Roma: Ruins, reunions, & beer runs

One day in Rome and only a peripheral glance at some sites, and I was sending emails to friends full of laments about the solitude I had been faced with in Florence which was continuing in Rome. I wrote 2 or 3 such, then turned around and joined a game of Kings which had begun in the Hostel lounge. I immediately made 8 new friends, and within another day had become acquainted with the better part of the hostel's 100 or so residents. Never let anyone tell you that complaining is pointless.

My first full day, I saw only 2 really notable sites. The first was The Pantheon, an obvious inspiration for many of the Cathedrals that I have been wandering into for months, significantly older than all of them, and now converted to a place of Catholic Worship. The irony, of course, is that "Pantheon" means "all gods", and the structure was built as a one-stop shopping center for worshiping the full set of old Rome's Pagan deities. Today, the statues of the ancient God's, along with a good deal of the original decorative marble, have been ransacked or otherwise removed to make room for Crucifixes and tombs. Which I find kind of insulting. Fortunately, the well-known history and the unique features of the structure clearly advertise the non-Catholic origins.

Also, as you can see in that picture, the top of the dome is completely open to the elements (because they used to burn human sacrifices here and the stink wanted to escape somewhere, among other reasons), and that's totally rad.

The second site I saw was completely accidental. There's this old, mostly unidentified ruin south of the Pantheon which houses hundreds of cats:



Cats were originally brought over from Egypt thousands of years ago to deal with a rat problem in Rome. Guess what happened. Also, Italian Catholicism apparently extends to cats, which are religiously left with their reproductive functions intact. Once these fertile, Godly creatures become sick, old, or just tiring to their owners, they drive them to this ruin and dump them in.

As a result, a bunch of cat-lovers (who are perhaps less Catholic than their neighbors, but definitely more cat-personafying) have started a rescue office of sorts, completely illegally, within the ruins. I went in and petted a bunch of cats, which was totally awesome. And weird.

Back in the Hostel that night, the Kings game of the night before had apparently taken a page out of the Roman Kittys' books and spawned. Not only was the game itself twice the previous night's size, but there were other groups of people with cards also playing drinking games. Having now met many of these people, I felt obliged to make the rounds. The nice thing was that drinking store-bought was cheaper than going out, where the downside was not experiencing Rome at night. Yet. Honestly, I wasn't too bothered, and I wasn't as poorly-off the next morning as I imply I might have been.

The next day I planned to visit the Vatican & its museum, but while I was starting in the Vatican Museum -- looking at the face of Caesar, a very small & well preserved Ancient Egyptian, and the generally absurd opulence, I bumped into some fellows from the hostel. We proceeded to the obscenely crowded, photo-restricted, and appropriately legendary Sistene Chapel.

Enjoying the company, which had already visited the rest of the Vatican, I changed plans and joined them to check out some crazy Michelangelo-designed fountain and The Pantheon. Which I had seen the day before, but what the hell? It's free and pretty cool.

That night, while buying some beers at the store, I met Tom, from New Zealand, (who looks almost exactly like Micah Klatt when he has long hair) who was a warm and smiling harbinger of potential disaster.

My last chance at a calm evening was shattered when, while sitting in the hostel eating dinner, Daniel and Sana (the Aussie twins who we met in Bled) unexpectedly appeared. Gleeful, flabbergasted, energized, and egged on by Tom, we all decided it was a good night to get out of the Hostel and see the town.

As the four of us walked in the general direction of the nearby University District, we were drawn onto a side-street by extremely loud music. The street led to the front entrance to the University, where a group of students were guarding the only opening in the gate, checking tickets.

I looked at Daniel and said, "I'm all for new experiences, but if they are charging more than 2 Euros for this, I'm not going in."

Then I asked the guy at the door how much it cost to get in.

"Two Euros."

As we approached the source of the sound, Daniel suggested that a college crowd was a great place to find cheap drinks. At the end of a tree-lined lane was a plaza with a big fountain in front of an austere building with a thrust of steps creating a platform topmost, in front of the building doors: here the bands were set up.

In front of the fountain was a small stand with some liquor bottles on it, advertising mixed drinks and "shorts" for 1€. Daniel's suspicions confirmed, he & Tom each immediately bought rounds for everyone.

Thus reinforced, we went around to the bottom of the steps, where there was a much larger table hawking a greater variety of drinks. They had beer and sangria for 1€ and wine for 0.50€. This, of course, prompted another couple of rounds. And yes, the wine was about as bad as you'd expect for that price.

We were having a hearty chuckle about having discovered this fantastic event when Tom started repeatedly pulling us into hug-huddles and saying, with all earnestness, "I love you guys!", which eventually made me laugh so hard I spilled wine on my jacket. He then distributed some high-fives, went to find a toilet, and never returned.

