Walking Around...

The Prison was constructed around the time of the first "Sack" of Rome around 3 or 4 hundred years before Christ.  It was originally created as a cistern for a spring in the floor of the second lower level (there were two, the lower of which was where prisoners were kept by lowering them through the floor of the upper room).  This is the likely source of the water Paul used to baptize his fellow prisoners.  Eventually a passage from the cistern drain was constructed, reputedly for flushing out the dead prisoner's bodies.  Typically, only higher profile prisoners were kept in the prison, usually foreign commanders who were defeated and became the centerpiece in a Roman triumphant procession. They usually remained incarcerated until they were paraded and killed in public.

Standing in this prison cell was humbling, indeed.  I took a small pinch of dirt for my Mom, who was unable to come with us on this trip.  I'll send it home to her in a small glass bottle.

Home Tomorrow!

At long last and after walking at least 70 miles in 10 days (I lost count of the stairs), we fly home tomorrow!  To our mutual surprise, there is quite a bit of our trip budget left over.  Also, we were never robbed, pilfered, injured, lost, or hospitalized!  Although, Lisa encountered some pick-pockets who were running a "pregnant woman" scam (she read about the scam in the travel book).  Honestly, it was just like the book said, one woman would dress as a humble, begging, pregnant mother-to-be, and the other older woman (presumable her mother?) would walk alongside with a message written on a HUGE piece of cardboard.  They would approach, flash the big board in your face to distract you, and steal your stuff.  Lisa recognized it right away as a scam and pointed a finger in the old woman's face before barking, "NO!"  Then, she barked at me, "WATCH YOUR POCKETS!"  Both women and I were frightened enough to scatter at that point and Lisa was honestly ready to slam a pregnant woman into the wall, even if she WAS faking... Good times, good times...  I will post the last of the photos, but honestly... we took more than a thousand.  They don't sell film here anymore, they sell memory cards instead.  If your camera is full, you can always buy another 1Gb card to take 100 more.  We're not the type of people to force anyone to watch a slide show of our trip to Italy, but if you ask me to bring my laptop to the next small group or dinner party, I'll be happy to leave the full slide show running so that anyone who wants to can look at ALL of the pics.  There are some that would make nice wallpapers or postcards too, so if you want one, all you need do is ask.

kjw

Parking

Parallel parking presents a challenge to some people.  In Italy, I’ve noticed that the cars parked along the curb in parallel are closer to each other than you might be comfortable with in the good ol’ U.S. of A.  A LOT closer!  There’s maybe, oh, six inches of space in front and behind most of the cars.  “How do they parallel park that closely,” you ask?  Simple…

You start by backing into the space, like you normally would under any other parallel parking circumstance.  In Italy, however, you proceed until you hear the “THUMP” of your rear bumper against the front bumper of the car behind you (an immediate “failure” of your attempt at any driving school in America).  Then, you turn your front wheels inward and you ease forward until you hear the “THUMP” of your front bumper against the rear of the car in front of you.  You repeat this procedure, forwards and backwards until you’re “in.”  Simple.

When it comes to finding a space to park in, having a small car certainly comes in handy.  Having been here over a week now, Lisa and my combined counted total of SUVs being driven around is one (1).  People get around on scooters, motorcycles, and in tiny, tiny cars.  “Smart” cars are everywhere.  Our guide told us that his brother drives a Smart car and when he goes out at night to discos, he always finds a place to park… He told us that one night, they simply rolled a trash bin out of the way and parked in the space it had occupied!

Liquid Cheese

Tonight was Thanksgiving for Lisa and me.  We knew that turkey and dressing and yams, etc, were not an option, but we did want to have something nice, so we asked around and the locals pointed us to a small family owned restaurant that specialized in serving the local cuisine of Naples.  It was a short walk and we found the place extremely “homey.”  So much so that the family that runs the restaurant was eating together at a table next to us.  Whenever a new customer would come in or a new dish would arrive from the kitchen via the Dumbwaiter, one of the family crew would hop up and take care of the situation.  They were very helpful with the menu and dinner couldn’t have been more delicious!  We had pasta with garlic and chili peppers, pasta with Mussels, a medley of local vegetables (lightly fried), Calamari, and Filet Mignon in a Parmesan cheese sauce.  The sauce was liquid gold and it flowed like gravy!  We had dessert and a bottle of wine… it was Thanksgiving Italian style and we loved it.

