and bought a ticket for the express train to Roma Termini station.  I boarded the very 1990s train and sat next to two neat and tidy Germans who had their Roma Pass booklets laid out on their laps in a very orderly and disciplined fashion.

If "express" means "not coming to a complete stop at stations other than the destination", then the express train lived up to its name.  But it was not fast.  I was surprised by how green the surroundings were as we creeped through the Latian countryside.  No one ever came to check our tickets.

We emerged in the relatively Third World conditions of Termini station.  The platform was totally packed with people trying to get on the train from which I was disembarking.  I used the pushing skills I had honed over 11 years in New York and made my way to the metro, where I somehow managed to buy a ticket from a machine.  The metro was totally packed, but almost no one was Italian.  Everyone seemed to be a tourist traveling in a large group.  It was early evening on a Sunday, so I guess this made sense, but I had never seen such a high tourist-to-resident ratio in a large city.

I was not impressed with the quality of the metro train, but it safely delivered me to the Colosseo station.  I saw that my hysterical mother had called my phone with the Italian mobile she had acquired for the trip, even though I had experienced no delays and was making my way to the apartment my parents had rented exactly on schedule.  I refused to pay the huge sum it would have cost to call her back.

I came out of the station.  There was the Colosseum, just like in the movies.  Our apartment was on a drab section of Via Labicana, and I was amazed that I found it very quickly.  I buzzed the buzzer marked FOGGINI.  "Where have you been?" asked my mother, in a plaintive and desperate manner.  Traveling 4,300 miles to get here, I thought.

I thought about a recent speech I had seen on the internet by former Roman Catholic nun and current freelance monotheist Karen Armstrong, in which she said that religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate.  I think that's true of all people, regardless of religiosity.  Many times with my parents, I feel an icy hand gripping my heart when I hear them saying something crazy.  But what is the harm in simply comforting them?  It's not like I can somehow train them to behave differently, at this point: they are in their 70s.  And, in any case, I inherited hysterical panic and pessimistic mistrust from my mother and emotional coldness and crippling self-doubt from my father -- I'm certainly no better, and probably a lot worse, than they are.

After reassuring everyone that I was indeed there, safe and gesund, we went out to a pizzeria where I had the first of many bresaola, parmesan and arugula dishes and struggles with my mother over the wine carafe that I would enjoy during the trip.

As I was exhausted, we came back right after dinner so I could go to bed.  The apartment was simple, but cute.  It was on two levels, connected with an iron spiral staircase.  My parents had a balcony off their room with a view of the Colosseum and what I would later learn was the infamous Monument of Victor Emmanuel II.  My room had a less dramatic view.

My bathroom was equipped with a copper bathtub, which my mother thought was wonderful.

There was a computer in my room.  I checked some of my various accounts, received a call from Asaph, and then went to sleep.

The next morning my parents went out to have coffee and brought me back pastries before I woke up.  I decided that the Italian version of French pastries was better than the Spanish version of French pastries, but certainly not as good as actual French pastries. (The Germans have their own pastries.)

I had received many recommendations for things to see in Rome.  My friend Vince, a former Jesuit, told me to "treat Rome as three different cities: Classical Rome, Catholic Rome, and Renaissance/Baroque Rome."  Another Italophile friend had given me the name of a bathhouse and told me that it was "important to go to all the bathhouses everywhere you travel, if one wants to be a dissolute in the Somerset Maugham/W.H. Auden/Christopher Isherwood tradition of elderly [non-heterosexual] men."  My friend Aaron Hamburger, a former breakout author who was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, forwarded me a guide to Rome he had written.  (It was a tad too mainstream for me, however.)

And then there was Faruq.  Just as many persons do whatever American media personality, actress, television producer, literary critic and magazine publisher Oprah Winfrey tells them to do, I pretty much do whatever Faruq tells me to do, with the exception of a few things that I thought were probably violations of federal anti-terrorism statutes.  Faruq saw my trip to Rome as an important component in fighting what he called the "Judaizing process" that I am apparently undergoing.  Seeing himself as a weird cross between John Chrysostom and Julian the Apostate, Faruq hoped that massive exposure to Classical and Christian monuments would destroy any interest I had in Israel or the Hebrew language.  He provided me with a long list of obligatory sights.

