In the Key of B-flat

The walk home has been different the past couple of weeks. I first noticed it two Mondays ago. Piazza Navonna, usually a beehive of activity, was quiet, well, relatively. A dozen African drummers and dancers were taking a spirited lap around the oval but had only gathered a handful of followers. The usual gang of living manikins and other “performers” were all standing around, a collective expression of “What the F&#@?” on their painted faces.
A few blocks over, the Pantheon square was even quieter. The bad mime had gone home and that woman in the evening gown was playing her synthesized accordion for the sparsely filled late night diner’s tables.
I didn’t give it much thought at the time. Nothing particularly odd about a quiet Monday night . Maybe it was just one of those chaos theory things. I just kept walking but as I was entering the home stretch , an unfamiliar nose started to fill the evening air. Actually, it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar. It sounded like a swarm of bees or, more accurately, the constant droning of the 17 year locusts. But, locusts? In Rome? Then I turned the corner and realized that what I was hearing was the sound of thirty thousand or so vuvuzelas blaring from a couple of flat screen TVs hung outside of Druid’s Rock, a British pub a block or so from the backside of Santa Maria . Gathered around those screens were a couple of hundred British soccer fans (or were they fans of British soccer. Whatever they were, they were certainly getting their World Cup on.
I’ve never followed soccer, well, at least not since my godson graduated to peewee lacrosse, and that was a much different game. (As I recall, everybody but the goalie, and sometime him too, would swarm to the ball, occasionally kicking it towards whatever direction had the most open sky). Todasy, I can’t say that I understand the game but I over the past few weeks I have come to admire the devotion that the game is awarded over here.
I’m not just talking Italians either. Druid’s Rock seems to be a soccer Mecca in town, regardless who’s playing. Monday it might be Brits and Tuesday the Cameroons. Last night Argentineans held sway. The strongest showing has far and away been the South Koreans who showed up with drums and organized chants. Their cheers were constant. A simple successful kick from one player to another was met with barely controlled bedlam. When the ball got within 20 meters of the goal, it got absolutely scary. I wandered off, only to collide with scores of young Koreans running down to the bar. It looked like something out of an old Chef Boy-Ar-Dee commercial (except it was dark and they were Korean).
Everybody is following this, walk down the street and every radio is tuned in. Walk down the street and the televised green pitch glows through the door of a café, the window of a hotel lobby or the curtains of an apartment. (Hey, I’m starting to sound like a Peeping Tom here.) One night I did hear some guy rocking out to Eat A Peach but I think he was quickly deported. Besides the great viewer ratings, the number of kids playing soccer in the parks seemed triple. My Italian is still pretty meager but it seemed that it was all anybody was talking about.
And then…the dream ended. Italy, the defending champs, failed to make it out of the first round, they were defeated by Slovakia. One friend, who had watched the game in a bar with a couple of her Slovakian friends, said that the scene got ugly, Italian men were trying to trip the Slovak girls on their way out the door. Still, there wasn’t the violence that would accompany a similar loss in the states. Mostly people just looked sad, a little wistful (I imagine it didn’t help that the US was still in it, clearly an indication of the end of days. Of course, that curiosity has since been righted.) The next morning while walking to work, I passed through a park to see a couple of kids tossing around a soccer ball, with their hands. Clearly the actions of the broken hearted.
By the next day, however, things were getting back to normal. Crowds were still gathering around the TVs. I don’t know if it’s because the town is filled with tourists , or if, for the Italians, any kind of soccer beats no soccer. Either way, the fever is still high. I hear that they have set up a Jumbotron at Villa Borghese which continues to draw a solid crowd. The Germans were whooping up their win over England yesterday. Even the kids were back in the park this morning, and using their feet.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Pantheon

