Europe 24 - Rome, Day 1

We slept well that night, and to start our first full day in Rome we decided to have breakfast at the Testaccio Market, a block or so away.

The Testaccio Market is a fascinating place if you like urban markets. For generations it was an open-air farmer’s market but a few years ago it was enclosed into its own building with many of the stall owners whose families had been part of the market forever continuing on. It has all sorts of vendors ranging from butcher shops and produce markets to shoe stalls and clothing nooks, and you just go from place to place until you see what you’re looking for, even if you didn’t know what that was before you saw it. We found some tasty things and enjoyed them there in the little courtyard of the market as the day slowly heated up around us.

The thing about Rome is that no matter how many times you have been there before there is always more to see. You could spend years there without repeating anything, and while we did have some favorites that we wanted to revisit we were mostly focused on branching out. One of the museums we missed previously was the Capitoline Museum, and having now corrected that oversight I can heartily recommend it. It’s kind of like the Vatican Museum only cheaper, less crowded, and without the Sistine Chapel but with the same general sense of being an enormous rabbit warren stuffed to the brim with artifacts, artworks, and vast ornate rooms. It also has some of the best views out the windows in all of Rome.

We took the 718 Bus from Marmorata and climbed up the oddly flattened stairs to the Piazza del Campidoglio where the Capitoline Museum is located. The Piazza del Campidoglio had been a central focus point for ancient Roman governance before falling into disrepair and neglect and eventually being redesigned by Michelangelo in the 1530s/40s. He reoriented it away from the Forum and toward St. Peter’s Basilica – the center of power in Rome at the time – and created new facades and artwork for it. The work wasn’t finished until long after he died because that’s construction projects for you, but it remains a striking space.

It took us a while to figure out how to get into the museum – the first door we tried turned out to be the exit, over on the left side of the piazza, so we made our way over to the other door on the right and they were happy to take our money and let us in. The lesson there, of course, is that once we got in we were going to have to wander through the buildings until we ended up on the other side of the piazza in order to get out, and eventually we did manage to do that but don’t ask me to retrace that journey on a map because that’s more dimensional physics than I want to learn.

The first space you enter once you get past the entrance is an open courtyard ringed by statues and the remains thereof. The friezes along the sides were interesting, as was the statue in the back.

The real focus of this space, however, are the bits and pieces from one or more vast statues that were clearly designed to impress onlookers in their original state but which now, as fragments, are oddly funny. I loved the hand and the foot and I will have to put them in my rotation for my social media profile pictures at some point. You have to understand, though, that each of these fragments was anywhere from 9 to 15 feet (3 to 5 meters) tall. Romans did not skimp on statues.

We designated this as our meeting space, set up a time to gather there, and then headed off in separate directions. It’s just easier that way.

It doesn’t take much to get lost in the Capitoline Museum. Some of that is due to the nature of the space, which reels out in new directions and levels every time you turn around and it’s almost impossible to get from one space to another without passing back through some intermediate hub area. There was an entire wing of the place I didn’t know existed until Oliver told me about it long after we’d left. But most of it is the fact that the place is just packed with stuff and you start looking around and suddenly a hundred years have gone by.

Seriously, packed.

There are friezes and carvings, from funeral stelae to inscriptions commemorating things that nobody has remembered in centuries to random bits of artwork that still have an odd sort of appeal after all this time.

There are more sarcophagi than you’d think possible from an empire that managed to survive that long without getting depopulated.

And there are all sorts of statues, pretty much everywhere you look. I have no idea how there is any marble left in the world, having seen the sheer volume of statues in Rome. Sculptors must have been their second largest occupational category after farmers. What’s astonishing is that this is just the stuff that survives and is on display. The Roman Empire was a long time ago. A lot has been lost and much of what hasn’t been lost is in storage because there isn’t that much museum space in the world.

Some of these statues were whimsical.

And some of them were seriously impressive – I was fascinated by the ones that incorporated widely different varieties of stone into one artwork, for example.

And then there was the room that had the creepiest statue I have ever seen.