I was mostly interested in seeing the links between the civilization of Ancient Rome and the development of Christian Europe.  I decided to finish reading a book that Faruq had given me, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, during this trip.  Faruq had given me this book in the hope that I would be impressed by the superior Roman civilization, but I was shocked to read the details of the brutality of Ancient Rome and the cruel repression of the Jews after the destruction of their temple, including banishing them from the renamed Jerusalem and the imposition of a tax on all Jewish men, women, and children in the Empire to pay to support the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

Judea Capta. 

Our first stop was the Basilica of Saint Clement, which my Italophile friend had recommended, as it contains the tomb of Saints Cyril and Methodius, evangelists to the Slavs.  The church also contains the ruins of a temple to Mithras in its crypt.  I overheard some moronic Roman Catholic American tourists saying stupid things as I tried to examine the Mithraic ruins.  I realized that I would encounter a lot of religious tourists of the worst kind on this trip.

We then walked over to the Basilica of St. John Lateran.  I was drawn to the obelisk placed nearby.  My guidebook had a whole section on the obelisks of Rome, and I decided I would make a special effort to see as many as possible.  The Lateran obelisk was finished in the 14th century BC by Pharaoh Thutmose IV.  I examined the hieroglyphs.

 

The cross affixed to the top of it seemed gratuitous, but there is a lot of gratuity in Rome.  It then started pouring, so we entered the basilica.

The nearby Scala Sancta was closed for lunch, so we went to eat something before heading over to the Roman Forum.  The sun came out for a bit as we made our way.  Nothing funny happened.

My parents had remembered that the Forum was free of charge, and our guidebooks confirmed this, but when we arrived at the Arch of Constantine, we found that we would have to pay.  Dark clouds quickly filled the sky, so we decided to take shelter in a cafe until the sun came out again.

 

We then walked along Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali and looked at a bronze copy of the statue of Augustus of Prima Porta that was erected under Fascism.

Viewing Trajan's Column did not require an admission fee.

 

We walked past the massive Monument of Victor Emmanuel II.  It looked like something that might be more appropriate in Washington. 

 

I don't go to the gym enough, I thought.  I would have this thought many times during my trip, owing to statuary.

We headed over to the Capitoline Hill.  We examined the replica of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.  The original statue escaped destruction by Christians because they mistakenly thought it was Constantine.

 

Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you, wrote Marcus Aurelius.

I gazed at the fountain featuring depictions of the river gods of the Tiber and the Nile.

I started to feel a bit flustered.  This is a great fountain, I thought.

We went to have dinner at a restaurant that had been recommended to us.  It had a certificate posted on the wall that indicated some sort of special designation as provider of typical Roman dishes.  Unfortunately, many typical Roman dishes involve parts of the animal that I am not overly enthusiastic about eating.  I ordered an artichoke frittata, which was marked as typical, along with a chicken dish.  The chicken required a lot of work to eat, owing to the cut, and I started to think that the gigantic boneless, skinless chicken breasts beloved by non-heterosexual men in Chelsea are grotesque, grown on genetically manipulated creatures that can barely be called chickens anymore.

I looked over at the kitchen.  It was one older woman surrounded by pots and pans.  The restaurant was brightly lit and no music was playing.  I would learn that this was standard in Roman restaurants.  In New York, you can rarely see what you are eating, owing to the dim lighting, or hear the person across from you, owing to the din of music and the screaming of young, drunk women.

The next morning we had reservations at the Borghese Gallery.  We took a nicer metro line and then the bus.  I admired the pines of Rome.

Photography was not allowed in the Borghese Gallery, as there were many amazing things worth hiding.  The Venus Victrix sculpture by Antonio Canova, depicting Napoleon's sister Pauline as Venus, was impressive enough, but then I saw two museum employees lead an elderly blind woman past the ropes surrounding it.  She was fitted with latex gloves and allowed to run her hands over the sculpture while one employee described what she was touching.  I started to cry a bit.  This would not be the last time I would cry in the presence of art on my trip to Rome.

In fact, I cried in the next room, looking at Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, which depicts Daphne being transformed into a tree as Apollo chases after her.  It was hard to think of anything more beautifully sculpted than Daphne's hands metamorphosing into branches and leaves.  In another room stood The Rape of Proserpina, and I noted how attempted kidnapping and sexual assault are popular themes in Baroque art.

There were many Caravaggios as well, including several on loan as part of a special exhibition featuring Caravaggio and a recent Irish-born British figurative painter for whom I do not care.  There was even Judith Beheading Holofernes!

