When in Rome

I finally succumbed to the enticement to stop off in Italy on a trip home from Israel. I looked into spending time in Venice and Ravenna and perhaps fitting in some cycling in the Po river valley but finally settled on a more conventional itinerary--Rome and Florence. My first impression of Rome was how quiet is was. I still don't know if my ears were confused after the flight (did I sneeze at high altitude?) or if it really is exceptionally quiet for a big city.

I walked from the airport to the train station and bought my ticket and noticed the train to downtown leaving. So I waited for the next train and hoped that I could still fit in the tourist bus ride around the city and the church and museum that I noticed were near my hostel. The train stopped for a while in the middle and took nearly an hour longer than it should have so I was only able to fit in the tour bus ride. It was the first time I had been on something like that and found it to be a great way to get oriented to the city.

Over the next three days I did a pretty good job of maximizing my exposure to Rome's top sites. The arch of Constantine was at the top of my list and I was prepared with an explanation of what was depicted on every corner of the triumphal arch. I took corresponding pictures and could quickly be prepared with a slide show were anyone to care to hear about it. A couple of days later I caught a different view of the arch from the Colosseum.

The forum is like an old graveyard for historic buildings. An archaeologists dream which I feared would be a tourist's nightmare. I went there on something like European historical site appreciation day. That meant everyone could go there for free and it seemed like plenty of folks took up the offer. I didn't think anything of it until I asked for an audio guide and was told that there were none available. I hadn't read anything about all those pilars lying around but I decided to walk around and try to make sense of the place. Fortunately I found the Arch of Titus and played the part of the Hebrew University student and noted the famous depiction of the manorah that the Romans took from Jerusalem's temple. The Arch of Titus is a lot less elaborate than that of Constantine so I had a more brief absorption period but definitely allowed it time to sink in. The forum has a lot more and I even figured out what a few other things were about but I'm afraid my appreciation of the famous hills and the figurative graveyard could have been more profound.

After having exercised my imagination with the idea of a hippodromo (chariot race track) in Istanbul, running across Rome's was nice. It was interesting to see that the track that the chariots raced around continues to be preserved by some of the more fit of the city's inhabitants. Other than the jogging track, there is little remaining--I'm sure most tourists don't take note of it.

There are various other monuments that I enjoyed seeing and which I'll probably write about as part of this entry later but one of the more memorable experiences involved catching up with an Italian friend who was a fellow student of the Hebrew University and who lives in Rome. We met for dinner and talked about contemporary Italy as well as the Europe (she's an activist advocating the E.U. becoming like the U.S.). Then we hopped on a bus back towards the central bus station as our hostel was very near to it. We tried to get her to explain to us how to pay but she explained that nobody in Rome pays for such things as bus fares. In fact, she noted that the national airline's trouble is largely due to so many Italians being able to fly free due to their being a distant relative of someone who works for the airlines or who works for a complany who has a contract with the airlines. That was one of those mind warping ideas that I still can't get myself to really believe. In any case, I'll confess that I didn't pay for the bus ride--when in Rome, right?