Day 11, Friday, May 2, Rome

"Hail, Caesar; we who are about to die salute you!"

Today we first went inside the Coliseum, which we had seen from the outside the day before but had been closed. We went through a security line and put our bags through an x-ray machine to get in, but I could have put an AK-47 through the machine and they wouldn’t have known. The guy manning the screen was so bored that not only was he just not paying attention, but he was preoccupied with seeing if he could activate his cigarette lighter using only a pencil.

As a structure, the inside was pretty cool, but it wasn’t anything more than you have seen in pictures. The size does get you, however, and particularly the depth and intricacy of the sub-arena passageways (now exposed). The Romans really were engineering masters. I would have liked to know how they flooded the arena – i.e. did the water flood the lower chambers, or was it sealed above the chambers? The real thing about going inside the Coliseum is that you could imagine yourself as one of the 50,000 people attending. (They had several totally separated quadrants so that if there were a stampede or riot it wouldn’t turn into mass chaos. Smart.) I’m still not quite sure how to treat it. It’s an engineering marvel and a triumph of a previous civilization, but its purpose hails the barbarism that had begun to gnaw at Rome and would lead to its collapse in 476 AD. It also made me think about today. It was the “reality TV” of the 3^rd century. TV today gives us the comfort of knowing that the guy with his brains splattered on the wall didn’t actually die – in fact, he pocketed several million for his services and will die again in a another blockbuster a few years hence – but at the same time it seems that our entertainment appeals more and more to the same part of human nature that packed the Coliseum. We may not be actually killing people for public display, but at least the Coliseum crowd was watching from a distance, I can name several movies based on depicting bizarre forms of torture in all their… sadism?

Someone would be very surprised to know that I was in awe of and took a picture of the brick remains of the room where they did their boring job every day. Will someone look for traces of me some day?

After the Coliseum it was on to the neighboring Roman Forum and Palantine Hill. The Forum was the hub of Roman government for a long time, and it is dotted with various buildings built on top of each other. Among them is the Roman Senate building, a shrine to Julius Caesar marking where he was cremated (if I remember correctly), and several arches commemorating various Caesars and their accomplishments. Palantine Hill is the location of the Emperor’s palace for several hundred years. You can still see the outlines of the throne room. You can also look down several stories and see the complicated labyrinth that was the palace. Versailles had the luxury of being built from scratch with unlimited acreage; this palace had to be squeezed among existing urban structures. As such, it may well have been the more impressive building (from an engineering perspective) considering the results and the time period. You could also look out the back and see the Circus Maximus below. The best-preserved Roman buildings in Rome are all buildings that were converted into churches. This is great, but unfortunately the flip side is that in many cases the non-converted buildings were scavenged by the Catholic Church to build its own new buildings. Lots of Roman buildings have brick walls with odd square holes; those holes were hanging points for marble wall linings that were taken for use in homes or churches in the course of the years.

The old and grand in the foreground with the dome of St. Peter's -- the next great power to replace Rome -- in the background.

After lunch at a walk-up café (great and cheap margherita pizzas and calzones) we headed to the National Museum. It housed a great collection of Roman statues (mostly busts) and frescos from villas. We walked through and learned the history of various emperors while they stared back through pupil-less stone eyes. I liked the early busts better because at that time Roman artists were incorporating the lifelikeness of Greek sculpture with their own Etruscan-Roman realism and grittiness. The result is that early busts really did look like real people – no airbrushing – while later busts looked idealized. It also had a collection of Roman coins. It grouped them by emperor (because in most cases each emperor had his face printed on the coins made during his reign) and had a description of economic events during their time. One – I think it was Caligula – had to deal with high inflation rates. He decreed empire-wide price controls and set prices from Rome, and the result was that items disappeared from shelves, commerce froze up, and black markets appeared. That’s according to the National Museum in Rome. I find it darkly humorous that you can look back as far as you want in recorded history and price controls always exacerbate problems in the market – though today the public is on to the ruse, so politicians circumvent this by talking about “price floors” or “rate freezes” (in the case of mortgages) or push a certain item as being “critical” and thus worthy of special treatment.

We have used the subway quite a bit here. It is good and efficient, but very limited. There are only two lines and they only intersect at the main train station. The cars have very few seats and can pack a lot of standing people. They are completely covered in artistic graffiti, as opposed to the precise and small “tagging” graffiti we saw on French subways. On French subways, there would be a name/sign painted just above the doors, and that was usually it. These are canvasses for the type of words turned into art that is frequently seen in the U.S. Graffiti is everywhere in the city, as well.

People here really like random metal stud piercings, usually out of their cheek/mouth.

I’ve decided that any Italian who doesn’t die of lung cancer by age 50 is basically guaranteed to get skin cancer. Italians vary in shade from a healthy olive to well done, and you can see the results of this baking in some of the older people.