I decided to walk through the Villa.  My parents agreed to meet me later at the so-called Spanish Steps. There was some sort of children's athletic event on the grounds of the Villa Borghese.  I had read somewhere that Italian children were now as overweight as American children, but I saw no evidence of this in a brief glance.

I finally arrived at Piazza di Spagna.

 

There was another obelisk, although I learned that the hieroglyphs on this one were Roman copies.

We ate a delicious lunch at another recommended restaurant, where there were many distractingly attractive waiters.  

We headed to the Castel Sant'Angelo, which my parents wanted to see, since it is featured in the opera Tosca.  

We had a clear view of that monarchical statelet that I was apprehensive about visiting.

 

I left my parents and walked across the Ponte Sant'Angelo.  I paused at the angel with Veronica's veil.

 

I admired the coat of arms of the Medici family.

I need a coat of arms, I thought.  Also, I need a new coat for fall.

Faruq had told me to go the the Palazzo Spada, to see a false perspective by Francesco Borromini.  I walked down Via Giulia, a famous straight street created during the reign of Julius II, the Terrible Pope.  I hesitantly entered the palazzo.  There were a lot of signs announcing that something was closed, but I wasn't sure what it was.  "I am here to see the perspective," I said, timidly.  

"Yes, it is five Euros," said a young woman behind a cash register.  I paid and was handed a ticket.  I walked about ten feet and handed it to another, cuter young women who then led me into a courtyard.

"Now I will demonstrate the perspective," she said.  I was not allowed to approach it.  She walked over to what appeared to be a long column-lined hallway with a statue at the end of it.  She stepped up, extended her arms, and started to walk.  As she did, her hands got closer and closer to the columns.  When she arrived at the statue, she put her hand on top of it to indicate that it was tiny.

Photography was not permitted.

 

"Thank you," I said, and then left.  

I walked through the crowds of tourists back to the apartment.  It was weird to see so many young, white priests and nuns everywhere.  I didn't think there were any more young, white Roman Catholic priests and nuns, but there are.

I went up to the balcony of my parents' room and engaged in Rome-viewing.

Later that night I met up with an Italian friend of a friend named Pierluigi.  We went to a non-heterosexual bar that was located right next to the apartment.  He was very nice and funny and, of course, had a beard.  He apologized for the mediocre quality of non-heterosexual nightlife in Rome and then complained about the current state of Italian politics and society.  I asked about Italy's plummeting birth rate.  "Everything is blocked here now," he said.  "I want to move to New York."  Really? I thought.

The next day we were to be shown around Rome by the owner of the apartment we were renting.  "Isn't it so nice of him to show us his favorite sights around Rome?" said my mother.  I didn't think to question my parents, but I felt like there was a chance they didn't realize what we were getting into.  They had arrived at the apartment while I was still flying down from Munich, so they had already met with the married couple who owned it.  The father of the husband had been some sort of slightly famous Italian artist.

He arrived in a van with a driver.  I couldn't imagine that this experience wouldn't cost us.

We drove to the Porta Maggiore, where we looked at the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces the baker.

 

The remains of an ancient road (I don't remember which one), were pointed out.

 

The husband, Paolo, was very nice, and quite interesting, although my inner insecure American couldn't help but think that he was just a little bit of a blowhard, as many Americans find educated Europeans.  I found myself trying to impress him with bits of information that I had recently learned in the book I was reading.  When my father asked about taxes in ancient Rome, I chimed in with "weren't the residents of the city of Rome exempt from taxation?"  As Paolo tried to give the history of the title pontifex maximus, I interrupted him and explained it instead.  When he talked about the etymology of "basilica", I pointed out its link to the name of the herb "basil".  As he was describing the history of the Colosseum, I started talking about my visit to the Roman theater in Caesarea. (I had to pretend not to be amazed when he described the etymology of "amphitheater" -- amphi- meaning "both", as in two theaters put together so that the seating is arranged in an oval: why had I not realized this before?)

This American is an annoying blowhard, he thought, I thought.  But it seemed better than being perceived as an ignorant American.

We headed over to the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs, built inside the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian (Thermae Diocletiani -- I also had to pretend that I already knew the etymology of Rome Termini station, which I certainly had not, having assumed that termini was related to "terminal" and never guessing that it was related to "thermal").