You go in and immediately you think, “Well, this is another overdecorated room full of more artwork than is reasonable to have in this amount of space,” but that doesn’t separate it from most of the rooms in the Capitoline Museum when you get down to it so you slowly start to look at the various bits of art until, after some undefined but not nearly long enough unit of time, you find yourself staring at the big one in the middle.

This one.

There is no reason for this to exist. Having been brought into existence, there is no reason for it to be on display. And yet here we were. I will admit that there is a certain train-wreck fascination about the piece – enough to put it on my blog and devote several paragraphs to it, apparently – but I can’t really say it’s something I’d put in my garden.

I’ll go with the duck.

Or, perhaps, the big pieces that we all found at about the same time in a brightly lit atrium-like room somewhere in the middle of the museum, though those would require a considerably larger garden than the one we have.

There were a lot of them, and they made the space more welcoming – it was a nice place to sit for a bit and catch your breath.

You begin to understand where Sylvester Stallone’s roots are from, staring at these statues.

There’s more to the place than just Roman statues, though. There’s Egyptian statues, for those who like just a little bit of variety.

There’s Etruscan pottery, enough to stock an entire RenFaire with souvenirs.

There was a reconstructed chariot, kind of off to the side in one room, minding its own business. That’s the strangest thing about the Capitoline – everywhere you looked were these treasures and half the time you got the feeling they were just stuffed somewhere until the curator had time to figure out where she really wanted them to go.

There were vast echoing highly decorated rooms, each one more ornate than the last.

There was this room, which had a white statue at one end and the black one at the other as if the two were having a contest of some kind.

And then you got to the paintings, which had entire wings devoted to them. I spent a lot of time taking pictures of paintings to use for my Western Civ II class, which amused me no end even if my students likely won’t even notice. So much of teaching is just keeping yourself entertained.

They also had mosaics, for those so inclined. I’m not sure what it is about mosaics that makes the figures depicted look so odd, but it is endlessly amusing.

The thing about this place is that it had not only a wealth of things to look at inside the museum, but also fabulous views to look at outside of it as well.

My favorite bit was when I found a fairly lonely staircase that led to a vast arched brickwork space with some displays about construction projects, and if you kept going past all that it dead-ended into an open hallway. If you turn left and go down the hall you’d find a ground-level public space where tour groups were trying to find shade – the door between you and them was locked but if you had gone through it you’d find yourself outside of the museum entirely – but if you just kept looking straight across the hall you would discover that the hall itself was essentially a balcony overlooking the Roman Forum.

It was brutally hot – somewhere around 39C (102F) – and the Forum has no shade anywhere so I was glad to be where I was, yet even I had to be careful about putting my hands on the shaded part of the metal railing. The views were spectacular, though, and I had them pretty much to myself. Later I told Kim about it and when we went back there were a couple other people there with us, but it really was surprising how uncrowded it was.

Eventually it was long past lunch time and we’d met up at our designated spot, raided the gift shop for small things to take home, and were ready to eat the marble flooring so we headed out in search of sustenance. We ended up at a Tourist Trap Restaurant which was overpriced but nearby, air conditioned, and had good food (even the tourist traps in Rome have good food; you just pay more for it). It wasn’t our plan, but needs must and it kept us going.

A quick ride on the 83 Bus back to Testaccio, an equally quick raid on the corner grocery store for meats, cheeses, snacks, and fruit, and we were soon safely ensconced in our apartment, happily enjoying our siesta. We could do that even with the museum visit because dinner time in Italy is much later than it is in Wisconsin. In Italy the Early Bird Special for old people and small children starts at 7pm, when most restaurants open, and you really don’t start to see places fill up with diners until around 9pm. So we had plenty of time. I finished all of the online grading I planned to do on this trip and relaxed for a while.

And then I decided I wanted to go for a walk. The Testaccio neighborhood is named for its most prominent geographic feature, Monte Testaccio – an artificial mountain made entirely from broken pottery. I’d been to Testaccio twice before and never actually seen it, and this seemed like something I could easily correct since it was only about two blocks away. Oliver and Kim, noting the temperature outside, wished me well in my journey.

