Adventures in Italy- Rome

I’m sitting in a PC Lab in the library at Lancaster University, staring at a blank screen. The mere thought of everything I want to write about the past week and a half overwhelms me. I don’t know where to start. There is so much to tell. I’m still getting used to the idea that I was in Italy three days ago, and now I’m in Lancaster, not to mention the month (month?!) I’ve just passed in London. Time is flying by, and these are not idle hours. These are unforgettable days and nights I’m passing here, indelible memories I’m making, pages I’m adding to the chapters of the book of my LIFE. What the heck?
The day I left for London I remember thinking I was crazy, that life wasn’t making sense, that the motions I was going through were entirely unreal. After a month everything still feels unreal. I am ecstatic to be here.
The really funny (in my mind) thing I find hard to believe is that I’ve survived. Sometimes just barely, but those are the times I’ll look back on as the moments where I evolved most as a person.
I’ll start from the beginning.
On September 23, 2006, six girls who had never travelled alone before, including me, boarded a plane to Rome, Italy. In the boarding line I met an older couple who were also flying to Rome for vacation. They were split up by the sequence numbers on their tickets, so I made conversation with the woman while her husband waited in a separate line. I didn’t catch her name, but we talked for a while as the line moved slowly, and I noticed that she was carrying a novel by Margaret Atwood (one of my favourite authors) that I had never seen before called The Penelopiad. I asked her about it, and she gave me an articulate plot summary. It turns out she graduated from the University of Toronto, the same University from which Atwood is an alum, with a degree in English. I felt lucky to have met her. It seemed to me like a good sign.
We arrived at Rome’s Ciampino airport at 8:20pm. Here I experienced my first Italian bathroom—sans toilet seats. After going through passport control we picked up our single piece of checked luggage. I had volunteered to check my carry-on suitcase so that everyone could put their liquids into one bag and just carry backpacks on the plane. This worked out for me because I gained extra space for clothes and other necessities, but I also had to lug around an extra bag. The girls kindly offered to switch off when I got tired.
At the money exchange booth we ran into some more good luck. We had reserved a shuttle from the airport directly to the hostel, the alarmingly inexpensive Camping Tiber, but we weren’t quite sure where it would pick us up. Two girls in line ahead of us happened to mention the name of the hostel. Turns out they were staying in the same hostel and were also looking for the shuttle. Talk about a coincidence! They introduced themselves as Aly and Kate, two students from Canada travelling around Europe for a few months. (Side note: I bought a magazine in the airport before the flight to Rome. One week after meeting Aly and Kate, as we were waiting to catch the shuttle to the airport in Venice, I was flipping through the magazine a second time and came across a picture of Aly! She had been interviewed by Glamour magazine for a special about women in debt. Aly, a “student from Canada”, had stated that she was working to pay off her University debt. How bizarre is that?)
After a short time a short man showed up carrying in his broken arm a piece of paper on which the name of our hostel was hastily written in marker. I have to admit that he and his blood shot eyes made me nervous, and the fact that he didn’t speak any English at all wasunsettling. What had we gotten ourselves into?
In fact, he turned out to be a very nice man, just as Camping Tiber turned out to be a great place to stay. We had booked six beds in what was called a “20 bed female dorm”. In reality, the “dorm” was a huge open room partitioned off into mini-rooms by low concrete walls. In each mini-room were two bunk beds and a curtain for a door. Essentially, there was zero privacy or security and no way of keeping your neighbours (or the dogs outside) from making too much noise while you were trying to sleep. However, there was locked storage for our bags during the day (I still slept with my purse at night), the beds were much more comfortable than the ones at IES, and the lights always went off at a reasonable hour. Plus, we learned very quickly that when you’re utterly exhausted a little noise and even overhead lights can’t stop you from sleeping soundly. Camping Tiber also had a great restaurant with friendly staff and fairly reasonable prices. Its biggest drawback was the outdoor bathroom which was about a three minute walk down the main road from our dorm. They were surprisingly clean, though, which made the 6:30am trek to the shower a bit more bearable.
Yes, we woke up at 6:30am. Camping Tiber ran free shuttles to the train station every hour starting at 8am. We aimed for the earliest bus right away. At the bus stop the first morning we met two Australian women who were travelling Europe in their VW bus. They told us what train stop to get off at and also let us know that we had very fortunately come to Rome during European Culture Celebration Weekend and nearly everything was free. (Side note: Two days later we spotted these same women again on the stairs of the Piazza di Michelangelo in Florence. The odds of meeting them again in another city are so slim; that sort of coincidence makes me smile.)