The church contained a kind of sundial called a meridian line.  The sun shines through a small hole once a day.

 

The light hits a point along a line on the floor, depending upon the date.  There were symbols from the zodiac along the line, in the appropriate place.

We got back in the van after briefly looking at how the Piazza della Repubblica reflected the outline of the Baths of Diocletian.  In the van, Paolo asked my parents if they wanted to go to an unusual museum he knew about.

"Well, how much time do you have to spend with us?" asked my father.

"Well, it depends upon what you want -- you got the description of the prices from my wife, yes?" said Paolo.

My father and mother shook their heads to show that they had not.

"Well, it's 60 Euros per hour, plus the cost of the driver, of course," said Paolo.  We had already been with him for three hours.  I could tell that my father was silently going into shock.

Not wanting to make a scene, and figuring that a few more hours wouldn't make much difference at this point, we continued on, although we skipped the museum.  We drove to Saint Peter in Chains to look at Michelangelo's Moses.

 

We drove to the Porta San Paolo, where we stopped at a high-quality cafe that served excellent gelato.

 

I had some slightly racist cappuccino, even though it was around one in the afternoon.

 

I realized that I had been offered cappuccino after every dinner I had had in Rome, even though everyone who goes to Italy always reminds you that Italians don't have cappuccino after noon.  I was offended that I was being so blatantly mocked by the waiters of Rome.

My father paid for everyone's gelato and coffee (my mother, surprisingly, had not tried to order wine), and then we went to look at the Pyramid of Cestius.

As we drove around Monte Testaccio (which he claimed was related to our English word "test"; I had assumed that "test" was related to "testicle"), we stopped a sculpture that Paolo's father had sculpted many years ago for which Paolo was the model.

 

 

Plans were made to have lunch with Paolo and his wife, and I couldn't bear the thought of that, especially the awkward discussion of the payment for the tour.  Also, I had more sights I had to see from Faruq's list.  They let me off at the Palatine Hill, where I bought a Roma Pass and went in to look at the ruins.

I tried to figure things out with my guidebook, but I had some trouble.

I then walked into the Forum, where I saw Faruq's favorite scene from the Arch of Titus.

I examined the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, into which was built the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda.  It reminded me of that church plunked into the middle of the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

Even though I do not consider myself a fan of religious syncretism, I liked the reuse of pagan structures for Christian churches, even if the results were sometimes quite ugly, aesthetically.  But I loved the continuity of religious practice, even if the specifics changed.  Rome is a city of palimpsests.

I examined a winged victory (Νίκη) -- not a Judeo-Christian angel -- on the Arch of Septimius Severus.

 

I stopped in the Colosseum on my way back to the apartment.  It seemed gratuitous that it had been made a Christian site, owing to all of the martyrs.  It has become common for non-heterosexual New Atheists to make jokes about Christians with punchlines like "too few lions!" or "bring back the lions!"  I learned in the book I was reading that Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire because of their refusal to worship the official Roman gods, and that they were branded "atheists" because of this.  This seemed funny and ironic, for all involved.

I thought of my upcoming birthday.

 

When I got back to the apartment I asked how the lunch had gone.

"Well, I told him I didn't have enough cash on hand to pay him yet, but I paid the driver, and I paid for lunch.  He's already called here once asking about his money again."

Great, a blowhard and money-grubbing, I thought, unfairly.  I contacted Faruq, who said that 60 Euros an hour was what he charged for tours of Berlin.  I went to tell my parents that they should pay right away.  If Faruq was worth this rate, then certainly this distinguished gentleman was worth it.

Later that night, after a meal of more bresaola, parmesan, arugula and wine-carafe tug-of-war with my mother, my father and I got into a fight about the tip.  I had received conflicting information about tipping practices in Italy, and when I tried to hand a tip to our waiter, he refused it.  My father insisted that we just leave, and that tipping wasn't necessary.  I wondered if we had somehow offended our waiter in the way we had presented it and thought we should just leave it on the table.  Somehow this whole exchange ended up greatly upsetting my mother, although I think it was related to a preexisting condition. I tried to remember to be compassionate instead of trying to be right, especially since my father displayed no interest in comforting her and pulled out a road map of Sicily.

