Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city. -Anatole Broyard

Ah, Rome. I just got back yesterday morning. It was a lot of fun! I must admit, though, I’m slightly relieved to be back in a country where I can communicate in the native tongue. Going to Italy was the first time I had been in a country where I did not understand ANYTHING anyone was saying. It was a lesson in perspective, that’s for sure!
Anyway, here’s what I did:
My friends and I spent the night at Paris’ Orly airport on Friday night, because our flight left at 6 am on Saturday morning, and we didn’t feel like dealing with cabs at 3:30 in the morning. Needless to say, it wasn’t the best night’s sleep.
So, we got on our flight, which was great and cheap (yay Easyjet!), and landed in Rome at about 8 a.m. I met up with my good friend Madi at the Termini train station, and she took me to her apartment to drop my stuff off.
My first experience with Italians was watching two girls getting arrested on the bus. All of a sudden there was a scuffle, and this undercover cop pulled out handcuffs and cuffed these two girls who looked about 15. Of course, I had no idea what was going on since I can’t speak Italian. It was fun in a very scary way.
Madi lives literally across the street from the Vatican. You open her window and you are staring at St. Peter’s Basilica. It was pretty cool. There are always cops stationed outside her window, guarding this one entrance to the Vatican, and Madi is friends with all of them. It’s so funny – she leans out her window and has 30-minute conversations with them. Oh, Mads.
After dropping off my stuff, we walked all over Rome. I saw the Colosseum and the Forum (so cool and so OLD), the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps. The Trevi Fountain was amazing! So gorgeous, except there were just so many people around it, it was kind of hard to relax. They also have the most annoying vendors in Rome. They come up to you and literally stand in front of your face and hold up what they are selling until you walk away or yell at them. That kind of put me in a bad mood. And I’m not sure if I can say I actually saw the Spanish Steps – I’m pretty sure I just saw the hundreds of people sitting on them. Kind of a disappointment, but no matter.
OH! Crazy coincidence – while I was at the Colosseum, I ran into two girls from high school at two different times. It was so weird! I hadn’t talked to or seen them in at least two and a half years, and there they were in Rome! One of them even has a class with one of my sorority sisters (Hannah) in London. I thought my head was going to explode.
That evening, I had dinner with one of my other sorority sisters (Nooners) and her two roommates and Madi. It was fine, except we ordered fried fish for the second course and they brought out entire fish that had just been dipped in batter and fried whole, eyeballs and all. Whoops! Remember that if you go to Europe – only order seafood if you don’t mind your dinner staring at you.
Well, while we’re on food, let’s talk about the gelato. It is an explosion of flavor in your mouth, pretty much. Aaaah so good. I ate it twice a day, which was bad for the waistline but pretty fantastic for the soul. My favorite flavor was Crema, and it was like this lemon cream flavor…aaah. And gelaterias were everywhere – I decided they are the Italian version of the crepe. Okay, that’s enough.
After dinner we walked around Campo de Fiori which is this crazy piazza at night with lots of bars and people just go stand out in the middle and hang out in this giant square. It was kind of like high school football games where everyone just stood around in that big parking lot next to the football field, except without the sport and with lots more alcohol.
Sunday morning was truly serendipitous. I got up early to go to Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. I was planning on going to the 10:30 Mass, but when I got to St. Peter’s Square, it was full of thousands upon thousands of people. I looked up at the steps of the Basilica, and lo and behold, the Pope was up there! It turns out it was a canonization mass for four new saints, and it had just started. So, I made my way over to the middle and I got to attend a Mass said by the Pope. It was one of the coolest moments – the ceremony was so beautiful and it was so cool to see the big guy himself! (He’s actually pretty small.) The Mass was in Latin, except for the readings, which were done in different languages because the saints were from all over the world. One of them was done in English, which was neat – I felt welcome! The best part was the singing – it was the most beautiful singing I have ever heard in my entire life. (I started crying; it was that good.) And at the sign of peace, oh my gosh, it was so cool. (For the non-Catholics, it’s the part of the Mass where everyone turns to one another and wishes each other peace.) Everyone in the square turned to each other and was saying “Peace be with you” in their own language, and there were people from all over the world there. I mean, imagine people saying “Peace” in Spanish, French, Italian, German, English, Russian, Chinese…It was so moving, I just, oh I wish you all could have been there! It is truly something I will never forget.
