Saturday, July 12, 2014

Vatican Museum

Ancient Rome Pics

Beer Review: The Last Two

Beer #29: Perroni Rosso

Served: Pint, with aperitivo buffet

Appearance: Reddish brown, translucent.

Scent: Faint beer scent. Same as most Italian beers.

Taste: This tastes almost like Killian's Irish Red. This is not really a compliment.

Cost: €6. However, this came with the plate of food in the picture. Not a bad deal.

Overall: 3.5/10. The aperitivo buffet was good though.

Beer #30: La Chouffe

Served: Tulip glass.

Appearance: Cloudy, orange/reddish.

Scent: Bready, Belgian, and delicious.

Taste: Bread, coriander, strong flavor. Classic Belgian beer.

Cost: €5. However, Belgian beers at 8.4% ABV also usually cost around that much in America.

Overall: 8/10. It was a good beer overall, but remember, I really like big Belgian beers. If you're impartial, perhaps take off a point or two.

Monday, June 30, 2014

Day 31 & 32: The Last Days

I started off my Sunday with a trip to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij. This is a museum that consists of the home and art collection of the Doria Pamphilij family, and a few of them still live in parts of it. They came to prominence in the 1600s, when a Pamphilij was named Pope Innocent X. Since in those days the pope was also the king of Rome, the Pamphilij acquired a bunch of wealth and influence that they've managed to hold on to, because Europe doesn't have the philanthropic tradition that America does (we have Carnegie Hall and Carnegie Mellon and the Carnegie Foundation, and they have aristocratic families with priceless art collections). The villa is sumptuously decorated, like a miniature Versailles, and the art collection includes pieces by Titian, Caravaggio, Raphael, Velazquez, Bernini, Brueghel, and a bunch of other old Italian masters. However, the best part of the museum is the free audio guide. It's narrated by a member of the Pamphilij family, and includes interesting notes, like the time he and his sister got in trouble for scratching the terra cotta floor by roller skating on it.

After that, I went to get my fried artichoke in the Jewish Ghetto. This was the first time this trip I was ripped off. The artichoke was €5, but the restaurant charged €2 for water (acceptable), €2 for bread (this is what the place in Venice charged for cover, and the Jewish ghetto in Rome doesn't have a view of San Giorgio Maggiore to justify such an expense), and €2 for service (in Venice, I was charged a maximum of 10% of the total for what I ordered, and I never ordered €20 worth of food). For those keeping track at home, that's €11 for a €5 artichoke. A quick check of other restaurants in the Jewish ghetto showed a similar result would have happened had I picked another place to go. If stereotypes are based on a grain of truth, then the Jews got theirs from that whole area. I would suggest skipping it.

Afterwards, I went to Trastevere and wandered around a bit. Trastevere is across the Tiber (Tevere) from where I was staying, and was a slightly odd mix of interesting bars and restaurants with souvenir shops, street vendors, and slightly sketchy stuff like sex shops or casinos with 10 slot machines only. One of the stores was selling marble fruit bowls for what seemed a reasonable price, so I got one. I'm sure there's a drinking game that can be played with it, and it seems pretty sturdy. I ate dinner at one of the restaurants, watched the end of Mexico/Netherlands, and went back to the hostel to sleep. A month of touring is finally starting to catch up to me.