(For the record, I hate the American practice of tipping, especially its extreme manifestation in New York.  Of course, I tip very generously, out of guilt, but I think that people should be paid a living wage and that we shouldn't have to add an extra amount at our discretion.  Of course, we are helpless to back out of this custom without penalizing the workers, although the large numbers of non-tipping tourists in Miami Beach eventually forced most restaurants there to automatically add a non-optional service charge, which is a step in the right direction.  Another reason that I hate tipping is that I am bad at doing arithmetic under pressure.)

The next day we went to the Trevi Fountain.

 

 

Unoriginally, I thought of La dolce vita, and also its blasphemous remaking by that Russian-born, Jewish, non-heterosexual, anti-Muslim pornographer who used to be a member of my former infamous gym.

Have I been eating too much pasta? I wondered.

We walked to the Pantheon, another pagan structure that was Christianized as the unoriginal Church of St. Mary and the Martyrs.  I took the standard photo.

I examined another obelisk, this one from the Temple of Ra in Heliopolis, brought to Rome by Domitian for a temple of Isis.

 

We then walked to Campo dei Fiori, where we looked at but did not touch the agricultural goods.

 

I didn't like the looks of the restaurants around this piazza, although and because they were crowded with tourists.  I abandoned my parents as they sat down to eat because I had many things from Faruq's list left to see.

I admired the coat of arms of the Della Rovere family on the Palazzo della Cancelleria.

 

Again, I thought that I needed a coat of arms.

I arrived at Piazza Navona.

 

I examined the obelisk that was custom-made in Egypt for the Emperor Domitian.  The hieroglyphs describe Domitian as a pharaoh.

I was awed by Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers.

 

The Nile was hiding his face.

 

I need to find a gym, I thought.

I ran to the Basilica of Saint Mary Above Minerva, another church built on a pagan temple, to see the 15th-century frescoes by Filippino Lippi about which Faruq wrote a thesis.

 

There was also the statue of Christ the Redeemer by Michelangelo.

The bronze loincloth covering Christ's genitals was not Michelangelo's idea.  There was a large group of Slavic tourists having their photos taken one-by-one in front of this statue, for some idiotic reason.

I went outside to appreciate another obelisk from a temple to Isis.

 

But this obelisk was resting on an adorable sculpture of an elephant carved by Bernini.

 

My guidebook said that elephants were beloved by the Church, since they were believed to be monogamous and to mate only once every five years.  I thought about the circumstances of my relationship and what the Church would think.

I walked by the Tiber Island, on my way to the Mouth of Truth in the Basilica of Saint Mary in Cosmedin.

 

I passed the Temple of Hercules Victor, also converted into a church.

 

I was happy to see an old-fashioned pedestrian crossing signal, in spite of my disapproval of the quasi-Italian word "alt".

People were posing for photos with their hand inside the Mouth of Truth, but as I was alone, that would have been weird.

I headed to the Capitoline Museums.  I passed Castor and or Pollux.

I examined Constantine's foot.

 

Inside I saw an inscription on a tomb that read: "Whoever shall violate or injure this tomb, may he share the fate of Judas!"

 

Faruq is a bit obsessed with Judas, for unhealthy reasons.

I emerged into a courtyard where I was stunned by the presence of Marforio, a former so-called talking statue of Rome, onto which people used to post anonymous political commentary.  I loved this statue.

 

 

I just wanted to climb up in his lap.  This depiction of a river god made me think that professional contrarian Camille Paglia was correct in her observations regarding the subculture of masculine-identified non-heterosexual men who tend to sport facial and body hair.

In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears' fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell's Angel but the capacious bosom of the primal earth mother. The gay bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion.

The Greek-style pretty ephebe is a cold visual icon, tauntingly remote and ultimately ungraspable. The bear, however, offers warm, soothing regression to what Freud calls the polymorphous perverse, the whole-body tactility of early childhood. My working theory is that the gay bear as a sexual persona is a mythic father-mother, a parental fusion like the androgynous Egyptian river god Hapi or the Roman Father Tiber, bearded and jovially recumbent amid his swarm of rollicking cherubs.

I walked through the museums, overwhelmed by the collections.

 

There was a special hall for the original equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius not destroyed by Christians.

 

I was moved by a sculpture of the satyr Marsyas, who was flayed alive for challenging Apollo to a contest.

 

 

I read that this myth was intended to indicate that the Greek pantheon had supplanted the earlier worship of nature spirits, just as building a church in a temple to Minerva showed that Christianity had supplanted paganism.