The rest of Sunday pretty much paled in comparison to the morning. Madi and I were going to go to Perugia, a small town two hours outside of Rome, because they had a chocolate festival that day, where the whole town celebrated chocolate making. Sadly, by the time I was done with Mass, the next train to Perugia would have been too late for the festival. So, instead, we walked around Rome and tried to find something to do, since I had pretty much seen everything and I was going to the Vatican and such the next day with my friends from Paris. We decided to try and find a movie theater. We walked all over and finally found one with “Little Miss Sunshine,” which we both really wanted to see. So we bought our tickets, and they guy at the counter was like, “You want two together?” And we said, “No, no, we want to pay separately.” He kept asking us if we were sure and we said yes, of course. (Only, he was talking in Italian and we were talking in English, and even though we clearly did not speak Italian, he refused to stop.) So we bought our separate tickets and went in and sat down. Once we got in the movie theater, we sat down and after a couple minutes the man behind us was like, “You realize this movie is all in Italian? It’s okay, you learn, you learn.” Yeah, right. Crap. Can someone please explain why they would not change the title of the movie into Italian if it is, in fact, shown dubbed in Italian? Or at least mark somewhere that said movie is not the original version? So then we had to go communicate in sign language that we needed a refund, and the man only yelled at us in Italian and shook his head. We then tried to sell our tickets to people in line, but, guess what? They have assigned seating in Italian movie theaters. What the…? All of a sudden, the man’s puzzled look when we asked for separate tickets made sense. Thus, no one wanted to buy our tickets because I was in C4 and Madi was in F11, and no one goes to the movies by themselves. I was feeling pretty down on Italy at this point. The rest of the night is scarcely worth mentioning – defeated by life, we slunk back to Madi’s apartment and ate takeout spaghetti.
The next day was much, much better. I met up with my friends from Paris (who stayed at a hostel), and we went to St. Peter’s Basilica (which I hadn’t actually been in at that point). It was absolutely breathtaking, even after the zillion churches I have visited in France. The Pieta was in there, which I think is one of the most beautiful sculptures ever. It was really interesting, because I eavesdropped on a tour guide as he was talking about it. If you look at, Jesus is actually about half the size of Mary, which doesn’t really make sense, until you realize that Michelangelo wasn’t sculpting Mary holding her dead son. The sculpture is actually of a vision Mary had, when she was holding Jesus as a child on her lap, and she envisioned his death on the cross and holding him then. Therefore, Jesus is actually child size, and Mary’s look of serenity is actually her accepting what is to come, not actually experiencing it. Does that make sense? It did at the time.
After St. Peter’s, we got in line for an hour to go to the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican Museum was not at all what I expected, but in a good way. It was absolutely gigantic! It actually reminded me a little of the Louvre, because it had all different kinds of collections – ancient sculpture, Egyptian treasures, paintings, tapestries, modern art, etc. Pretty amazing. It was frustrating though, because there was tour group after tour group and they would stop in the middle of the hallway and block everyone. (There was also really only one way to go through the museum, so they couldn’t be avoided.) Oh well. The Sistine Chapel was beautiful beautiful beautiful. The one annoying part was that the guards in the chapel tried to get the hundreds of people in it to be silent by clapping their hands and saying “Shhhh” really loudly. A bit counterintuitive if you ask me, since they were actually louder and more obnoxious than the murmur of the crowd.
After the Vatican and such, we just wandered around the city and finished up with dinner in Piazza Navona, the city’s most beautiful piazza. Lovely!
We got on a plane yesterday morning, and here I am back in Paris. A great weekend, all in all.