Today, I had my ticket to go see the Vatican Museum. This enabled me to skip the massive line to buy tickets. On my way into the Vatican, I was also informed that there would be lines for the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica at least that long, and that I could skip them if I was on a tour group. So I paid my €20 to get a tour, and this marked the second time I was ripped off. There are no lines for either the Sistine Chapel or St. Peter's (I probably should have figured that one out given that St. Peter's could swallow any other church whole and stil have room for another one after that). I wound up leaving the tour halfway through, because the guide wanted to go straight to the Sistine Chapel and skip the Raphael Rooms, which are almost as good as the Sistine Chapel, and contain his famous School of Athens fresco. You would have to be a bigger idiot than I was today to miss these, and I wasted €20. The Sistine Chapel itself was breathtaking though, but I don't have any pictures of it. Unlike anywhere else in the Vatican, snapping pictures is forbidden, and if they catch you, you will be forced to delete them. Why they care about that and not St. Peter's, or Raphael, or their massive statue collection is a mystery. Why the poverty part of the priestly vows goes out the window once you are a cardinal or pope is a mystery too (the Vatican Museums were once the Papal Palace, and they do top Versailles as the most opulent royal residence in Europe, because even the Sun King couldn't afford to hire masters like Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini to come decorate his house, or take the choicest ancient statues back to his kilometers-long house without paying). But regardless of the massive hypocrisy behind the creation of such a place, it's still a must-see. Just don't expect it to strengthen your faith. Heck, even Michelangelo himself located the devil in his fresco of the Last Judgment on the wall in such a position that it would be right over the Pope's throne (this is more an indictment on the Pope at the time, but that's far from the only detail Michelangelo threw in to piss off the Vatican. Everybody has seen the central panel of the ceiling fresco, with God inside of a shape that is exactly the shape of a brain. No comment on how he knew what a brain cut in half looked like with the church's ban on autopsies at the time, or the philosophical implications of putting God inside a human brain). The size and scope of the museums took me half a day, and I didn't enter until 12:30 (my tickets were timed for 1:30, so I guess I paid €20 for early access, less of a ripoff than the artichoke fiasco).

And with that, my tour of Europe is at an end. I'll post all the Rome pictures at home with good wi-fi, I have one more beer review, and I'll probably write a best-of post on my ridiculous travel day tomorrow.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Day 29 & 30: Roamin' Through Rome

The Blogger app on my phone has been a recalcitrant piece of shit the past two days, so now I have to rewrite my post for yesterday again and combine it with today.

After a slightly late start yesterday (fuck you, wine), I went to the Palatine Hill to see the Forums, Domitian's palace, and the Colosseum. As soon as I arrived, I saw a huge line of people waiting to get inside the Colosseum. It looked like I would be waiting for two hours if I wanted to get a ticket from there. Fortunately, I have a guidebook and fellow hostel travelers who told me that I could skip that nonsense, wait 10 minutes for the same ticket at the Roman Forum, see that, and waltz past all those idiots. So I did.

The Forums (Augustus, Trajan, Nerva, and Caesar have forums outside the paid museum, the main one is inside) are mostly smashed to bits, the victim of 2000 years of history, several sackings, and the Catholic Church's insatiable hunger for marble to use in their churches. Nonetheless, what remains really conveys the majesty and wealth that Rome amassed in its prime. The columns of the temples and public buildings stand over 33 feet high, and the peaks of the roofs must have been 45 or 50 feet. Equally massive are the dimensions of the buildings evidenced by the broken bases of the columns. To see them as they must have been in antiquity, with polychrome marble, and adorned with statues and paint and gold leaf would have been to gaze at the power of the Roman Empire at its peak. What's left today is merely an echo, but an interesting one. The story is much the same atop the Palatine Hill, where one comes across the ruined Palace of Domitian. So grand was it in its time that the word palace comes from the Palatine Hill on which it stood. Now, it's just a massive set of crumbling walls that outline what would have been a sprawling building that would have rivalled Versailles in size, and probably majesty as well (when you control the whole Mediterranean, you aren't ever going to run out of palace money).

While the Forums and palace have lost their grandeur to time and greedy cardinals, the Colosseum has not. Despite being stripped of its marble cladding by the church, and half the outer facade having collapsed, it is still a massive edifice. In its day, 50,000 spectators could have watched two guys hack each other to death on an oval space somewhere between a hockey rink and a football field in size. While this is only a mid-sized stadium by today's standards, it was built without the steel, powered construction equipment, polymers, and computers that shape places like JerryWorld, and is 2000 years old to boot. It is a far greater engineering marvel for its time than JerryWorld is by today's standards, and it doesn't have a giant fucking scoreboard that interferes with punting or stabbing somebody because it's too low.