As I walked back to the apartment, I saw that the National Monument of Victor Emmanuel II was open, so I climbed up for a view from this gigantic structure.

 

I had been putting off going to the Vatican, out of fear of being overwhelmed and succumbing to an art-related delirium.  Faruq had told me that I would need to eat a large lunch beforehand, for strength.  My parents had already visited the Vatican many years back and had no interest in going again, but the next day we all had a hearty meal of fried stuffed pumpkin flowers and pasta at a restaurant in Trastevere before I headed out on my own.

I had been told to go to the Vatican in the afternoon, to avoid the crowds from tour buses.  Although there were a lot of people, there was no real line to get into the Vatican museums.  I could overhear some Irish people commenting about how they had waited for several hours on a pervious visit.

Luckily I was not wearing a fashion singlet, as two young men at my former infamous gym liked to do, so I was admitted without incident.

 

I tried to prepare myself mentally for the visit, by focusing on my breath and trying to calm down.  I rented an audio guide and headed in.

I liked the giant pine cone, also taken from a temple to Isis.

 

I admired the hairstyle on the colossal head of Augustus.

I entered the museum, along with hundreds of others.  There were signs with arrows marked "Sistine Chapel", but I knew that there were miles to walk before that destination was reached.  I felt bad for the many other visitors who assumed it was just in the next room.

I stared at either Creugas or Damoxenos, by Canova.

 

 

There was a large statue of Antinous, Emperor Hadrian's boyfriend who drowned in the Nile and was then deified.  Here he was depicted as the god Bacchus.

 

I took a detour into the Egyptian collection, stepping out of the river of people on their way to the Sistine Chapel.

I found the combination of the Egyptian god Anubis and the Greek god Hermes to be very interesting.

 

There was another statue of Hadrian's boyfriend, this time as Osiris.  He had many outfits, apparently.

 

I thought of Faruq, and his worship of she-who-meows.

 

The exit from Egyptian collection dumped me back at the entrance to the museums, so I had to go through the crowds yet again.

I finally made it to Raphael's Rooms.  There I saw the The Baptism of Constantine, probably by Gianfrancesco Penni.

 

That was the beginning of the end, I thought, as did Julian the Apostate.

Raphael's The School of Athens was incredible.  I took a photo of Plato and Aristotle.  Later I noticed that this was the image on my admission ticket.

Evidently Raphael was very promiscuous and died at age 37 from excessive sex.

I visited the restroom before finally entering the Sistine Chapel.  Despite the huge crowds and a continuous hexilingual announcement telling us to be quiet and not to take photographs, I was more moved by the Sistine Chapel than anything else I had previously seen in Rome.  So unoriginal of me!  It was at this point that the audio guide, which had been providing extremely thorough information about each work of art (delivered in a crisp British accent), started to get religious in content.  And I, possibly because of exhaustion, less probably because of the Holy Spirit, started crying as I stared up at The Last Judgment.

It was very beautiful.

I limped out of the chapel and headed back around to St. Peter's.

I should have just gone home, but I wanted to get it over with.  I went and rented another audio guide.

This time I mean it: it was much bigger than I had expected.

 

I barely made it past Michelangelo's Pietà and the Queen Christina monument before nearly collapsing on the floor.  There was a mass going on, and I wandered around in a dazed and incoherent stupor, neglecting my audio guide.

I failed to see everything.  It was too much.

I went outside and stared up at the obelisk that Caligula had brought from Alexandria.

I staggered back to the apartment, overwhelmed by what I had seen.  I insisted on walking everywhere in Rome, even when it would take over one hour, and therefore developed many blisters on my feet during the trip.

We had dinner with some friends or acquaintances of my parents from Ohio, who were in Italy to go on a bike tour.  They were secular Puritans of my father's ilk.  The wife had short hair and wore no makeup, giving her a German or lesbian appearance.  The husband was funny in a wholesome, Midwestern way, and I liked how he would refill my wine glass while leaving my mother's empty.  We were flying to Sicily the next morning, and, as they had traveled extensively throughout Italy, we asked them what to expect.

"It is very beautiful, but there is a lot of litter, and I didn't like how they treat their animals," said the wife.  I got a horrible image of a Sicilian man beating his dog on top of a pile of garbage.

Later that night Pierluigi invited me to go to the 40th birthday party of a friend of his.  He called a taxi to pick me up and take me there.  "Do I have to tip?" I asked him over the phone, terrified of having to do math in Italian.  Luckily, I did not.

