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| At Trevi Fountain. It seemed like everywhere we wanted to go involved going through this piazza, so we saw quite a lot of Trevi Fountain. This is in the uncrowded early morning hours -- usually it's thronged with people. |
Confession: I didn’t like Rome too much last time I was
here. When you’re a 21-year old college
student staying in youth hostels, it seems you get a lot of unwanted attention from
various sleazy young men. Fortunately,
it seems this is not a problem when you’re a 41-year old mother of three.
It’s evening in Rome, and we’re still standing. It’s been a very busy day. Our flight left Boston at 5 pm last night,
and I have to say that we’ve become big fans of Alitalia. We got dinner – macaroni and cheese with what
appeared to be pancetta – plus wine and various other snacks. We had pillows and blankets and
headphones. The kids had Phineas and
Ferb to watch on their individual TV sets.
(We also got breakfast – pastry and yogurt and, unaccountably,
Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. But given
that this was served at around midnight EST, we were marginally less
enthusiastic.) Also, the coffee I had on
the plane was better than just about anything I’ve had in an American
restaurant.
The
kids managed to sleep a few hours on the plane, before we were woken up for
“breakfast” at 11:45 pm (or 5:45 am, as the case may be). Our flight landed an hour later and we were
up for the day. The taxi ride to our
hotel was a real thrill ride, careening down narrow cobblestone alleys that
were completely unsuited to automotive traffic, buildings and pedestrians
flashing by about 6 inches away on either side.
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| The Spanish Steps (again, early morning hours; again, usually thronged) |
It
was much too early to get into our hotel, of course, so we set off on a walking
tour of nearby landmarks. As it turns
out, our hotel room doesn’t have a lot to recommend it (unless you’re a fan of
aged décor and unreliable plumbing), but the location is great. We were a short walk from the Spanish Steps
and the spectacular Trevi Fountain.
These are normally packed with people, but at 7:30 am were only
populated by a few street cleaners.
At
this point we fell prey to what we’ve since found is the Rome Directional
Vortex, which rendered both of us completely unable to read a map. We were supposedly about 5 minutes from the
Pantheon, according to the Google directions I’d printed out earlier, and we
were supposed to be meeting our friends the Brookses (whom we haven’t seen in
10 months) there. But somehow neither
Bob nor I was at all able to navigate.
We’d find where we were on the map, determine which direction to go,
then stop a few minutes later, pull out the map to check our progress, scratch
our heads, and discovered we had no idea where we were. We then had to find ourselves on the map
again and restart the cycle. We must
have walked for miles, mostly in the wrong direction, attempting to get to the
Pantheon. Luckily, Rome offers many
rewards to the wanderer, with amazing architecture, ancient ruins, and
fascinating people-watching everywhere you looked.
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| Reunited at the Pantheon |
Finally
we made it, and there was much excitement being reunited with our friends
again. It was clear that we needed to go
somewhere where the kids could run around and squeal without disturbing hordes
of people, so we set off for the Villa Borghese, a huge, beautiful park near
our hotel. Here Bob and I managed to get
lost in the park. We were attempting to
find this particular playground, but eventually just gave up in despair.
Probably
the kids’ favorite stop of the day was the Piazza Navona, a huge oval piazza
with the famous Fountain of the Four Rivers and lots of artists and street
performers. Nadia desperately wanted to
give all of them coins, and given that the smallest coins we had were 2 euros
each, that would have been a rather expensive proposition.
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| Despite all the horsey rides, Lanie didn't quite make it through the day. |
The
kids were rock stars today. We didn’t
end up getting back to our hotel until after 7pm at night, so we all made it
the full day on little to no sleep. In
addition, we walked for miles and miles.
(Lanie is the exception to this, as she convinced all of the other 7
kids to play a “horsey” game wherein they gave her piggy back rides. Somehow, Tom Sawyer-like, she managed to have
them all fighting over the privilege of who would get to carry her around next
while she crouched on their backs and shouted, “Canter! Gallop!”.)
***
From
Bob:
This
was a long day, indeed. Even beyond all
the international travel elements, and the rigors of being in a different
country, this family really pounds the pavement. I think most Romans would be ready for bed if
they followed us around from the Spanish steps to all the way through our urban
hike around town.
At one point, we decided it was just
a little too early to pack it in, so we took a walk from the
second-highest-rated restaurant in Rome (which happens to be a gelato shop) all
the way to the Piazza Navona. Chris Brooks’ smart phone told us it would be .6
kilometers, which seemed like no sweat.
