Europe 24 - Rome, Day 4

The Germans were a bit of a mystery.

We were in Rome in August. August is high tourism season when places like Rome are packed with people who aren’t locals – people like us who are just visiting because Rome is one of those places you should visit at some point in your life if you can. It’s an amazing city, with astonishing things to see and really good food. August is also when most of Europe goes on vacation, so having a lot of non-Italian Europeans there wasn’t all that surprising either.

Nevertheless, there did seem to be a disproportionate number of large German tour groups walking around, taking the same buses we were on and generally wearing identical straw hats with differently colored bands above the brim to separate out one group of German teenagers from another. In a crowded city packed with tourists, they stood out.

We filed that thought away for future consideration.

We had our own quixotic mission for this day. Last year we went to the Vatican, which is a fascinating and worthwhile place even if you’re not Catholic. St. Peter’s Basilica is immense and full of gorgeous things, and the Vatican Museum has quite possibly the most overwhelming collection of artifacts in the world. You could spend days there.

As always, there is a gift shop.

At this gift shop – and nowhere else on the planet, apparently, not even online – they sell a Vatican perfume. I know! Who would have thought such a thing? But they do. You can get things labeled as Vatican perfume online, but they are not this. This can only be purchased in person, at the Vatican Museum gift shop, which will not ship it to you. It is surprisingly affordable, as perfumes go, though, and actually a very nice fragrance. Lauren bought some while she was there. She loves it and wanted us to get more if we could.

But getting into the Vatican Museum is an expensive and time-consuming process, especially if all you want to do is go to the gift shop. A series of phone calls revealed that there is no way to do the latter if you didn’t do the former as well, so we had to make alternate plans.

Such as breakfast. And then out into the city for another day of visiting.

Kim and I have walked past the Castel Sant’Angelo on two previous visits, including last year when we did so with Oliver and Lauren. It’s an imposing building, originally built as the tomb of Emperor Hadrian in the second century CE, converted into a fortress in 401CE, and then converted again into a papal castle in the 1300s. It sits at the end of a bridge full of Bernini statues, a quick walk away from the Vatican, so it’s easy to get to but we never went inside. This, we decided, needed to change.

The 30 Bus takes you pretty much to the foot of the bridge, but this year was much less scenic as all of the Bernini statues are being worked on. On the plus side, though, the restoration work squeezed out the relentless selfie-stick vendors and power-bank hucksters who had lined the bridge last year.

Castel Sant’Angelo is a many-layered complex, as you would expect from something that was designed to defend in depth against invaders. The doors are open now, but you can imagine that getting inside when the people there didn’t want you to do that would have been a trick. These days, though, you go to the entrance, buy your tickets, and quickly find yourself in the outer ring of the place walking clockwise around the central tower for what feels like an afternoon before the actual entryway to the fortress appears before you.

Fortunately there is a lot you can see as you walk along. There are artifacts all over the place just casually lying about, as is surprisingly common in Rome, and there are side rooms you can explore.

And as with Rome in general, there are fountains where you can refill your water bottle. They never stop running, and you just put your bottle up to the end of the tube. But if you want to drink from it directly there is a trick to it which the group of fellow tourists in front of us did not know so we taught it to them. You plug the end of the tube with your finger, and then the water shoots up from a small hole right at the bend of the tube (on this one, it’s actually a small vertical tube) and it’s much easier than trying to drink from the end of the tube.

The people who designed Castel Sant’Angelo were clever in many ways, one of which is how they get you to climb all the way up to the top of the fortress without really realizing it. You don’t take stairs, at least not until you get almost all the way up. Mostly you walk up a series of wide curving ramps which were probably put there to make it easier to get carts and horses where they needed to go. You walk along thinking how this is just a casual stroll up a slope and you’ll rethink the serious climb when you get to the steep part and suddenly you’re done.

The first open space we found was this courtyard, with its statue. We’d return to it a time or two and it was a nice space to sit on the benches for a bit – especially those in the shade – and rest.

The thing about Castel Sant’Angelo that surprised us was that it wasn’t just a fortress. It’s an entire ecosystem. It has all sorts of fascinating spaces – highly decorated rooms, lavish apartments (one pope actually kitted the place out for whenever he needed a refuge from people trying to kill him, which was apparently a common enough thing to require a refuge though not so common as to spark any sort of introspection on his part – he also put in a covered fortified passageway from the Vatican, just in case), display areas, and so on. It has art of many kinds. And it has some lovely views of the rest of the city, which you can say about almost every building in Rome over three stories tall, but it never gets old and you’re never wrong.

This is what having popes in residence can get you in terms of decorated spaces:

If you look closely at the decorations as you wander from room to room you find some really fascinating artwork as well.

Also there is an entire room devoted to weaponry, which makes sense if you think about it.

Most of the paintings and sculptures are medieval or early Renaissance, and as with so many of these museums they seem to go on forever. You go through a room and marvel at what is there and then you turn a corner and go into the next room and the process repeats for much longer than you’d think possible given the number of similar museums in Rome.

This one, from the 13th century, is in what the little information sign called the “Umbrian-Abbruzzese” school but it struck me as oddly modern in a way – that elongated sort of profile would have been perfectly at home in the mid-20th century.

This one is from the 15th century, and to be honest I’ve had this student in class before.

Also, why does this guy look like he is about to slip a few bucks into your hand with the reminder not to tell your parents?