Pompeii

We saw Pompeii today through the eyes of an educated guide.  He was marvelous!  He took us through the entire city and told us of all of the different rooms, the geography, the streets, and all of the different things to see and do, through the eyes of a local Pompeii resident.  He told us stories and all about the ways of life in Pompeii, prior to the monstrous volcanic explosion.  In the pictures, you’ll see two peaks of Mount Vesuvius.  If you trace the slope from each peak to draw a single high peak in the middle, that’s how tall the volcano used to be, prior to the explosion!  As you can see, it was nothing short of Apocalyptic… Pompeii was a thriving sea-port before the explosion.  Ironically, it was built out of volcanic stone which was very prevalent in the area.  Remember, this city was bustling at least 500 years before Christ was on the earth and they had:

-         Graded streets with rainwater runoff

-         Elevated sidewalks to cross the streets

-         Sewers and running water (with pressure to run the fountains)

-         Toilets and sewage treatment facilities where they would harvest ammonia to clean their laundry

-         Aqueducts

-         Sliding barn doors and garage doors (wooden)

-         Reflective stones to find your way through streets at night

-         Tiled entry-ways

-         Tiled roads, with smoothed grooves cut for chariot wheels

-         Named streets, complete with Latin names and numbers, laid out in a grid

-         Gold jewelry

-         Surgical tools and needles

-         Glass bottles

-         Fast food restaurants and cafeterias

-         Farming, fishing, open air markets

-         Sundials and AM, PM time demarcation

-         Red-light district (it was an international seaport)

-         Painted stucco walls and frescos

-         Covered sidewalks and multi-story homes and shopping areas

The sights of Pompeii were a real eye-opener for me.  No matter what you study about the city or the people, it is amazing to walk in the shadow of that volcano and see how civilized they were and how they lived their lives.  These weren’t meager people, searching for sustenance to “get by.”  These were a thriving people who sent their kids to universities, spoke Latin, and enjoyed life.

All Roads Lead to Rome

Tomorrow morning after breakfast, we’ll head to Rome on another train.  It’s the last city of the trip and while we’ve seen so many fantastic things, we’re ready to stop packing and unpacking.  Getting everything we’ve bought, home in one piece, will be a challenge, but we’ll find a way.

My Bathtub Epiphany

So, I was laying in a bathtub with the water 2 degrees hotter than I could possibly stand it, trying to soak some of the day’s walking out of my feet and legs and I had this epiphany…  I had a pizza box in my lap and a slice of the most wonderful pizza in my left hand, and a very dry Martini in the right, and I thought, as I took another bite, “In America, Grandmothers all over the country have figured out the dichotomy of tender and flaky.  Somehow, when you put a fork through a nice pie crust, it flakes apart; but it’s still a bit tender as your teeth gnash their way through the base of the crust.”  I thought about this as I thoughtfully chewed some pizza crust.  “The Italians, on the other hand, have invested their culinary wisdom into the simultaneous concurrence of crunchy and chewy.”  God bless the Italians, for when it comes to pizza, a three day old piece of the worst in Florence, is still better than a fresh pie from Pappa John’s any day.  I went on to finish the pizza, the martini, and I almost needed a crane to set me back to vertical after my soak.

Manly Toilet Seats

Rejoice men, the toilet seat war is indeed one for the ages; but the Italians are on it!  It would seem that every single public toilet seat in Italy is secured in the “UP” position.  In fact, if you put it down, it will spring back up again… the way John Crapper originally intended it to be.  It even mists a nice fragrant deodorizer when its slow climb back to vertical finally climaxes.  Saints be praised!

Creepy Baby Jesus

OK, after looking at hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Renaissance paintings today, Lisa and I want to know one thing.  Wasn’t there anyone alive in the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth century that could paint a likeness of the baby Jesus that wasn’t just downright creepy?  The poor child looked balding, scary, stern, angry, confused… We started naming them, “Hey honey, did you see the painting in the other room with “Vampire Jesus?”  There was “Moe Jesus,” and “Curly Jesus,” and “Larry Jesus.”  We saw “Bob Newhart Jesus” and the list went on an on.  I understand that Catholicism runs deep in Italy, I totally get that.  Seeing Mary and Jesus on canvas, wood, in sculpture, etc, is to be expected, but wow.  Give the poor boy a pleasant countenance, is that too much to ask?

I shouldn’t complain.  The history of this place is just awesome.  I was trying to think of a way to express it that would really drive home the point… I just can’t even begin.  This is another one of those things that leaves you slack-jawed if you pause to think about it for any length of time.   Think about this… Leonardo DaVinci was SURROUNDED by priceless works of art (dating back to the time before Christ) when he started painting at the age of 20. At roughly the same time in Spain, a man named Chris Columbus started thinking that the world might not be flat after all, and he set sail to prove it, discovering a new continent in the process.  Roughly three HUNDRED years after that, some men in the Colonies decided that they’d had enough of merry old England and they had themselves a revolution.  Two HUNDRED years later, I was in the fifth grade heaving water balloons at Jerry Snow because I thought she was cute.  Ten years later at twenty, I was in College and most certainly NOT painting the next Mona Lisa.

We saw so many paintings from this time period that they almost started to get boring.  “Here’s another creepy Jesus, again, OH, here’s another disciple… LOOK, there’s the original painting they must have used for the opening of ‘Desperate Housewives,’ more disciples… Goliath’s head on a sword… John the Baptist’s head on another plate… OOOH, here’s one from Michelangelo…”  There was more history and art in that one museum than I’ve seen anywhere in our country, ever.  We felt very fortunate, just to be let into the place.

