Roman Holiday, Part 12: We Commit Random Acts of Tourism

The thing about Rome is that you don’t really have to make any plans to see things. Things just appear in your path wherever you go.

There are things you do need to plan for, since everyone else wants to see those things too and access can be limited. And there are things that you might want to plan for so you don’t just walk by them without noticing or get too caught up in other things even to remember that you wanted to see them. But there are a lot of things in Rome so you can’t go too far wrong whatever happens.

We saw a lot of random things on our way from place to place.

There were a couple of ancient temples that we came to think of as Our Temples, for example, because they were right by a bus stop that we frequented and we saw them fairly often. The general area is called the Foro Boario and if you look it up on GoogleMaps it just says “Historical cattle market” though I have to say that despite wandering around the place several times during our stay in Rome we never once saw a cow. We live in Wisconsin. We’d have noticed a cow. We would, in fact, have been legally obligated to stop whatever we were doing and say, “Coooooooooooooooow!” in that low-pitched croon that midwesterners fall into whenever confronted by bovines, and then nod knowingly to each other. Just as well they don’t have them anymore at the Foro Boario, really, although “cow” in Italian is “mucca” and really what is that beside “moo cow” with an accent?

Temples, right. Ancient ones.

This one’s called the Tempio di Portuno (Temple of Portunus, the god of keys, doors, livestock, and granaries, which is an impressively varied portfolio for a god) although apparently it is also known as the Temple of Fortuna Virilis (the “Temple of Manly Fortune” which raises all sorts of interesting questions about just what was going on in those granaries with that livestock and why one needs to lock the door in the process). In keeping with my “see now, figure it out later” philosophy of tourism I just figured it was cool and left it at that, though I now know that it was built around 400BCE and rebuilt around 100BCE which makes it even cooler than it was before. You can walk almost right up to it, and it really is impressive how the Romans just leave these things lying about in the open like that.

A few steps away is the Temple of Hercules Victor (Tempio di Ercole Vincitore), which is a bit different from the usual rectangles that these things come in.

According to the source I just looked up, it is the oldest surviving sacred temple in Rome that was made of Greek marble, which is a remarkably specific achievement. Nobody knows who it was for or why it was built, but rumor has it that neither flies nor dogs will go inside and that has to count for something.

We must have seen these temples half a dozen times on our travels around the city though we only stopped there a couple of times and only really explored the place once. It turns out that in this particular instance it might have been good for me to have done some research ahead of time, as I might have discovered that the other name for the Foro Boario (or at least the general vicinity) is the Piazza della Bocca della Veritá – the Place of the Mouth of Truth, which was one of the things we had vaguely thought we should see. We knew it was around there somewhere but never quite managed to take the time to figure out just where. Turns out it was pretty close.

The Bocca della Veritá is a statue that is supposed to know if you’re lying to it – if you put your hand in its mouth and then tell a lie, legend has it, the statue will bite your hand off, so if you’re going to lie to it you should keep your hands in your pockets where it can’t get to them. It’s apparently rather large and it used to be in the Temple of Hercules Victor but sometime in the 1600s they moved it across the street to the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, the medieval church you see on the left side of this photograph.

Oh well. Maybe next time.

I did notice this building, though. It’s across the street from the Temple of Portunus the other way from the Bocca della Veritá and it just struck me as interesting enough to photograph when I walked by. It looked more medieval than ancient, and it had a fascinating inscription over the door.

It is, I now know, the Casa dei Crescenzi, built sometime in the eleventh century CE and originally owned by a guy named Niccolò de Crescenzi and it’s the oldest identifiable post-antiquity home still standing in Rome – another rather specific achievement when you get right down to it, but still quite something. The inscription reads, in part, “it was not vanity which motivated [Nicholas] to build this house, but the desire to restore the ancient dignity of Rome,” which is a lot to ask of a brick house, impressive though it may be, but you have to hand it to the man for trying.

Another thing that we stumbled across randomly was Trajan’s Column. We were walking along a large and busy road that turned to the right in order to get where we were headed, but we noticed that if we just kept going straight instead there was a long steep flight of stairs down that was as wide as the road itself and dropped us right in front of the Column.

Trajan’s Column sits between a fairly large church on one side and a field of ruined columns (without the capital letter) on the other. Those columns were obviously part of something much grander at one point but which kind of feel a bit overshadowed by the Column, because the Romans put a lot of work into Trajan’s Column – much more than your average column. It’s almost a hundred feet (thirty meters) tall – add another five meters for the pedestal in addition to that to get the total height – and the most striking thing about it is that it is completely covered with a spiral frieze that goes from top to bottom.

