BFT23 - We Do Tourist Things in Rome

 

The best way to get over jet lag is to stay up until what would be about your normal bedtime in your new time zone, and the best way to do that is to get out into the sunshine and let your body think it’s actually not bedtime quite yet. This is called “lying to yourself,” and and it is a Useful Life Skill. So once we got situated in our apartment and had some time to luxuriate in the sensation of not being in motion for a bit, we went back out into the city.

They want you to have tickets to get into the Pantheon now, which is a change from before. Last year you just got in line and paid for admission, and you can still do that if you feel like standing in line in the bright July sun in Italy. But this year they’ve started selling advance tickets. You go online, pick a time and date that you like, and pay for your tickets. You can download them onto whatever device you want, print them out, make paper airplanes out of them – whatever you want. The world is your oyster.

This sounds like it would be a clearly more efficient way to do things, and when you walk up to the actual Pantheon it is. But the website to get to that point is, shall we say, a work in progress. You need to sign up for an account, for one thing, and once you do that you need to figure out how to get to the times and days you want. And then you need to figure out how to pay for it, a surprisingly complicated task that in the end required me to call the Pantheon directly and speak to a person there who told me that the reason my credit card was being denied was that I was doing the thing that the site told me to do if I were using a credit card, which would not work. If I wanted it to work I needed to do the other thing, which was clearly a different thing except that it was exactly the thing I needed so really it was the same thing only labeled differently.

I assume this makes sense to someone. It did work, though.

We had tickets for 4pm the day we arrived – enough time from our arrival to let us catch our breath in the apartment for a bit, and late enough in the day to keep us awake for a while – and in the end we walked up the Pantheon, showed our tickets to the Official Person by the door and waltzed right in without waiting in the Very Long Line, so it was all very much worth whatever online issues had to be resolved to get to that point.

Getting to the Pantheon was easy – a quick bus ride from the Marmorata station in Testaccio, a few blocks from our apartment, and into downtown Rome, followed by a walk of a few blocks. And if you get lost – Rome is a very old city and the idea of roads that go in a straight line and meet at right angles with other roads was not invented until 1681 – there’s always a helpful sign in the nearest shop, which they put there to avoid having to deal with you in person. Everyone wins that way.

The Pantheon was one of the places we loved when we were there last year and we wanted to share it with Oliver and Lauren. It’s bigger than you think it is and completely open on the inside so it looks even bigger than that, and it’s just gorgeous. You can stay for as long as you want – the tickets say you get an hour, which really is all you need, but nobody checks and in practice you could shut the place down if you wanted.

We walked around, gawking at all the sights – my favorite is still the tomb of Queen Margherita for whom the pizza was named, but there isn’t a spot in the place that doesn’t have something interesting to see.

You kind of get a sense of the scale of the place when you realize that the human-sized door to the right of the arch in the photo below is not the one with the triangular stonework on top but is instead the opening at the bottom right corner of that, the one with the little metal safety railing in front of it. Look closer.  There it is!

All that, and when you get tired you can sit on one of the benches and just let it all flow over you. Or stop and take a selfie.

We stayed for a while and then headed back out into the piazza where the fountain was a welcome sight on a hot day.

From there we walked over to Trevi Fountain by way of any number of little shops and random sights, since pretty much everything in Rome is interesting one way or another. Some things more so than others, of course.

Trevi Fountain is another one of those impossibly gorgeous places that is slowly being overrun by hordes of tourists such as ourselves. You will not find a more Instagrammable or Instagrammed place in the world, though why you would want to look for one is an interesting question. It’s not bad when people are well behaved – the crowd when we were there was loud and full but generally having a good time and polite enough – but there have been enough incidents of Stupidity recently that the Italian government is considering restricting access to the place. So if you plan to see it, you should do that soon!

We wormed our way through the crowd, taking photos and generally absorbing it all, and then we headed off toward another favorite from before, Piazza Navona.

Piazza Navona is a huge open space lined with shops, full of people, and home to three clusters of statues – one in the middle and one at either end. Also, an ad involving a banana. You walk around and enjoy the place, and really what more can you ask?

Oliver had studied these statutes in one of his art classes in college and generally thought it was cool to be standing in front of them for real. That is the thing about a place like Rome – you read about it and see pictures and then you’re there and it is an astonishing thing really.  The seagull was just a bonus.

After a while we headed to the non-banana end and it was there that we ran into the guy with the ring. He had a whole routine and we sat for a while and took it all in. He was a pretty good showman. You have to admire that. He was a little put off by the soccer ball that came rolling in at one point, but the crowd circled up protectively and that didn’t happen again after that.

Eventually we wandered back to the apartment – by this time it was nearly 8pm, which is about when people in Italy think about eating dinner. So we thought about eating dinner until such time as we decided to go eat dinner for real, which is a story for another time.