Daniel and I sat down on the edge of the fountain and started chatting with some guys from Naples, and Sana disappeared. When she located us, 2 hours later, we learned that she had been getting enthusiastically chatted-up by a group of Italian guys & hoping we would come to her rescue.

In the meantime, Daniel and I went about dancing our pants off (figuratively, you jerks). The first 30 minutes or so it was just us in front of a huge, growing mass of stationary Italian students, but they joined us soon enough and the place was a huge dance party by the time Sana returned.

After a number of hours, we finally exhausted all the bands; but a van pulled up with it's back doors open, full of blasting speakers, and started rolling slowly through the crowd. The three of us headed over to dance along behind it, and ran into some of the hostel employees, who were flabbergasted that we had found this party. They couldn't keep up with us, so we lost them.

Soon thereafter, Sana's admirers tracked us down, and we had to put on a real show to provide an escape for her (fortunately, the twins are actors). It was about 3 am at this point, and we decided to head home before they found us again.

We wanted to find some Kebab (the great late-night snack throughout Europe), but instead we found a huge street sign which had been knocked down by some earlier mischief-makers. I'm not sure what the sign meant, but it was definitely "Don't do" something:



Naturally, Daniel and I picked it up and started carrying it back to the hostel.

Which was a gas until we walked by this building that has a little security booth out front with two police officers in it. We walked by, they came out, they yelled at us in Italian, and they waved us back in their direction. We smiled, walked back, and offered them the sign with a smile.

One of them told us to do something in Italian. We explained that we didn't perle italiano or whatever. The officer pointed us back the way we came, and his partner explained in broken English that we should put the sign back.

At this point, I did the natural thing: I smiled and lied my head off. I said that we had found the sign in the middle of the street, and putting it back there would be dangerous!

The Police told us to put it back again, and Daniel rolled with my fabrication: "In Australia, you're *legally* *required* to pick up a fallen sign! You take it to the nearest police station. Where is that?"

They were having none of it, and we went around in circles a couple of times. I was hopeful that the end result would be us leaving the sign with them and stumbling along home. No such thing would happen: once the situation was fully understood (or rather, the lies clearly communicated), the Police gave a brief exchange in Italian, rolled their eyes at us, and waved us along, sign and all. Couldn't be bothered.

So we carried it back to the hostel, stood it up outside, laughed our heads off, and went to bed quite pleased with ourselves:



In the morning, I joined the Kings-Crew for a tour of Rome, which gave some interesting historical & mythological context, and even some relevant geological history, at an incomprehensibly rapid verbal pace from a native Texan. Among other sites, we saw The Pantheon. Yep, 3 days in a row for the gcb. You'd think I was religious.

Photo break. I took so many photos it's heard to choose, so this photo break is sponsored by
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By this time, I was supposed to have already left Rome. It occurred to me that I had been having so much fun that I had been avoiding the essential sites deliberately, so as to give myself a reason to stay in Rome longer. I foolishly vowed to solve this problem and get out of Rome, and headed immediately for the Roman Forum, the old Palace ruins, and the Coliseum.

The ruins of The Roman Forum are expansive, spectacular, and endlessly fascinating.

That last image is actually a church built on top of the ruins of an ancient Pagan Temple. The regular flooding had carried in enough silt and dirt to put that church near ground-level before excavations began in ernest. As tremendous and gigantic as the excavated forum grounds are, a major road was actually constructed, knowingly covering over a third of the Ancient Forum, by Mussolini- so that Hitler could come for a visit and bring his tanks. It remains.

The Coliseum's fame, I can say, is pretty much justifiable. The thing is pretty spectacular, no less for the obvious inspiration it was for the ubiquitous arenas used for sporting events today. We haven't improved the design that much in 2000 years, I don't think:



In fact, how many modern stadiums are you aware of which have wooden floors with trap-doors over a maze of cells, chambers, and halls that can be used for entrances, special effects, or running around wild animals in the dark to get them angry and ready to fight?

After a spectacular day of sites, I had a less criminal but equally amusing night out with the now-usual suspects. We almost lost Tom again, but managed to track him down and capture this fabulous photo:



We then made one of the greatest entrances I've ever made on returning to the hostel, which I cannot describe since text is insufficient and I sadly lack photographic evidence. After that, we further upset the hostel employees by turning the TV-and-Internet room into a gymnasium:



Invariably, wrestling followed; then scolding.

All that remained was to spend the morning waiting in an extraordinarily long line to get into St Peter's Basilica in The Vatican:



The line is off to the right. No cutting with the Intimidating Swiss Guard on the watch:



After the long line was a really long set of stairs, yielding a fine view of Rome:



The Basilica itself was, like, a big fancy cathedral full of priceless art and tourists and stuff. You know, same-ol-same-ol.

And then I got on a train to Salerno, near Napoli, with every intention of seeing the Amalfi Coast and Pompeii. Since I had had so much fun in Rome, Italy conspired to make the rest of my visit as depressing as possible.