We came to Rome a little intimidated by the size of the city, its thousands of years of history, and the hundreds (or thousands) of buildings, monuments, museums, and other sights for the tourist. How to choose what to see in a city that was old when Christ was born? Our solution, as to so many other dilemmas in life, was to pare down and make lists. In our Tuscan farmhouse we tabbed and dogeared our travel guides and architecture books and wrote down the things we most wanted to see in Rome. As it turned out, they were mostly buildings: three churches by Borromini and two by Maderna, St. Peters, the Mouth of Truth, the Sistine Chapel, the Coliseum, and -- since we were running out of money -- the American Express office. The list seemed compact and manageable, and we had faith that some other interesting sights would pop up along the way.
And so our first days in Rome were a sort of scavenger hunt. Map in one hand, list in the other, Kate in her backpack and cameras dangling from our necks, we navigated our way to one "X" after another, crossing items off our list as we went along.
Yet, ludicrous as it sounds, our list helped us see some wonderful things that we otherwise would certainly have overlooked. Sans list we probably would have stumbled upon the Vatican sooner or later, but would we have come to St. Carlo alle Quattro Fontaine? This tiny church, practically a chapel, was one of Borromini's first commissions. Compared to the neighboring buildings with their crisp rectilinear facades, his little church must have been shocking. The facade is all undulating waves of columns and sinuous pediments and ovoid frames, as if the carved stone itself was melted and distorted like blown glass in a great flame. The interior is even more complex, beginning at floor level with twin equilateral triangles with molded oval vertices joining smoothly together, flowing into an ellipse at the dome level and finally culminating in a circular lantern. Borromini left the walls and ceiling of his church plain and largely undecorated, which allows his daring shapes to stand forth unobscured by frittery.
However, our favorite part of St. Carlo was not the plastic facade or the ovoid interior, but the small west courtyard of St. Carlo. The two-story colonnaded arcade, presenting a simple iron cross on a backdrop of clean white plaster, was stark and lovely in comparison with the fantastic curves next door.
We saw another of Borromini's churches in Rome. St. Agnes in Agone, on the Piazza Navona, was described in one of our books as "his greatest work", with its flanking towers set out and forward on curved wings. We thought instead that Borromini had been over-cautious in St. Agnes. Apart from the setting of the towers, the facade of St. Agnes was stately rather than inspired, and even the famous curved wings looked deliberate, as if drawn with a protractor and scribe rather than flowing freehand brush. The interior was thick with gilding and decorative frames, like a great-aunt's sitting room cluttered with family mementos, and the lines and spaces are stolidly rectangular. We missed the daring of St. Carlo, where we went back many times during our time in Rome.
We also credit our list with bringing us to my favorite church in Rome, St. Maria della Pace. St.Maria was at the end of a dead-end street in a salbrious neighborhood west of the Piazza Navona. Two sad-looking bars and some sort of betting establishment lined the street, and litter was piled up in the corners. St. Maria sat gloomy and unwashed in its small courtyard, doors chained shut and an open side door the only sign of life. It turned out that the church was being restored and, we hope, will be open for visitors on our next trip to Rome. But even locked and dirty, St. Maria was a special building. By arranging a curved frame under the roofline, a bulging rounded upper level, and a deep semi-circular porch below, the architect Pietro da Cortona created a powerful, deeply shadowed facade. While St. Carlo seemed to revel in displaying its ingenuity and daring, St. Maria was forbidding and purposeful.
There were so many fascinating buildings in Rome that we had no hope of seeing more than a few of them. We tried to visit only one or two buildings each day, to keep them sharp in our minds, and the days slipped by faster and faster as we began to learn our way around the city.
And as we hoped, our list also took us by various interesting sights we had never planned to see or even heard of, from the enormous and gaudy monument to Vittorio Emmanuel in Piazza Venezia, to a fruit stall in a small street west of the Spanish Steps where we found lusciously sweet strawberries, to a peaceful enclosed park off Via Quirinale where a herd of wild cats lived, and, always, bits and pieces of demented carved decoration stuck here and there around the city.
We had always associated Rome with the Roman Empire of classical times, and as we learned our way around the city and our walks took us further and further from our pension near Piazza della Republica, eventually we did spend some days wandering around the Roman ruins of the Imperial Forum, the Colosseum, and the Thermae of Caracalla. Although what remains of Imperial Rome is interesting, we could not help but feel that we were seeing only the few fragments left after a millenium and a half of neglect and scavenging. In its glory centuries as capital of the Roman Empire, Rome was a tremendous city of over a million inhabitants, thick with monuments, public buildings, and grand streets. After the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the city was all but abandoned. By the Middle Ages there were barely 40,000 people living in Rome, wandering among the ruins of the Empire. For the next thousand years, no-one ever needed to quarry stone or marble in Rome; any building materials needed could be had by demolishing the old buildings, stripping marble from the temples, tearing carved columns and capitals from the ruins and scavenging sculpture and decoration from the remains. Some of old Rome's legacies, like the Colosseum and the Thermae, were too big to ever be completely destroyed, or too far from the city center to be convenient quarries or desirable building sites. But virtually all of the Rome that we saw was the product of the Catholic Church -- the Papal empire -- beginning in the Renaissance.
