Things Work Out After All

I'm always delighted to be wrong. At least when I've made a gloomy prediction. I am now back from Rome. More on this in a hour or two after I've had a shower and organized my thoughts. But I am now in New Jersey and I can do whatever I like until a little after noon on Wednesday. With a proviso that I might want/need to meet my sister, mother, etc. at the airport tomorrow, on Tuesday, sometime around 6:30pm and then do more.

Tomorrow I am thinking of visiting an art museum.

And I will be up until about 9pm Eastern, that is 7pm Mountain and on my mobile, if you want to talk to me. I'm still stoked about the Pantheon.

27 Hours in the Eternal City

My earlier peevish posting proved, very happily, to be quite wrong. I have been twice lucky in the last few days. First to get the last seat to Rome and then to get back out again after US Air canceled a flight and caused everything to go higgidy piggity. In fact I have only three minor complaints about the last few days.

First, I did not find anything wonderful to bring back to America. Not even a box of chocolates for Richard. Second that I ended up being very, very tired for the end of walking around Rome and may not have seen everything I might have. And I may not have been as awestruck as a more wakeful man. Third I have managed to wrench my right ring finger somehow.

I should have gotten some sleep or rather at least tried to do it as I have yet to do more than doze fitfully on any airplane flight. We arrived early in the morning on Sunday and due to a lack of traffic we arrived at the hotel at about 8:15, about thirty minutes after landing. This was far before our hotel room was to be ready at 9:30. We actually got in at fifteen minute early and were on the street after both my father and I had showers.

The Colosseum is not like one might imagine. It is huge and impressive, but only for its time. It is nothing on the scale of most modern structures. But emerging in the sunlight from the subway was... like stepping out of the ordinary life into a picture. The enormously familiar sight from pictures, movies, and paintings was there in front of me. We walked around it and over through the Roman Forum. There I saw where it all happened. The little ruined place where Julius Cesar was assassinated. Where Cicero made his speeches. All the later Forums built by the successive emperors. Overwhelming things to see all at once and so quickly.

It was very hot and the crush of crowds grew again as we got near the Trevi Fountain. It was beautiful, but it was too overrun to enjoy. So was the Pantheon a little while later. But I was ecstatic anyway. This is what I came to see. Columns as crisp as the day they were carved, just as Hadrian left them. The outside may be stripped and the inside filled with new gods, but... This is the place.

Lunch nearby, a beer was very refreshing. A local pilzner on tap with a plate of gnoci. Then a walk back across the tiber to the hotel where dad said he would lay down for a minute. I drifted off and was then nearly impossible to get moving again for the Vatican. Which was also rather like the Colosseum. So familiar yet there in front of me. It was not as overwhelming as it expected from the central cathedral of catholicism. Maybe it was too big to feel like I was in doors.