Rome II

August 10. The hotel breakfast room was on the top floor, reachable by a convoluted combination of elevators and staircases. Bright and cheery, with sheer white drapes over the tall windows, the room looked as if it had once been the hotel roof, and subsequently enclosed when an annex was added to the building. The breakfast offered was continental, but substantial. There was a fine selection of juices, cereals, fruits, eggs, and cold meats, and excellent breads and pastries.

Even at this early hour, in this air-conditioned room, you could sense the heat of the day.

At a tabacchi stand in the Stazione Termini we bought day passes for the Metro. A short subway ride and we were out in the sunshine right across from the Colosseum. Actors dressed as centurions and soldiers of ancient Rome posed for photographs alongside smiling tourists. The line waiting to get into the massive structure (colossal is the right word for it) wound around to the back, a full 90 degrees, which happened also to be about the temperature in Fahrenheit. In the shade.

The ruins are impressive up close. It does not take much of an imagination to visualize the caged wild animals in those underground passages, the gladiators and Christian prisoners, the nets and tridents, short swords and shields, the heavy gates and portcullises, the crowds, the cries, and the blood. Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus. Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute thee.

The Colosseum, like so many other monuments in today's Rome, including the Vatican itself, has become a tourism moneymaker on a grand scale. Nothing wrong with that, but for those who yearn for a less frenzied appraisal of the glories of a bygone time, this commercialization may strike a sour note. I guess mass tourism can be blamed for that. And for the graffiti. Another word of Italian origin that is now in the English language.

When we had seen what we wanted of the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, we decided to forego the passage through the Via Sacra and the Forum in the blistering heat, and descended once again into the depths of the Metropolitano. At the Ottaviano-S.Pietro stop we came out into the sunlight, and there in the distance against the blue sky could be seen several of the statues atop the colonnade of St. Peter's Square. We lingered over lunch at a Tuscan restaurant, where we noted that the clientele was made up mainly of local people, a sure sign of good Italian food. I must acknowledge, though, that I've had melanzana alla parmigiana just as good in a Palo Alto ristorante.

A short walk after that hearty meal, and then we were in the Piazza di San Pietro itself, one of the most beautiful public squares in the world, and there it was, the glorious façade of the Basilica with its great dome towering over all.

The younger ones in our group did make it up to the very top of the duomo, but we older folk who had made that very same hike twenty-two years before decided instead to take it easy inside the crowded basilica.
Set apart by a red velvet cordon and monitored by a young Latin American attendant in a dark suit, a chapel on one side of the massive nave now prepared for 5:30PM Mass. The priest officiated in Latin, and the familiar words brought back poignant memories of my time as an altar-boy.

The kids joined us after their descent from the upper reaches of the immense dome, and sat with us through the remainder of the Mass. That they found us in that crowd is something of a major achievement.