Big Dave

Michelangelo’s David is… well; just… breathtaking.  Literally.  You find yourself walking through the museum, checking your guidebook, looking around, feeling a bit more educated about art since you’ve been in 23 other museums… you’re wondering just what the big deal is about David, and when you turn the corner and see him for the first time, well, you just stop breathing for a minute.  I stopped walking, he was still a full football field away from me and I stopped in my tracks and thought simply, “He’s awesome!”  Up to that point, every single painting or sculpture I’d seen of David and Goliath was violent.  It was bloody.  There was David, holding Goliath’s head up, with blood literally spraying all over his body.  There was David, Goliath’s sword raised over his head, standing on his dead body, etc.

This was different.  The first thing I thought was, “He’s humble.”  Here’s a depiction of David, with his famous sling casually tossed over his shoulder with one hand and a rock, loosely cradled in the other.  His face is so incredibly, meticulously detailed that you can see in his eyes the look of a man who’d just killed another man; and regardless of how pre-ordained the outcome might have been, he looks a bit “sad” about it.  As I walked closer to him, he grew HUGE!  He’s much bigger than I thought he was.  His body is eighteen feet tall and he stands on a seven foot platform, so his head is a solid twenty five feet in the air when you finally get really close to him.  You can see the scars on his knuckles, the cracks in his toenails, the veins in his hands, and the pupils in the corneas of his eyes.  Every fold of skin, every dimple, even the flex of the standing calf muscle in his right foot is obvious.  How a man cut him from stone is just baffling and yet, several other statues that were commissioned to Michelangelo, ones that he did not finish, were on hand to show a bit of the process and it was still awe-inspiring.  I can’t remember who the prophet was who said it, and I’m paraphrasing a bit but it was something like, “When I compare the proportion, the detail, the countenance, and the emotion that David shows his viewers, I am convinced that no other sculpture needs even to be studied.”  I couldn’t agree more.

463 Steps to Heaven

From the moment I saw groups of people WAY up in the tippy-top of the Duomo of Florence (the Cathedral), I knew I had to go up there (this is the reason why I’m now in the bathtub).  Lisa had walked enough for one day (it was a LONG day) but I wanted pictures of the sunset over Florence from 400 feet high or whatever, so I went.  She went shopping, I went climbing.  There are 463 steps to the top of the Duomo.  These steps are built and carved out of the original stone they used to build the Cathedral.  They go up, spiral staircase fashion, and the way up is narrower than my shoulders and shorter than my height.  In other words, I had to walk up sideways with my head cocked to one side!  Somewhere about 30 steps into the journey, I had some second thoughts.  I couldn’t quit though because the only way back down at that point would have been “through” the people coming up behind me.  Nope, the only out was up… so up is where I went!  It took a long time, but the journey was worth it.  I got some great pictures and I got to see the fresco that was painted on the ceiling, way up close!  See the enclosed pictures to get an idea.

Italian Wine to the USA?

Lisa and I are trying like crazy to find a way to bring some wine home.  Since we didn’t check a bag, and since liquids on the plane are a “no-no,” we considered shipping home some bottles.  Well, we discovered today that that the cost of the shipping is $120 for six bottles, plus the tax and oh yea… the cost of the wine!  Seriously, $250 for six bottles of wine is beyond our budget.  Plan “B” is to buy the cheapest suitcase we can find, wrap some bottles in our dirty clothes, and check that mother on the airplane!  Time will tell.

Stuck Bus

One last funny story… on the way home we were seated (for the first time all day) in the back of the #22 bus.  According to my GPS, our stop was only .13 miles from our hotel, and according to our current pain factor, that was just about right at the limit of what we could tolerate for the remainder of the day.  We approached our stop and we hit the button to signal the driver that we wanted to stop.  The usual “DING” didn’t sound.  “Hmmm,” we thought, “Will he stop?”  Well, the answer was “no.”  In fact, Lisa and I weren’t the only ones who wanted to stop.  As the driver sped past the stop, screams of “ALTO, ALTO!” reached his ears and about a half mile past where we wanted to go, he made a decision.  History is littered with bad decisions.  The one our driver made was colossal!  For some reason, he thought the best idea would be to attempt a “U-turn” in the middle of the busy 4-lane street!  I have all of this on video and I will eventually put it up on YouTube so stay tuned… Anyway, he turned left across two lanes of traffic into a parking lot.  Please realize, this is a big city bus; it’s one of those extra long ones with extra seats.  He turned, miscalculated the ramp that led up into the parking lot he was aiming for and “Scraaaape, WHACK! SSSSSssssssssssssss” is what we heard next!  Lisa diagnosed the problem immediately, “He broke the bus; holy crap, he broke the bus!”  It gets better, he tried to BACK UP into traffic to complete the U-turn.  Now, I don’t know if the “SSSSSSSsssssssssss” was a loss of pressure or transmission fluid or what, but no mater how high the engine revved, all we heard was a grinding of metal as the bus refused to go anywhere.  Surprisingly, the people ON the bus were quite calm (which is more than I can say for the drivers of the cars trying to go either direction on the street).  He finally opened the doors, and we walked back to the hotel… I felt sorry for him, I’m sure the broken bus was the least of his worries!