Roman Holiday, Part 9: The Tourist Adventure Continues

There are a lot of things to see in Rome. Some of them are kind of random and all the more fun because of that fact, but others are the sorts of things you go out of your way to see and there are more of those than you can conceive of. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys historical sites, urban spaces, and human stories, you’d be hard pressed to find a better place than Rome.

Also, you’ll eat well.

Some of these places we went to more than once, which is a nice thing you can do when you’re not in a hurry. You notice things the second time that you didn’t see the first time.

We saw many of those things the first time when we were with Andi the Tour Guide, whose small evening tour was disproportionately wonderful. After tearing ourselves away from our first visit to the Vatican we walked down to the Tiber and found the bus that would take us to the Victor Emmanuel II Memorial where Andi was waiting for us. We misjudged where to get off, but fortunately nothing is all that far from anything in central Rome and he was waiting for us when we got there.

 

Andi talked about the Memorial for a while – most hated building in Rome, demolished better buildings to put it up, and so on as already described here, plus some explanation of all the statues on top and in front of it – and then he pointed across the street to a fairly nondescript brick building with a tiny little balcony on it.

Apparently this is where Mussolini preferred to do his haranguing. You have to know this on your own these days – I don’t think there’s any sign commemorating this fact and I really don’t see why you’d want one anyway since he was one of history’s great jackasses, but there it is. Nobody is hiding this fact, in other words, but neither are they celebrating it. It’s kind of astonishing to think about how much trouble one twisted soul can unleash on the world from a drab little balcony on a plain brick building, but there you have it.

One of the first stops we made with Andi was the Ghetto district, which we skirted along the edge of rather than going inside but which Andi told us about as we walked by. For centuries this was the only part of the city where the Jews of Rome were allowed to live and work, and it was about as bleak as you’d expect an overcrowded area in a premodern city to be. Those restrictions were formally abolished when Rome was incorporated into the newly united Kingdom of Italy in 1871. You can just walk through it now, and it’s a quiet sort of place – or at least it was when we went back a couple of days later to spend more time there.

This is the main synagogue, which was being renovated when we were there.

When you are exploring the Jewish section of a formerly Fascist country the Holocaust is never far away, and it has to be said that Italy has done a pretty good job of facing its own past squarely in this regard. The synagogue itself has a large carving to that effect on the wall facing the main street.

The inscription points out the date of the Nazi raid on the Ghetto, October 16, 1943, about five weeks after Italy had surrendered to the Allies. Unfortunately for all concerned, though, Italy was pretty much full to the brim with Nazi forces by late 1943 and the Germans basically occupied the country, set up a Fascist puppet regime in the northern part, and controlled it until nearly the end of the war in 1945. It wasn’t until after the Italian surrender and the German takeover that the persecution of Italian Jews really started in earnest.

The Nazis had to conduct this raid themselves because the Roman police were considered unreliable for such things and the citizens of Rome resisted, something that was not always true in other Italian cities. They demanded 50kg of gold from the residents – a sum the Ghetto residents raised with help from the surrounding non-Jewish Roman community – and then invaded anyway. The raid resulted in over a thousand people being taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, only sixteen of whom survived. In all, over eight thousand Italian Jews, including more than two thousand from Rome, were taken as part of the Holocaust. “These deportations are not arid figures,” the inscription notes, “but an offense to civilization and an offense to the holy law of God and this is a tribute of tears of blood.” There are similar signs here and there throughout the Ghetto district, because people need to remember these things.

The things I found most moving in this regard were the little brass squares embedded in the sidewalk. They're called "stumbling stones," presumably because you just stumble over them in your travels. You can actually find them all over Rome, though they’re concentrated in the Ghetto. Each one represents a Roman Jew taken by Fascists to be murdered. They’re found in front of the houses where they had lived, sometimes singly or in pairs, and sometimes in the larger numbers that tell you this was an entire family.

You are told their names, which is important. People have names. Names matter. You are told when they were deported. And you are told what happened to them. Most often the word is “assassinata" – “murdered,” which is far more accurate than the bloodless “died” or even the more prosaic “killed” as it includes the fact that their deaths were not accidental. Their deaths were designed by Fascists who thought the lives of these people weren’t important, and we as a civilization forget this at our peril.

For all that, though, the Ghetto is a quiet place now, a place where people live their lives and go about their days and if nothing else this is victory. Apparently you can eat well here, as everywhere in Rome, though we were far too early for dinner so we just walked through.