We tried to imagine what might be left if Manhattan were suddenly depopulated and then cannibalized for building materials for a thousand years by scattered survivors. A few foundation stubs of the great bridges might still be standing; some concrete-and-brick tenement complexes might still remain; none of the steel-framed skyscrapers would survive a milennia of rust and decay; the outlines of Fifth Avenue, the expressways, and Central Park would be barely discernible in the rubble-strewn forest; the city's tunnels would be long buried under the Hudson River and the subways all flooded or caved in; and everywhere the usable iron, brick, copper, and tile of old Manhattan would have been stripped away, leaving only hints of the scale and grandeur of New York City circa the 20th century. The bits of Imperial Rome remaining in modern-day Rome felt a little like that to us -- just hints of ancient glory in a ruin of stone and brick.
By now our map was disintegrating and our legs worn out by long days of walking, and I had developed a chronic case of insomnia. At 2 am I was usually still awake, hanging around the small lobby of the pension, watching soccer on TV with the night clerk. He spoke no English and I no Italian, and after a few attempts to find some common basis of communication we usually gave up and stared at the screen. The players were tremendously fit. They ran and ran, as if running a marathon in 25-meter spurts. Sometimes one player would start to move the ball forward. After a few yards he would pass it to a teammate, usually not on his team, and the ball would head the other way on the field, until the next pass reversed its course again. When a player did keep the ball in consistent motion for a while, another would run up to him, they would do a sort of hostile jitterbug for a few seconds and then fall down on each other, while the ball squirted out to someone else or, more often, the out-of-bounds line. Watching this with glazed eyes at two in the morning, I felt like I was watching atoms in Brownian motion, colliding and rebounding and occasionally sticking together and throwing punches. Every half-hour there was usually a kick on goal. The announcers would shriek in excitement as the broadcasters replayed every detail of the glorious event from every angle, over and over -- the attacker's grim determination, his leg drawing back, the mighty kick, the anguished cries of the defenders, the goalkeeper diving desperately, the ball sailing, sailing, ten feet wide -- as spectators roared and debris pelted the field. Sometimes the crowd threw firebombs. Clouds of smoke filled the air as firemen rushed on the field, spraying extinguishers. This normally woke me up a little, and I admired the players, who continued playing, dodging the smouldering patches of blackened grass and circulating firemen. An hour of this excitement was usually too much for me and I would turn in and sleep soundly until the next morning when I would learn the score from last night's game: zero-zero, six shots on goal, and five firebombs, one of which would have scored had it counted.
The last items on our list were at the Vatican, and one day we headed there, Kate sleeping in her backpack and our tired brains trying to squeeze in a few last sights before shutting down. The Sistine Chapel was packed as tightly as a oversold rock concert, B.O. and camcorders clunking on skulls everywhere, and people squeezed together, staring vacantly at each other until their failing neck muscles could be forced to pull their heads back and their eyes skyward again. Every few minutes the loudspeakers blared a tape recorded admonition, in six high-decibel languages reverberating off the famous fresco ceiling and walls, to KEEP QUIET and TAKE NO PHOTOGRAPHS. We much preferred the rest of the Vatican museum, especially the exhibits of 19th and 20th century religious art, which seemed to me as if borrowed from a parallel universe in which the explosion of styles that we know in our universe -- Cubism, the Fauves, Expressionism, Abstract Art -- came into a world where the Church retained its dominance, Bibical scenes remained the primary subject for painters, and Van Gogh had painted Madonnas and not sunflowers. But our favorite moment was on the cobblestones of the Piazza of St. Peters, in the shadow of Michelangelo's dome and surrounded by Bermini's great curved colonnade, when Kathryn stood up during a Papal audience and took her first shaky steps. It was April 16, 1997, a Wednsday in Rome.
Traveling On a Budget
Rome was rather expensive. Our double room in a reasonable, but by no means particularly attractive, pension west of the train station was L165,000 a night. Garaging our car cost around $25 a day.
Staying Connected
Our room had no telephone, so I usually walked to some telephone booths late at night to send and retrieve our email. I felt conspicuous standing in the booths amid all the dangling wires of my palmtop setup, and some locals eventually warned me against carrying expensive things around the Piazza Republica late at night. But Compuserve had a local node right in Rome, and so it was fairly economical to go online during the day as well.
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