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| At Trevi Fountain. It seemed like everywhere we wanted to go involved going through this piazza, so we saw quite a lot of Trevi Fountain. This is in the uncrowded early morning hours — usually it’s thronged with people. |
Confession: I didn’t like Rome too much last time I was here. When you’re a 21-year old college student staying in youth hostels, it seems you get a lot of unwanted attention from various sleazy young men. Fortunately, it seems this is not a problem when you’re a 41-year old mother of three.
It’s evening in Rome, and we’re still standing. It’s been a very busy day. Our flight left Boston at 5 pm last night, and I have to say that we’ve become big fans of Alitalia. We got dinner – macaroni and cheese with what appeared to be pancetta – plus wine and various other snacks. We had pillows and blankets and headphones. The kids had Phineas and Ferb to watch on their individual TV sets. (We also got breakfast – pastry and yogurt and, unaccountably, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. But given that this was served at around midnight EST, we were marginally less enthusiastic.) Also, the coffee I had on the plane was better than just about anything I’ve had in an American restaurant.The kids managed to sleep a few hours on the plane, before we were woken up for “breakfast” at 11:45 pm (or 5:45 am, as the case may be). Our flight landed an hour later and we were up for the day. The taxi ride to our hotel was a real thrill ride, careening down narrow cobblestone alleys that were completely unsuited to automotive traffic, buildings and pedestrians flashing by about 6 inches away on either side.
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| The Spanish Steps (again, early morning hours; again, usually thronged) |
It was much too early to get into our hotel, of course, so we set off on a walking tour of nearby landmarks. As it turns out, our hotel room doesn’t have a lot to recommend it (unless you’re a fan of aged décor and unreliable plumbing), but the location is great. We were a short walk from the Spanish Steps and the spectacular Trevi Fountain. These are normally packed with people, but at 7:30 am were only populated by a few street cleaners.
At this point we fell prey to what we’ve since found is the Rome Directional Vortex, which rendered both of us completely unable to read a map. We were supposedly about 5 minutes from the Pantheon, according to the Google directions I’d printed out earlier, and we were supposed to be meeting our friends the Brookses (whom we haven’t seen in 10 months) there. But somehow neither Bob nor I was at all able to navigate. We’d find where we were on the map, determine which direction to go, then stop a few minutes later, pull out the map to check our progress, scratch our heads, and discovered we had no idea where we were. We then had to find ourselves on the map again and restart the cycle. We must have walked for miles, mostly in the wrong direction, attempting to get to the Pantheon. Luckily, Rome offers many rewards to the wanderer, with amazing architecture, ancient ruins, and fascinating people-watching everywhere you looked.
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| Reunited at the Pantheon |
Finally we made it, and there was much excitement being reunited with our friends again. It was clear that we needed to go somewhere where the kids could run around and squeal without disturbing hordes of people, so we set off for the Villa Borghese, a huge, beautiful park near our hotel. Here Bob and I managed to get lost in the park. We were attempting to find this particular playground, but eventually just gave up in despair.
Probably the kids’ favorite stop of the day was the Piazza Navona, a huge oval piazza with the famous Fountain of the Four Rivers and lots of artists and street performers. Nadia desperately wanted to give all of them coins, and given that the smallest coins we had were 2 euros each, that would have been a rather expensive proposition.
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| Despite all the horsey rides, Lanie didn’t quite make it through the day. |
The kids were rock stars today. We didn’t end up getting back to our hotel until after 7pm at night, so we all made it the full day on little to no sleep. In addition, we walked for miles and miles. (Lanie is the exception to this, as she convinced all of the other 7 kids to play a “horsey” game wherein they gave her piggy back rides. Somehow, Tom Sawyer-like, she managed to have them all fighting over the privilege of who would get to carry her around next while she crouched on their backs and shouted, “Canter! Gallop!”.)
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From Bob:
This was a long day, indeed. Even beyond all the international travel elements, and the rigors of being in a different country, this family really pounds the pavement. I think most Romans would be ready for bed if they followed us around from the Spanish steps to all the way through our urban hike around town.
At one point, we decided it was just a little too early to pack it in, so we took a walk from the second-highest-rated restaurant in Rome (which happens to be a gelato shop) all the way to the Piazza Navona. Chris Brooks’ smart phone told us it would be .6 kilometers, which seemed like no sweat. Getting four adults across this particular .6 kilometers of Roman terrain would have been a nice stroll. There were mostly pedestrian-friendly alleyways and street vendors, and lots of pedestrians by this time of the evening.
