What We Will Miss/Not Miss About Italy

Speaking our mostly inept Italian into very forgiving Italian ears (miss)

Everyone smoking nearly everywhere all the time (not)

Antiquities around every corner (miss)

The cosmopolitan nature of a truly international city (miss)

Strong and unpleasant smells from body odor and cloying perfumes to sewer gas, garbage and burning chestnuts (not)

Great, high-frequency public transit (miss)

Tender and flaky pastry at even run of the mill pasticcerias (miss)

No agenda but our whimsy (miss)

Little narrow beds (not)

Standing in front of the masterworks of Rennaissance art (miss)

Walking and sitting in the piazzas (miss)

Italian assertiveness/pushiness (miss/not)

Marvelous olive oils on nearly every table (miss)

Window shopping the stylish, over the top shops (miss)

The feel of being in the Motherland (miss)

Streets as negotiated space for peds and cars alike (miss)

Cars everywhere and often suddenly behind you (not)

Cooking with the lovely Marcella in her sweetly mod orange kitchen (miss)

Cash machines dispensing large bills in a city where everyone wants exact change only (not)

The elegant, majestic Italian pines (miss)

Sleeping with ears plugged (not)

And last, but not least, doing all of the above in the company of my amazing mom, a supremely generous traveling companion who still thinks after many years of contraindication that her daughter is terribly clever and rather funny!

Ciao, Italia!

Some ancient Romans lived like king...then there were the other guys....

Our last day in Rome had arrived, but there was still too much to see. Somehow we had never actually found the museum at Villa Borghese--it was somewhere in the park up there, full of great art, but it had eluded us the day before. And we had missed the Nazionale and it's famous coin collections. And the Catacombs. But we opted instead to make the trip out to Ostia Antica--an ancient (even by Roman standards, 250 BCE) port town that served the imperial city.

Ostia (for "mouth") was situated where the Tiber met the Mediterranean Sea, and in its heyday was home to 60,000 plus guards, merchants, slaves, sailors, and their families. The Decumano Massimo, its basalt-paved main street, continues for nearly 2 kilometers. As you walk across the large, flat black stones, red brick foundations cluster one after another. They are the apartments, baths, bars, warehouses, shops, bakeries and temples where over 2,000 years ago Ostians lived lives surprisingly similar to ours today.

There is a large amphitheater that once seated 2,500 people and an extraordinary bathhouse, Terme dei Sette Sapienti (Bath of the Seven Sages), with classically-themed, mosaic floors and several colorful frescoes. Among the ruins this building is unique for its preserved walls and roof, and wandering through its rooms and halls you could imagine what ancient life might have been like for the average Roman, better than you could among the more majestic remains of the Coliseum or Forum. The on-site museum displayed sculptural portraits of some of the people who lived there culled from the ruins for protection: a husband and wife, a servant, some young men. Tomorrow we leave these ancient Romans behind, but they will be with us in our imaginations for a long time.

Rome's Central Park

Tuesday morning we set out with our umbrellas for the Villa Borghese gardens, which extend for a half mile to the east above Piazza del Popolo. Like Central Park in New York (and redesigned around the same era--early 1900s), there is a series of naturalesque public spaces--tree lined lanes, rambly areas, duck ponds, a horse track, monuments, a zoo, as well as the Villa itself, which houses the art collection of the Cardinal Borghese (then the pope's nephew) and served in the 1600s at his party house in the country. There are street vendors, and bikes and segues for rent. We enjoyed a perfect chocolate croissant (fresh, tender and melt in your mouth flaky) and then headed toward the Spanish steps, which are in fact officially named something else (as so much in Italy is--names seeming to collect and evolve over the span of history), but they extend from the Villa Borghese above down to the Piazza di Spagna far below. We saw our second bride and groom posing for pictures in full wedding regalia while the tourists moved up and down the famous staircase around them (the first was in the campo in Siena).

In the afternoon, we headed back to St. Peter's Basilica. We chatted with a family from Melbourne as we waited in the long but fast-moving security checkpoint line. It's hard to fathom the extraordinary scale of the world's largest cathedral. It is a place designed to make you feel your insignificance (and the Pope's magnificence). Still, there is nothing so humanizing as Michelangelo's Pieta, even if Mary has the smooth, placid face of an untested 17 year old. The way Jesus' body is draped over her makes you feel the physical and spiritual weight of lifeless human form.

In case of an earthquake...

Monday was our day for the antiquities. We waited in line at il Palatino, or Palatine Hill, for our chance to roam around the Forum. The large ruin site includes both the Colisseo and Arch of Constantine, as well the Forum and this hill of Roman era houses held up by a wall ordered by Hadrian (not THE Hadrian's wall, but a Hadrian wall?). Archaeological crews tended several dig sites within the area sifting piles of dirt for pieces of the red brick that seems to constitute all the large monuments (which are then faced with the marble you think of when you envision Roman architecture). Except for the columns, which seem to be solid and generally Egyptian--imagining the power (certainly slave) that cut and carried these gargantuan marble blocks across land or sea from Egypt to Rome is mind-boggling.

We paused under a portico for a building no longer there. From our broken marble seats far below, it seemed to extend endlessly into the bright blue sky. The extremes of heinous and marvelous that must have characterized ancient Rome are very present here.

Our next stop was the Pantheon, which is reportedly the best preserved Roman interior around. It's a huge Roman temple that was converted into a Christian church toward the end of the empire. The many colorful marbles covering every interior surface (black, pink, gold, white...) is stunning. Thanks to Rick Steve, we spotted the square chunk of marble cut from the miraculous dome by Brunelleschi--who studied its construction when he was designing the dome of the Duomo in Firenze. At the top, where the dome's composition seamlessly changes to light-weight volcanic pumice, is a perfect round circle of daylight, and it makes me wish we could come back in the rain to see it fall inside the magnificent space.