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...
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