After the Roman stuff, I went to the Trevi Fountain. I found it under renovation, drained of water and half obscured by scaffolding. Shit. Then I went to the Pantheon. The building is a greater triumph than the Colosseum. It's still the largest dome of its kind in the world, and is the best preserved Roman building we have. It does have two downsides though. First, the exterior is kind of ugly. The architrave on the porch doesn't line up with the one on the round part of the building. It seems as though the Romans got the columns for the porch, installed them, realized they were too short, and then just said fuck it and finished the temple as is. If you ask me, they should have stopped after the first one was found to be short, removed it, thrown a few quarry workers to the lions, and done it right. However, this is pretty minor compared to the other issue. A few hundred years later, the Catholics got hold of it, ripped out all the old gods, and made it a church. Rome has a gazillion churches already, and many are far more ornate than the Pantheon. There are no Old Masters in it either. So, for the sake of a meh church, we lost the only intact Roman temple we could have had, because Pope Shitforbrains XXVII or some such wasn't okay with any religious history that wasn't about Jee-zus. You're a douchebag, Pope Shitforbrains XXVII...

About those other churches I mentioned. Rome's got a bunch of them, and with the exception of the Vatican complex, they are free to enter. Many of them have a couple paintings by Caravaggio, or Raphael, or some other Italian master. One or two even have sculptures by Michelangelo. Even the ones that don't have some really amazing frescoes and chapels. As a result, if you go into five or six, it's like seeing a world class art museum for the price of feeling guilty about all of the sex, drugs, and rock & roll in your life. If you don't have sex, do drugs, or rock & roll, admission is guiltless, but you're missing out. Raphael certainly thought sex was better than painting, and they didn't have drugs and rock & roll back then.

After all the art and guilt tripping, it was time to meet a friend for dinner. Anna Springer has been living in Rome for about a year now as a student life coordinator, so she was an excellent person to go get some good pasta & gelato with. The restaurant she and her coworkers took me to made the best spaghetti alla carbonara I've ever had, and the gelateria had a bunch of really interesting flavors that were super light and refreshing after a big plate of pasta with cheese, egg, and pancetta. I was near a food coma by the time I left, and went back to the hostel to sleep it off.

After sleeping it off, I went out for more arts. I began my day with the Capitoline Museum. This is near the Roman Forums, and was designed by Michelangelo around a massive 1800 year old bronze of Marcus Aurelius on horseback. The one outside now is a copy, but the original is inside, along.with the foundations of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a picture gallery with more Old Masters, and the Roman statue collections of several popes that were given to the public in the 1700s. These include the famous statue of the dying Gaul (maybe if he hadn't gone into battle nude he wouldn't have gotten that blade in the ribs, but then again, the French army has never been known for thinking this stuff through), and a beautiful statue of Venus, known as the Capitoline Venus. How a bunch of dudes sworn to poverty managed to acquire such a rich collection of priceless marbles from a pagan religion while destroying the buildings they found them in is beyond my comprehension, but I'm an engineer, so this isn't really my department.

After that, I thought I would go see the Borghese Gallery. This is the collection of art and statues acquired by the Borghese family. It is housed in their family villa in the Villa Borghese, which was once their estate, but is now a park. I arrived at the door to discover that you needed advance tickets, and they were sold out until the day I went home. Instead, I went through the Villa Borghese to the Piazza Del Popolo. It's a nice park for a stroll, but I liked the Tiergarten and Englischer Garten in Germany better (no hard feelings Rome, you have much nicer buildings and art and history).