Also it’s hollow, which is something I didn’t know at the time, and there are stairs inside of it that you can climb all the way up to the top if you have permission to do so. We didn’t have such permission but it was a bright sunny day so we just took the time to rest a bit and admire it before heading off toward our original goal.

When it comes to random sites the real mother lode in Rome are churches. There are all sorts of churches in Rome, as you’d kind of expect of the center of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s right there in the name, after all. Everywhere you go there are churches, sometimes two or three to a piazza, and you can usually go inside if you’re quiet and respectful. Some of them are more geared to tourists than others – those will sometimes charge you a euro or two, particularly if you want to see more than just the nave – but they all accept donations and they are all, universally, astonishingly beautiful. You’d never know this from looking at most of them from the outside, where they are often rather plain, but that’s Rome. It’s a city that pays very little attention to the outsides of buildings and from the evidence hasn’t done so for millennia.

On our second full day in Rome we decided to walk around Trastavere, which is the neighborhood north of Testaccio, just across the Tiber, and like everywhere else in Rome it’s full of churches. One of the first ones we came to was the Basilica di Santa Cecelia.

The exterior really does not prepare you for the interior, which is both soaring and full of art.

The most interesting part of St. Cecelia’s, though, was the crypts underneath. You have to go into the little giftshop that is kind of hidden off to the side and then pay the thousand-year-old nun a couple of euros for the privilege, but it’s worth it. She will point you to a small set of stairs that you walked obliviously by as you went through the giftshop to speak with her, and when you go down you find yourself in a dusty basement full of random bits of things and you think, huh, this is okay.

And then you round a corner and go through a little door and suddenly you find yourself here.

It’s a shock to the system, really it is. How can such a gorgeous little chapel exist in such a space? But it does, and there you are. We pretty much had the place to ourselves for a long time – there were maybe two or three other people down in the crypts with us, and there’s a lot more to the crypts than just the chapel so we didn’t see the other people much.

Eventually we made our way back to the surface and continued exploring Trastavere until we stumbled into the Basilica di Santa Maria. Like everything else in Rome, the exterior gave no hint as to what was inside.

This disconnect between exterior and interior is perhaps a good thing, as otherwise you’d never be able to go about your business in Rome. You’d constantly be stopping to catch your breath from all the astonishing sights. Behind that fairly utilitarian exterior was this:

 

We stayed for a while, just taking it all in. For a nominal fee you can light a candle and let it slowly burn down and I think that is a marvelous thing. There is something peaceful about a small flame that you can dedicate to a purpose – a memory, a hope, a thought – and we need more of that these days, I think.

This was my favorite bit of decoration in the Basilica di Santa Maria. I’m not entirely sure what message this is supposed to be sending to whoever stands in front of it, but someday it will be my profile picture on all of my social media accounts.

We tried to keep an eye out for other churches as we wandered around the city, and we were never disappointed. They’re everywhere and lovely.

While on the way from one place to another we wandered through a random piazza and ended up stopping by Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli, which is just on the other side of the Ghetto – another thing I didn’t know at the time since I spent the entire week not quite knowing where I was and would have sworn to you until just this week when I looked at it on a map that those two things were some rather larger distance apart. The amazing thing about places like this is that they just let you wander into them randomly. You poke your head in through the door, walk around a small screen, and then there you are.

 

At another point we wandered into the Chiesa Santissima Trinitá dei Pellegrini – the Holy Trinity Church of the Pilgrims – which is not all that far from Campo de Fiori, and repeated that entry process.

We also found ourselves in the Church of St. Louis of the French, which is between the Piazza Navona and the Pantheon. Like all of these churches it doesn’t look like a whole lot from the outside façade, which is big and austere and was apparently built as a separate thing from the rest of the church and just positioned in front of it like an Old West storefront.

But inside, once again, it’s really quite something.

And, like all of these churches, it’s full of art.

My favorite was the statue of Joan of Arc, who seems fairly triumphant in this pose and therefore unaware of what is going to happen to her later. That’s the thing about history – you know how the stories end and they don’t, and that’s what makes it such a melancholy field sometimes.

The church is full of French things – inscriptions to various French military outfits, dedications to French kings, and so on – and the prelate in charge of the place has been the Bishop of Paris for more than half a century now. It’s a little pocket of France in the middle of Rome and that kind of extraterritoriality struck me as fascinating.

Rome is a city that rewards the casual wanderer.