I don’t know much about architecture. I suppose I enjoy a good looking building as much as the next guy but certainly can’t intelligently identify its appeal, let alone discuss form, structure, etc. So I’m a little surprised by how attracted I am to this building. St. Peter’s Basilica is more imposing, the enormity of the Colosseum is more mindboggling, and any number of the baroque churches may be more graceful, but this building seems to me to be, well, perfect.
OK, maybe it’s not perfect on the outside but I think that works as a handy bit of a misdirection. It’s a fairly simple structure: a drum shaped rotunda with a dome on top (more on the dome later), introduced by a rectangular portico topped by a triangular roof. The building has suffered the wear and tear of the millennia. Most of its marble covering has long been pried off, leaving a surface that is about as pockmarked as your average adolescent. The building itself is half covered by scaffolding and even through that it’s clear that the pieces don’t quite add up. The portico is about 4 feet too short. That wouldn’t be so bad except you can see on the rotunda where the portico’s peak is supposed to fit and the actual roof line well below that. There are a number of theories on this but it’s generally believed that when the columns arrived from Egypt they were a little smaller than the work order called for. (Cut it off twice and it’s still too short). The inscription across the top attributing the building to Marcus Agrippa isn’t accurate either. The Agrippa built structure burned down shortly after it was built and the replacement was struck by lightning and likewise burned. Hadrian (or maybe Trajean) had this one built and with uncharacteristic humility (you should the mausoleum he built for himself) gave the credit back to Agrippa.
So there are issues with the outside. Granted. But step inside and it’s another story. Truth be told, I was underwhelmed by the building when I first saw it. I didn’t know enough to get it. Part of the problem is that the building is so well preserved that it doesn’t look like it’s 1900 years old. All that broken stuff around over at the forum? That stuff looks old. Not this. Most say that it survived numerous sackings and the Dark Ages because it had been converted to a church. I like to think that when the Visigoths and Normans came through and wrecked the joint, they took one look at the Pantheon and said “Uh, this is really nice. We better leave this one alone.”
The marble floor is in a pattern of squares and circles of four colors representing the reaches of the empire (Egypt, Gaul, Asia Minor, and Carthage. There’s some green from Greece in the walls as well). There’s a slight angle to the floor as you move towards the wall to allow any water that comes in to drain away. It is a pantheon so the walls have a number of niches for tombs and memorials to some key historical and artistic figures. (The Agrippa built version was intended as a tribute to his friend and father-in-law Caesar Augustus but he declined the honor (Romans and their false modesty again) so it was mostly devoted to the deified Julius with statues of Augustus and Agrippa on the outside . Some think that Agrippa’s hubris was the source of the bad ju-ju that brought on those fires.)
The walls and floors are nice but the real attraction is the dome. The diameter of the rotunda is 43.3 meters and from floor to extrapolated ceiling it’s 43.3 meters. In other words, if you had a 43.3 meter ball and needed to put it someplace, this would be your best bet. The domed ceiling is made of chunks of stone and pottery and Roman concrete. (When I first arrived, I got so wonked out on this building that I actually e-mailed the author of a book on Roman concrete because I had some question. Amazingly he wrote back and not with any threat of a restraining order.) The dome has stood for 1900 years without any internal support. No rebar, no chicken wire, no nothing. Never been repeated. Never.
Finally (I know I’m going on a bit here), If you’re wondering why I referred to the ceiling as extrapolated a few lines ago, it’s because the ceiling is topped (or not topped) by the oculus, an opening which provides the only light in the building. If it’s a rainy day, it rains into the building. There are drains in the central tiles and as I said before there is a slight incline to the floor to send excess water to the sides where (I think) there are some additional drains. A friend of mine tells me that if you’re lucky and catch the building during a sun shower, you may be rewarded with a faint rainbow within the building.
As anyone who has spent any time here can tell you, Rome is a beautiful and frustrating city. For example, last week the power company came by the new apartment and shut off the power because the previous tenants hadn’t paid their bill. It took them two minutes to turn it off and two days to turn it back on. On top of that, there were other annoyances which, frankly, I can’t recall at the moment, but I finally decide the only reasonable thing to do was to go to the Pantheon. It was fairly packed, but I was able to find a seat on one of the handful of pews up by the altar and I sat…for a while and looked at the dome. It calmed me down. I suspect that if Goffin and King would have grown up in Rome, this would be their rooftop. Then the darnedest thing happened. A seagull drifted down through the oculus (That’ll send a shiver through your Catholic upbringing.) and started to fly laps around the dome. For about five minutes it just flew in circles. Then it slowly drifted back up towards the opening and was gone. Guess it was having a tough day too.

Walking home from school

A couple of weeks ago I decided to face the obvious and sign up for Italian classes. It wasn’t a tough decision. I had been hitting Rosetta Stone for months before departing but: 1) I hadn’t been hitting it hard enough, 2) from my experience, Rosetta Stone is helpful for building vocabulary but not so helpful for understanding the rules of grammar, and 3) Rosetta Stone doesn’t come close to preparing one for the speed at which Italians speak their language. I knew I was in trouble when I stopped into a pizza joint in Baltimore a couple of weeks before leaving with the intention of deciphering the banter of the counter guys. I couldn’t recognize a single word.