Getting four adults across this particular .6 kilometers of Roman
terrain would have been a nice stroll.
There were mostly pedestrian-friendly alleyways and street vendors, and
lots of pedestrians by this time of the evening.
Getting eight kids across this route
was a little more involved, what with all the pedestrians, street
vendors and
small Roman automobiles that seem to consider themselves pedestrians. Oh, and I forgot Wendy’s mom Susan, she was
there too. She was just as sturdy a
travel as the kids were. My point is, that if you just counted our mileage it
might not seem like that much, but we covered some ground. Enough ground, in fact, that Lanie gave out
just as our final trip back to the hotel commenced. I had to carry her limp
form all the way home. It actually
wasn’t that bad, though I wish our hotel room was on the first floor and not
the fourth.
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| Gelato! At supposedly the 2nd best place in Rome. |
Now for what we learned during all
this walking. Somebody could write a
book about all this old stuff here. It
won’t be me though, because I really didn’t take a lot of the dates and facts
in very well. I’m generally quite
interested in history, but history here is rather oppressive. It keeps following you around and jumping out
behind every corner. This little
fountain here the middle of this lonely plaza used to be for cows,
apparently. And this statue commemorates
this incredibly famous person from antiquity, while that enormous edifice is
for some guy I’ve never heard of who died in 1873 (which, in Rome, was
yesterday). The ancient ruins on this
block are different from the ancient ruins over there because…I’ve got nothing.
I have no idea why these ruins are different from those. I won’t be able to relay how dense the
historical atmosphere is here. Every
five minutes, not at all figuratively, there is a new building in front of you
that makes you say to your wife, “That must be special.” And you wife says back, “Yeah.” And then you
complete the same conversation five minutes down the road.
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| One of the ubiquitous Roman fountains |
This is how old Europe does drinking
water. I assume it’s carried in on the
same aqueduct that brings water to the Trevi. It’s potable, we know, because
we’ve been drinking it all day. We would
not have thought to do this on our own, but we saw lots and lots of Roman folk
walk right up and take a swig.
Businessmen hold their ties out of the way and lean right in. Scores of school kids gather round with empty
soda bottles and push each other out of the way to fill up. “Que fresca!” I heard one kid say. Although this sounded like Spanish to me, I
did not disagree with the sentiment. It
was quite good, fresh water.
At one point in the afternoon we
knew we had pizza coming and we were in the middle of a park. We were out of
water, but I knew there was water somewhere.
We roamed the park looking for a drinking fountain. All we could find were the decorative
kind. Maybe you could drink out of them,
but we could only reach the standing water part of the fountain, and I wasn’t sure that the
spraying part wasn’t just recycled from the pool anyway. There was one little fountain that had a
trickle coming out of a rock that dripped down into a small, but deep
pool. I was thinking about swinging in
and trying to figure out how to snatch some, when a huge dog ran right in front
of us and jumped in the pool and started licking the rock. The kids in my water
search party did not think this was a good sign.
The last drinking fountain we
remembered was at the top of the Spanish Steps, which didn’t seem too far away
on the map. Jen and Nadia ventured out
and were defeated by the Roman streets.
It’s a tough city to get around in because of all the streets. It sounds weird, I know, but it’s true. They have so many streets here, but most of
them are only 50 feet long. You’re on one street, then there’s a huge but
otherwise nondescript piece of antiquity, and then you’re not on that street
anymore, it’s another street and it’s difficult to figure out how you got
there. It’s taking us quite a while to
get used to this.
Luckily, Nadia and Jen made it back
to o
ur playground headquarters, albeit without any water, and guess who managed
to save the day? Me, of course. Well, it was really a school trip of third
graders from Lazio or somewhere and they were all gathered in a big crowd right
there next to our playground. A mass of orange baseball caps jostling for position in the middle of a
Roman park can mean just one thing. I
grabbed a water bottle and went right over and, after patiently waiting my
turn, filled right up.
You can check this story out yourself. Just go to the big park up on the hill and go
over to where the puppet theater is next to the playground and the hut with little
kids’ rides like the ones in the mall that for some reason our kids did not
seem to notice the whole time we were there today. There’s a fountain right in that place. Bathrooms are another story, though.
The pizza was really good, too.
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| At the Villa Borghese. That one boy on the left is not one of ours, lest you be confused. |
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