The party was full of Pierluigi's friends from school, and, with a few exceptions, everyone was between 37 and 43 years old.  This was unusual for me, since I am friends with a crowd of non-heterosexual men ranging in age from 25 to 55.  It was strange to be in a group of non-homosexual men and women who were almost all my age; I evaluated everyone for fine lines and wrinkles.  I couldn't imagine my non-homosexual peers staying up and drinking and smoking at a party like this: most have children around whom their lives revolve, and they generally consider staying up past 10:30 and having a half glass of wine to be the height of sybaritic decadence.

Because it was Italy, most people did not have children.

The birthday boy was very charming and funny, like a cuter, non-annoying Roberto Benigni.  He was carrying around his own ashtray.  I talked about the pollution levels in the Mediterranean with a very nice woman who was an oceanographer; she told me the water off Sicily was quite clean.  I admired a obviously non-homosexual man with Florentine curls who was smoking a small cigar and looking mean and beautiful.  "Happy Birthday" was sung, with Italian lyrics, as cakes were brought out.  At one point I was standing by the food table, talking with Pierluigi, when a pretty, young (37-43 years old) woman asked for the chestnuts.  I understood her Italian and handed them to her.

"How could you understand?" asked Pierluigi.

"The word in Italian is like the word in Spanish: castagna is like castaña.  And it's kind of like the French châtaigne," I said, pompously.

"Tu parles français, alors?" he asked.

"Oui, un peu," I replied.

"Les Français sont le peuple le plus civilisé du monde," he said.

Really? I thought.

I mentioned that I was going to Sicily the next day on a budget airline whose name is a multilingual pun on the Italian word for "heron", airone.  I asked if I should be worried about this airline and was told that it had merged with Alitalia.

"Don't worry, Italian pilots are the best in the world, because we have the world's worst airports," said Pierluigi.  This didn't reassure me.

When I got back to the apartment I had a message from Faruq:

"Don't forget to visit San Luigi dei Franchesi, San Andrea della Valle, San Ignazio, Santa Maria della Vitoria, Santa Maria della Pace, Santa Sabina, Santa Costanza, Santa Prassede, Santa Maria in Trastevere, Villa Farnesina, San Andrea al Quirnale, San Andrea alle Quattro Fontane, Sant' Agnese, Sant'Agostino and Sant' Ivo."

Good grief, I thought.

Comments

[Jérôme]

Like a Henry James modern character.

[Édouard]

Tout à fait ! ;-)

[C.L.]

Really fantastic. One of your better travelogues, with a laugh-out-loud scene at the end.

[Bourgeois Nerd]

My favorite part of Mondays. Seriously.

[BearToast Joe]

St. Peter's must have been amazing and awesome to leave you so speechless.

[Boomer]

Wonderful post. Really laugh-out-loud funny at times. I am very excited about my trip to Rome later this month and your travelogue (especially Faruq's final litany of sites) gives me great ideas for seeing some of the less typically tourist sites of Rome.

[henry]

My compliments, this is a beautiful piece. Italy did inspire you.

[hughman]

awesome as always. thanks for taking us there.

[stan]

Ah, the twinge of pathos for your poor parents! On our recent visit to Brussels we stayed at a "bed and breakfast" operated by a French husband and wife out of their three bedroom apartment. It could not have been more lovely, and when the husband learned that we were going to a restaurant that required passing through an "iffy" neighborhood, he immediately offered to drive us there, and as we were early, it turned into a tour of his favorite parts of Brussels, ending at that bizarre monument that looks like an atomic model from a chemistry class, but the height of the Statue of Liberty, with flashing white lights. I suppose the French really are the most civilized people, even when they live in Belgium.

[James]

How much do YOU charge per hour?

[R J Keefe]

Good God, how impressive. Now I don't have to go to Rome at all!

(And the only one of those parental characteristics that you've even vaguely inherited is hysteria. You're funny!)

[RaShaSha]

I have no basis to suspect this, but, in case you’re fraught with doubts that your 'travelogue' posts may be too trite, I'll have you know your posts on Italy, and Rome in particular, incited me to book my first trip there. I am going in February, and I will be checking out some of the exact itinerary you describe. By the way, if it sucks, and I hate it, you will be completely to blame.

[Patrick]

Happy Birthday!