Day 10: Thursday, May 1, Rome

Italy has its poor, too. I doubt this one will ever get to use the Banca Populare.

On Thursday we hit the ancient ruins. We found out that just about everything was closed, however, because May 1 is a public holiday (Liberty Day). We looked at the Coliseum and Forum from the outside. We ended up targeting churches because we correctly figured they wouldn’t close for national holidays. We saw Santa Maria Maggiore, a church that is a part of the Vatican. It had a great old mosaics, a new roof, and Bernini’s tomb among its claims to fame. I thought it was both a good and bad place to lay Bernini. On one hand it was fitting that the designer of St. Peter’s and many other church works of art be laid to rest on Vatican property, but on the other hand this leader of the Baroque rests in a chapel that isn’t very Baroque.

From there it was on to San Giovanni. The subway was incredibly crowded. This wasn’t too surprising since the bus system shut down from 1-4pm due to the holiday. However, the subway also skipped two stops, one of which was our target. The subway almost emptied at the next stop, so the entire station was packed, and we got off and were planning to walk back to the church. By this time we figured there was a sporting event or something because the crowd was uniformly young. We waited for most of the crowd to pass and then merged onto the escalator. When the escalator started leveling off I was greeted by a guy about my age and a slightly older man – about 30? – shouting and trying to come at each other while others tried to hold them apart. It was right at the top of the escalator, so the crowd spilled out and moved around like a group forming a fighting circle. It looked to me like the older guy (who had a slightly smiling sneer) was baiting the younger guy, who was furious. It looked like they were going to part ways when the young guy ran over to two of his friends, reached in a messenger bag, produced a half-drunk bottle of wine, and rushed the other guy as if to brain him. Several police/station personnel had appeared by this time and held the two apart. The whole thing lasted about 15 seconds.

Note the graffiti along the entire length of the building. A typical Roman street, unfortunately.

We emerged to see streams of young people walking in the same direction we were going. The street was littered with even more broken bottles and cigarette butts than usual. The crowd was mostly what I would call “Euro-grunge,” and a lot of kids we had seen in Rome seemed to fit in that category. There were a lot of people carrying mostly-empty wine bottles and drinking straight from them. We stopped at a McDonalds in an attempt to find a restroom and think things through and found that they had closed their restrooms and their basement and put plastic wrap over all of the seats, obviously in preparation for a crowd that might trash the place. Almost all of the shops were closed, though this could have been due to the national holiday and the fact that this was the afternoon when many things are temporarily closed. However, a good number had what looked like owners just sitting in the doorway or watching the goings-on, and it seemed like they were there to keep an eye on their place. We could hear music drifting down the street and eventually learned that there was going to be a concert at 7pm (this was about 3pm) in Piazza San Giovanni – right next to the church. The church is just inside the city walls and we were outside, so in order to reach the church we had to funnel in through the same city gate as the throngs of concert-goers. In the end we decided to chalk the afternoon up to experience and head home without fighting the crowd.

Guess who I saw that evening?

That night we ate out. Whenever we eat dinner out we are eating well before most Italians do – they begin dinner about 8 or 9. This place hadn’t fully opened up, and the waiter took our order and then got concerned and basically said that he couldn’t ask the cook to cook more than 4 different primis (first courses) or the cook would get angry. The music was an eclectic mix, including “I Will Survive” (by Aretha Franklin?) and “Gangster’s Paradise.”