The train ride into Rome each day took about thirty minutes, but it dropped us off right in the centre of town. Our first day in the city was fantastic. The weather was beautiful—at least 80 degrees and sunny. We saw the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, the Trajan Column, the Trevi Fountain, countless piazzas, the Spanish Steps, and the house where Keats spent the last three months of his life. We heard music on the streets, ate lunch at a small (and very expensive) café, took hundreds of pictures and just enjoyed the thrill of being in Rome. Several times Caroline and I looked at each other and just smiled. Dinner was at an outdoor café in a piazza. We walked miles and sweated like crazy but cooled ourselves with gelato or, in my case, sorbet, which we ate by the Trevi Fountain at night. My exhaustion that night was the product of an extremely satisfying first day in Italy.
The second day in Rome was not so great. It poured from the time we woke up until the time we went to bed. And this was the day we had planned to see the Vatican City and St. Peter’s Basilica, which required lines, lots of very long lines. So, we waited in a 2 ½ hour line for the Vatican, soaked to the bone and freezing cold, battling a very pushy bunch of Asians all the while. I gave in and bought an umbrella for €5 about 1 ½ hours into it. Everyone else resisted and ended up completely water-logged.
Vatican City was, of course, very beautiful and full of artwork, but we were exhausted from the previous day and cranky and wet. It was tough to keep going. Finally we decided just to try to make it to the Sistine Chapel. This proved much easier said than done. Signs for the Sistine were posted right at the entrance of the Vatican, but it turns out that the signs and the ropes and the queues actually lead you on a wild goose chase (a rather slow, crowded goose chase) to get to the actual chapel. It reminded me of those tacky celebrity news programs that announce the top story at the start of the hour but don’t actually get to it until the last five minutes.
The Sistine Chapel was worth the wildness and the slowness and the crowdedness. It was magnificent. I stood in the middle just looking up. It really is a fantastic sight. It’s unbelievable that one person could have the will to complete a project so massive. Eventually I found a seat on the side of the chapel where I had a nice view of the paintings on the lower part of the ceiling. Would you believe me if I told you that I fell asleep in the Sistine Chapel, right then and there, in an upright sitting position? Well, I did. And I tried everything I could not to, but my eyes were absolutely determined to close and remain shut. That’s when I decided to stand up again.
We ended up seeing all of the Vatican museums twice that day, including the Sistine Chapel, because we got lost on our way out. It was a pretty terrible experience. We then sprinted to St. Peter’s Basilica in a torrential downpour, only to wait in line again. Caroline and I had just about had it by then. Honestly, I would have been much happy experiencing Italy from the warm confines of a local café. It really wasn’t necessary for me to stand in line with a bunch of Americans or other tourists from around the world waiting to see something that really lost its essence when it was taken over by pushy people with cameras to feel like I had truly experienced Rome. Regardless, I stuck with the group and finally made it into the Basilica, which was more like a museum than a church-a really fantastic, mind blowingly beautiful and massive church-museum. I recognized at least four pieces of famous artwork from the Art History course I took at Pittsburgh. I’m still trying to work out how I feel about such extravagant displays of religious faith, but it was certainly a sight to behold. Still, my feet really hurt.
We made it back to Tiber after that. I discovered Italian misquitoes that night. They come out when it rains and hang around in puddles. All of the waiting in line we had done that day made me a prime target for the blood-sucking little flies, and I ended up with a decent display of bites all around my ankles. They itched. A lot.
That night at the hostel Caroline ordered Risotto with Scampi for dinner and ended up with at least six whole enormous crayfish on her plate, eyeballs and antennae and all. She freaked and somehow I became the lucky one that got to fish them out of the mushy rice and into a paper bag where they could no longer be seen. I still haven’t figured out how Italians eat their crayfish whole, and sometime I’m going to ask for a demonstration.
We got a special shuttle the next morning at 6:30am to travel again. We switched metro lines twice to make it to Tiburtina train station where we caught a train to Florence at a discounted price and ended up riding first class entirely by accident--very roomy indeed. Thus, we were off to explore Florence. One Italian city down, two to go!
To be continued…