Monte Testaccio is fairly large – well over a hundred feet (33 meters) high and entirely made of broken olive oil amphorae. Because of the way olive oil interacts with the clay amphorae they couldn’t be reused and they had to be disposed of somehow, so the Roman government organized Monte Testaccio as a way to do that. It’s surprisingly well engineered and for a long time the restaurants at its base used the easily carved hill as storage space. Apparently you can make a great wine cellar that way, quickly and with minimal effort as long as you don’t dig too far and make the whole thing come crashing down on you. It’s a designated archeological site these days and you can’t climb it without an appointment but you can see it from the sidewalk.

It looks like this.

There’s a little street that meanders on back along the side of Monte Testaccio and I walked down for a while. It was lined with restaurants, many of which are listed on the myriad of websites touting Testaccio’s rising fine dining scene, and abandoned buildings, which presumably are not. It was interesting.

Fine dining not really being our thing, we decided that for dinner we’d go back to one of our haunts in Testaccio – Pizzeria da Remo. It’s a very local sort of place – if you don’t speak Italian you’re sort of on your own and the staff will let you know that in no uncertain terms. They get in your face in a way that feels natural to anyone from Philadelphia or New York City, but there’s no malice behind it and they warm up fairly quickly. Since returning home it has been deeply amusing reading the online reviews left by my fellow tourists who were expecting something more docile, I think. But the food is wonderful and you can sit outside and enjoy the evening. We have gone here every time we’ve been to Rome and if we ever go back no doubt we’ll return. We got our pizzas and our supplì (deep fried tomato-flavored rice balls with cheese inside) and had a lovely time of it.

It’s always tricky getting water at restaurants in Europe. I think Europeans drink less water than Americans do. You have to order it – it doesn’t just appear on your table – and it comes in one-liter glass bottles with no free refills, and both here and at the Tourist Trap earlier we ordered a bottle apiece. Each time the waiter looked at us as if we’d clearly made a mistake. “Those are big bottles!” they said. “Yes,” we replied. “We’re Americans. We’ll be fine.” And we were.

The evening was still young, though, so after dinner we decided we’d go down to see our favorite temples, a quick bus ride away. The bus drops you off at a lovely spot next to the Boca della Verita, which we’ve never actually gone in to try – apparently if you put your hand in the mouth of the statue and tell a lie it will bite off your hand– so we walked over. The entry gate was closed by this point, but that meant that the crowd had thinned to where we could actually see it. It’s right there on the outside wall, behind a wall of bars separating it from the sidewalk, which came as a surprise to me as I’d always thought it was inside the building but there you go.

From there we walked over to the temples – the Temple of Hercules Victor (the round one) and the Temple of Portunus (the square one). The place was pretty much ours at that hour, and we enjoyed walking around and seeing them, as well as the oldest private home in Rome right across the street.

They’ve also got some kind of art exchange going with South Korea now, the net result of which is this statue – the Colonne Infinite, which will be there until sometime this fall.

We weren’t far from Trastevere at that point and since it had started to cool off slightly we decided that it would be a nice walk from the temples to the Isola Tiberina, which sits in the middle of the Tiber River and has a some lovely bridges across the river into Trastevere.

From the far bridge we could see down to the river walk, where there was a night market in progress.

We marveled at that for a while before heading into Trastevere, which is the hopping part of Rome if you happen to be a lot younger and more party-oriented than we are. Still, a lovely place to walk around, though.

On our way back we decided we’d go down to the night market and see what it was like. It was lively, with vendors lining the walk, music filling the air, restaurants and bars in full swing, and crowds of people just strolling along with us. There was one place that had movie posters for sale that was interesting.

I’m not sure what the graffiti artist was trying to get across with this bit of artwork on the wall, or even if there was anything more to it than the fact that chickens are worth celebrating in some way, but as someone who spent more time than he ever thought possible working with poultry I understood.

It took us a while to find a staircase back up to the street level, and by that point we were close enough to the apartment that we just walked the rest of the way even though it was still 90F (33C) at 11pm. It was good to get back to the air conditioning, and we called it a day.