We stopped for a bit on the outside of the Ghetto in a little park. It had comfortable benches and flowers all around, and there were all sorts of people just hanging out there with us.

Eventually we circled back around the other side of the Ghetto because that’s where the Turtle Fountain is.

According to the little sign next to it, the fountain was designed by Giacomo della Porta and Taddeo Landini in the 1580s to honor the Jews in the Ghetto, who wore their homes on their backs because of the harsh laws of the time regulating what they could own and how easily it could be taken away. It’s a surprisingly amiable fountain for all that.

One of the interesting things about the Ghetto is that as you walk into it from the synagogue the first landmark you come to isn’t really connected to it in any meaningful way. It’s just there in the same place. The Teatro di Marcello and the Portico d’Ottavia both long predate the Ghetto, but they’re there and you can walk pretty much right up to them.

The pair of columns is a particularly striking sight and at the time I could swear I had seen them from a different angle, perhaps on a bus ride past, and for all I know I was right.

I spent some time wandering around by the Teatro on the theory that the path would curve around and take me back to the Portico. This meant working my way around a number of Instagrammers posing dramatically in front of the Teatro and staring off into the middle distance, including one young man who thanked me for waiting until he was done to walk by, and good for them I suppose. It made them happy and hurt nobody and really how much more can you ask of people? Eventually it became clear that the path was just heading further and further away so I turned around and headed back through the Instagrammers to the Portico.

From the Ghetto we followed Andi past the Largo di Torre Argentina, with its ruins of four temples and the “cat colony” that appears on GoogleMaps if you look it up right now, through a narrow street full of restaurants (which differentiates it from most streets in Rome by exactly nothing) until we got Campo de Fiori.

Campo de Fiori is a decent sized piazza a bit to the west of the Ghetto, and in the evening when Andi took us there it was fairly empty, though he said it would liven up later after people had eaten dinner and went back out. It’s a fairly unglamorous space in many ways – you can tell that it has largely escaped the gentrification efforts of the people who do such things even though it is a busy place and one well known to tourists. It’s dominated in the middle by a statue of Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who in 1600 was burned alive exactly where the statue now stands, and whose works were then banned by the Pope.

The statue is very deliberately oriented so that Bruno faces the Vatican, a fairly eloquent gesture of defiance. You have to appreciate the thought that went into that.

When we went back again the next day there was a market going on.

Apparently this is a thing that they do there all the time, though we got there late enough that most of the vendors were either starting to pack up or thinking about starting to pack up, though they did their best to call us over to buy things anyway and eventually Kim made the mistake of answering one of their entreaties and after much haggling bought a few jars of things that we could eat since that’s about our speed these days.

Don’t mess with Roman pigeons, by the way. They take no prisoners.

From there Andi took us north to Piazza Navona, which is a much bigger space with a three large fountains, one in the middle and one at either end. We got there as dusk was falling, and it looked like this.

The next day in bright sunshine it was perhaps more vibrant, but I am fond of the closing embers of the day and what they do to a space, so the first photo appeals to me more than the others.

Our first mission when we got there was to find the Tourist Center, since for the price of a small tchotchke (a snazzy little magnet that says “Quo Vadis” on it – a useful question at all times) we purchased the right to use their bathroom, and this seemed a fair trade. Business transacted, we then walked from one end of the Piazza Navona to the other, just kind of taking it all in, and ended up sitting for a while on one of the benches by the Fontana di Nettuno by the north end. Other than the incessant selfie-stick vendors it was a nice place to rest and try to accept the fact that we were where we were, under a foreign sky in a bustling piazza in the middle of Rome, watching the water splash and the crowds filter by. There are worse ways to spend time, indeed there are.

The star of the piazza, though, is the fountain in the middle – the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers) which – I found out later – was completed in 1651 by Bernini and which features an ancient Roman obelisk as well. You can’t help but be captivated by it, especially when the local pigeons decide to convert the sublime into the ridiculous. Life works that way.

From there Andi took us over to the Pantheon, but this post has already gotten long and that will wait for another day.

These aren’t meant to be long posts, and if anyone is still reading them I thank you – it is a special sort of person who is willing to follow along with another person’s travels, I think. Mostly I want to put down these stories so I remember them, though, and they do tend to get longer as a result.