My current class is an immersion class and is almost entirely in Italian. I am clueless about 60% of the time. My insegnante rattles off a bunch of syllables and first, I have to try to figure out how they break down into words and, only then, try to pull some meaning from it. It’s frustrating and difficult and brings back strong memories of sitting in Mrs. DeCaro’s French class back at St Pete’s (Sts Peter and Paul Warren, Ohio).
But I don’t want to talk about Italian class. I want to talk about the walk home. Class is slightly up a hill that runs behind the Vatican and I live all the way across town, about halfway between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Colosseum. There are convenient Metro (read subway) stops and I imagine there is a straight shot bus, but for now I like to walk it (I may feel differently when August rolls around). While Rome is one of the great cities of the world, it isn’t that big and is very manageable on foot. Besides, in the course of an hour walk, any lingering gelato guilt tends to melt away.
Anyway, the walk starts with an easy jaunt down the hill with my class mate, a young French woman working in Rome for the summer that, much to my chagrin, seems to be able to understand what our insegnante is saying. (I figure it’s an EU thing.) At the bottom of the hill she peels off to catch her bus and I take a left that leads me to and through St. Peter’s Square. St Peter’s Square isn’t a square; it’s an oval. A huge oval, flanked by Bernini’s cleverly arranged columns, and, during the day, filled with people and summer sun. When I hit it, though, the sun has been down for twenty minutes or so, the sky has settled into muted shades, and the crowds have thinned to just a few stragglers. It’s lovely (and I don’t think I use that word very often). I tend to linger here for a bit, let any post-class frustration drift away, and experience a moment or two of bliss.  I question my move to Rome from time to time but never while standing in that square.
From there, it’s down the street past the Castle Saint Angelo (originally built as Hadrian’s mausoleum, now a museum, also the locale of the final scene of Tosca) and across the Ponte Saint Angelo with it’s Bernini designed angels holding various symbols of the crucifixion (nails, crown of thorns, etc.). Once across the bridge I have a choice. I can take an oblique angle followed by a straight shot up Via dei Coronari or I can stay on Via di Panino ( literally the way of the roll) into a jumble of streets that meander through a neighborhood that historically was filled with craftsmen of various stripes (marble cutters, woodworkers, and bakers-hence that panino business). Today it’s home to a wide assortment of trattorias, pizzerias and the like). The route decision is based on how long ago lunch was and time. The latter choice involves usually involves dinner but also getting lost (that’s partially the point and I never the leave the apartment without my frayed and trusty street map.)
Either way, I eventually find myself at the Piazza Navonna. This was originally an amphitheater and race track built shortly after the Colosseum but now, lined with restaurants and dotted with fountains, is a popular place for milling about. I usually keep moving here, but like to notice the play of light reflected of the surging waters of the massive Fountain of the Four Rivers (Bernini again, he is all over this town). From there it’s three short blocks to the Piazza di Rotunda. It’s a similar but thinner crowd than Navonna but the rotunda in question is the Pantheon. Closed at this hour and half shrouded in scaffolding, it’s still impressive and I always stop to just look at it. Simple elegance: a square, a triangle, a cylinder, a globe and just about perfect. Perhaps the original “often imitated but never duplicated.”
Eventually I pull myself away and cut down a side alley. A dozen or so blocks, a few lefts and rights and I’m at the bottom of the Quirinale hill (one of the seven). Looking to the left I can catch the edge of the Trevi Fountain and, if the mood strikes, I can wander down and take in that scene (a similar but thicker crowd than Navonna) but usually I head up the hill and then the steps to the Piazza de Quirinale outside the palace of the same name. I stop for a few minutes to admire the view (OK, I’m actually catching my breath but this is a great spot to take in the city’s horizontal scape. No building is taller than St. Peter’s.)
Breathing normally again and almost home, I head down Via del Quirinale and take a right at the four fountains (Rome is full of fountains and, in most cases, the water still comes in from the aqueducts. It’s cold and tastes great but these four fountains, sitting right on the street, are encrusted with a layer of grime that I imagine in 85% car exhaust. I wouldn’t touch ‘em). From her it’s a short walk to the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, around the circle and down my street. I usually hit my door as the basilica’s bells are tolling 9:45.
On a typical night, it takes an hour and 15 minutes and there’s usually a slice of pizza in there someplace. A few nights ago, my insegnante asked me which bus I took to get home. When I told her I walked, she shook her head, saying it was too far. I suppose if you live here for a while, you get inured to the sights but that hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes it’s the high point of the day. Beats the walk home from St. Pete’s…uh, the other St. Pete’s.