After a failed attempt at yesterday's blog post, it was dinnertime. Instead of a sit down dinner, I decided to do an aperitivo buffet. In Italy, at around 6PM, most bars have a thing where you get a drink, and then they have a variety of finger foods and stuff laying out that you can munch on while you drink. I had a €7.50 Aperol Spritz and a €6 beer, but it's a good deal when it comes with like €5 worth of appetizers each time. I'll do a beer review for Perroni where you can see the amount of noms you get. Then I came back to the hostel to rest.

Tomorrow may be a bit interesting. Apparently, it's a Vatican holiday, and while I don't speak Italian, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Pope is going on a field trip to a bunch of churches to take selfies, preach his socialist agenda, and fire a few more hardliners. This may turn Rome into a crowded snarl of roving pilgrims. Either way, it sounds like a good day to hunt down some fried artichokes in the Jewish ghetto. I wonder how fast they run...

Friday, June 27, 2014

Day 28: Naples to Rome

I decided to catch an afternoon train to Rome so that I could visit the Archaeology Museum in Naples. This was a very good decision. The bottom floor houses the Farnese Collection of monumental sculptures from Rome. Unlike the Greco-Roman statues in other museums, these are by and large not smashed to bits (though this is due to restoration in most cases). The sculptures themselves are immense. One sculpture, called the Farnese Bull, is a larger than life depiction of two people tying a woman to a bull (it's from a myth). This was carved from one block of marble that must have been the size of a Hummer before the sculptor worked it, and the detail is striking. Other sculptures include a resting Hercules, and a bunch of gods and emperors between 10-20 feet tall.

The second floor explained why the Pompeii site had so few mosaics and frescoes. Most of the best ones were hacked out of the site and put in this museum. This is actually for the best, as they are fragile, and being in a climate controlled museum where nobody can touch them or step on them is better than leaving them in situ, but what a wondrous sight it must have been when they were digging up Pompeii and came across frescoes, mosaics, statues, and household objects in bronze and silver that they now display here.

However, neither the statues nor the Pompeii stuff is the most interesting thing in the museum. That honor goes to the contents of the so-called Secret Room. Secret Room is actually a misnomer, but you can't name this room after what's actually in it, because "The Gallery of Penises and Naughty Statues" is not really a good thing to name something in your museum. Nonetheless, this gallery brings to light something that isn't taught in schools when the Romans are discussed: the fact that they were very, very open about sexuality, nudity, and eroticism. The penis was used as a symbol of fertility and prosperity, and so when they found Pompeii, there were dick statues and paintings everywhere. They were placed at crossroads, stores would paint Mercury with a penis in his hand instead of a cadeuceus to ward off evil, and most people had some statues in their garden that are waaaay not appropriate by today's standards. In particular, there was a statue found of the satyr Pan having sex with a goat (which I guess is only half bestiality), along with a Superbad level case of bronze penises with wings or other adornments. My friend Dan Hoff once got in trouble in Latin class for "demonstrating sexual prowess with Corinthian columns" (he held two paper columns up to his crotch and pretended to have two organs). Turns out that instead of giving him a disciplinary mark, our Latin teacher should have given us a history lesson, because that was about the most Roman thing anybody did in that class...

After that, I got on a train to Rome, watched the US advance, and then celebrated by drinking a Budweiser in Italy.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Beer Review: Carlsberg Special Brew

Beer #28: Carlsberg Special Brew

Served: Draft, into a 0.4 liter glass (American pint).

Appearance: Amber, but transparent

Smell: Not much different from Budweiser

Taste: Yeah, this is essentially Europe's version of Old English or anything else that is normally associated with being a 40 in America.

Price: This was €5 for 0.4 liters. This is also 9% alcohol, and the cheapest thing at this bar in Rome. When will I ever learn?

Overall: 2/10. The only reason this gets a 2 is because it's strong. Anything that tasted like this at 5% ABV would probably score a 0. Good thing soccer is a good sport to watch when you're drunk and your team is already through to the next round...

Day 27: Pompeii Picture Dump, Part Uno