Getting eight kids across this route was a little more involved, what with all the pedestrians, street
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| Gelato! At supposedly the 2nd best place in Rome. |
vendors and small Roman automobiles that seem to consider themselves pedestrians. Oh, and I forgot Wendy’s mom Susan, she was there too. She was just as sturdy a travel as the kids were. My point is, that if you just counted our mileage it might not seem like that much, but we covered some ground. Enough ground, in fact, that Lanie gave out just as our final trip back to the hotel commenced. I had to carry her limp form all the way home. It actually wasn’t that bad, though I wish our hotel room was on the first floor and not the fourth.
Now for what we learned during all this walking. Somebody could write a book about all this old stuff here. It won’t be me though, because I really didn’t take a lot of the dates and facts in very well. I’m generally quite interested in history, but history here is rather oppressive. It keeps following you around and jumping out behind every corner. This little fountain here the middle of this lonely plaza used to be for cows, apparently. And this statue commemorates this incredibly famous person from antiquity, while that enormous edifice is for some guy I’ve never heard of who died in 1873 (which, in Rome, was yesterday). The ancient ruins on this block are different from the ancient ruins over there because…I’ve got nothing. I have no idea why these ruins are different from those. I won’t be able to relay how dense the historical atmosphere is here. Every five minutes, not at all figuratively, there is a new building in front of you that makes you say to your wife, “That must be special.” And you wife says back, “Yeah.” And then you complete the same conversation five minutes down the road.
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| One of the ubiquitous Roman fountains |
What has stuck with me, and what I think the Romans do particularly well, is water. Yes, this includes the famous fountains, which are beautiful to behold, and offer a nice gathering point for living statues and spray paint artists. But I’m mostly referring to the small, barely conspicuous flows of water that we encountered countless times today just splashing away in little out of the way corners. Sometimes they’re just pipes sticking up out of the ground bubbling away, sometimes the water emerges from a lion’s mouth or a maiden’s bucket.
This is how old Europe does drinking water. I assume it’s carried in on the same aqueduct that brings water to the Trevi. It’s potable, we know, because we’ve been drinking it all day. We would not have thought to do this on our own, but we saw lots and lots of Roman folk walk right up and take a swig. Businessmen hold their ties out of the way and lean right in. Scores of school kids gather round with empty soda bottles and push each other out of the way to fill up. “Que fresca!” I heard one kid say. Although this sounded like Spanish to me, I did not disagree with the sentiment. It was quite good, fresh water.
At one point in the afternoon we knew we had pizza coming and we were in the middle of a park. We were out of water, but I knew there was water somewhere. We roamed the park looking for a drinking fountain. All we could find were the decorative kind. Maybe you could drink out of them, but we could only reach the standing water part of the fountain, and I wasn’t sure that the spraying part wasn’t just recycled from the pool anyway. There was one little fountain that had a trickle coming out of a rock that dripped down into a small, but deep pool. I was thinking about swinging in and trying to figure out how to snatch some, when a huge dog ran right in front of us and jumped in the pool and started licking the rock. The kids in my water search party did not think this was a good sign.
The last drinking fountain we remembered was at the top of the Spanish Steps, which didn’t seem too far away on the map. Jen and Nadia ventured out and were defeated by the Roman streets. It’s a tough city to get around in because of all the streets. It sounds weird, I know, but it’s true. They have so many streets here, but most of them are only 50 feet long. You’re on one street, then there’s a huge but otherwise nondescript piece of antiquity, and then you’re not on that street anymore, it’s another street and it’s difficult to figure out how you got there. It’s taking us quite a while to get used to this. Luckily, Nadia and Jen made it back to o
ur playground headquarters, albeit without any water, and guess who managed to save the day? Me, of course. Well, it was really a school trip of third graders from Lazio or somewhere and they were all gathered in a big crowd right there next to our playground. A mass of orange baseball caps jostling for position in the middle of a Roman park can mean just one thing. I grabbed a water bottle and went right over and, after patiently waiting my turn, filled right up.
You can check this story out yourself. Just go to the big park up on the hill and go over to where the puppet theater is next to the playground and the hut with little kids’ rides like the ones in the mall that for some reason our kids did not seem to notice the whole time we were there today. There’s a fountain right in that place. Bathrooms are another story, though.
The pizza was really good, too.
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| At the Villa Borghese. That one boy on the left is not one of ours, lest you be confused. |