One of the things that Castel Sant’Angelo is known for, oddly enough, are fireworks displays. Known as La Girondola, these displays were a regular feature from the 1480s into the late 1800s, generally around Easter, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul (June 28), or whenever a new pope was elected, and they were extravagant things involving stage sets (which often burned down), huge numbers or rockets, and a genuine sense of theater. Bernini designed the show one year, in fact. They stopped doing this in the late 1800s because it was damaging the building, but recently they’ve started up again. You can find videos online. There is an entire area of Castel Sant’Angelo devoted to the history of all this with an extensive collection of paintings and prints of various shows over the centuries, and this one was my favorite.

Eventually you discover that without quite knowing how you have made it all the way up to the top by the big statue of the Archangel Michael which gives the place its name. It’s a large open space with exactly zero shade so staying there on a cloudless 98F/37C afternoon isn’t really something anyone wants to do for any great length of time, but the statue is really very impressive.

You also get some wonderful views of the city from up there.

Those views don’t stop as you work your way back down, really.

Eventually we found ourselves nearing the ground level again, but then got distracted by an entirely new area of the place we hadn’t seen. Basically there was a narrow path that circumnavigated the entire fortress, with occasional widenings for armament displays, and we made our way around.

You can see the Archangel’s piazza from below as well.

It was getting toward lunchtime – which happened later and later the longer we stayed in Italy – and we decided that a return to the Testaccio Market was a good plan, so we found the nearest 280 Bus stop and started walking toward it except that at one point we had a choice between following GoogleMaps along the streets or cutting through a leafy park. On the one hand, GoogleMaps was quite clear about taking the streets. On the other, the park was shady and GoogleMaps isn’t always the most reliable guide. Oliver and I chose the streets. Kim took the park. It turned out that the park had no exit at the other end – there was an actual dry moat keeping people in – so Kim had to retrace her steps while Oliver and I found a shady spot on a corner to hang out. In the end we all got about the same amount of shade, so who can say who won that choice?

Also, while we were waiting at the bus stop, a guy drove up in this and parked sideways.

These little cars were fascinating. Cars in Europe are generally smaller than cars in the US, in part because cars in the US are bloated far beyond any rational need for them and in part because the roads are narrower in Europe and the cities were laid out long before cars and didn’t leave space for them the way American cities do. European cities tend to be walkable, which you don’t realize how much you want to live that way until you’re in one. But Italian cars seem to be even smaller than most European cars since their roads and cites are even narrower (this is called “foreshadowing” – stay tuned!) and Italian men seem to have found other ways to express their masculinity.  Sometimes they take the small car thing to extremes, though. A surprising number of the cars in Rome are small enough to park sideways without interfering with traffic, not that motorists in Rome would allow anything – even the laws of physics – interfere with their driving.

We got to Testaccio and walked past the park where Kim and I had eaten our gelato the night before. It was much less crowded during the day.

The Testaccio Market closes at 2pm so we had to get our lunches quickly. Fortunately we found good food, plentiful beverages, and a shady spot to eat and drink, and all was right with the world.

There followed a siesta.

At some point, however, it occurred to us that the pope’s main church is not technically St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. It’s actually the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, which we could get to via the 3 Tram if we took it past the Baths of Caracalla. That was a papal church. They had a gift shop. Maybe we could find Lauren’s perfume there?

Worth a shot.

So Kim and I hopped on the 3 Tram and headed over. We went right by the Colosseum, which we chose not to visit on this trip, and eventually found ourselves at one of the largest intersections in Rome, staring across a hundred meters of asphalt to St. John’s Lateran, which was behind a protective barrier of construction projects.

To get in we had to find our way over to the plywood and then follow the narrow path around to the right for about ten minutes, dodging the oncoming pedestrians as best we could. We did pass this building, though, and that was interesting enough to keep us occupied as we walked by.

And then we were there. It’s a big, imposing church – not as big as St. Peter’s, but certainly big enough. You have to pass through a security check, but that was surprisingly pro forma and we soon found our way in.

And that’s where we found the Germans.

There were thousands of them, all there for a special mass of some kind which was being celebrated rather enthusiastically in German. They were clearly very much into it despite the heat, and the medical area slowly filled up with overwhelmed teenagers as we watched. Religious fervor plus dehydration will do that, I suppose.

It’s a lovely church, as you would expect.

We found the gift shop pretty quickly – it was off to the side where it didn’t interfere with the service – and just as quickly determined that there was no perfume there, alas, though there were other things that looked enticing. And then we wandered around a bit since we were there and why not? The Germans didn’t seem to mind. The church had even opened up the courtyard for the occasion – normally an additional fee – and that was a fairly peaceful oasis amid all the hubbub.

We took the tram back to the apartment and started packing up a bit since we were leaving bright and early the next morning, but that soon gave way to dinner at a place called Osteria degli Amici, over by Mt. Testaccio. It was a bit more elegant than we usually went in for, but the food was tasty and they were very responsive about allergies. At first I felt kind of quarantined off, as they put us a fair distance from the other diners, but we’d gotten there early by Italian standards (8pm) and as the hour got later the place filled up around us.

I showed Kim and Oliver Mt. Testaccio on the way back, and then we finished our packing and watched some of the Olympics on Italian television for a while, which meant that we got to see athletes who weren’t American. Those of you who watched on US television probably didn’t even know such people existed, as the American networks tend to keep that fact fairly well hidden. But there were! Many of them won medals.