Bananas Don't Travel Well

Thinking back to our stay in Italy three weeks ago, it seems sort of a blur. One thing we discovered straight away is that ten years has made redeye flights considerably more difficult to recover from. (I recall feeling tired, but not the depression that it now seems to bring on). As a result, our first few days found us wandering the streets of Rome in a daze.

typical Roman sight: Moses on a busy streetNot that that is a bad way to be in Rome, where virtually every corner yields some ancient statue, church or ruin, and where paying too much attention to the masses of cars might feel overwhelming (this was nothing, by the way, compared to the traffic in Cairo). But we did feel we weren't quite getting the most of it, and it was hard to get our act together to accomplish much. That said, we got a good first taste, had some great food, and though we got shut out of the Borghese museum, we did make it to the Capitoline museums (by unprecedented luck, on the monthly free day) and the Vatican.

The triumph of ChristianityThe queue for the Vatican museums was incredibly long, but they managed the flow of traffic admirably. Once inside, we realized why the Capitaline museums had left us cold. The Vatican has amassed the cream of the artwork from all periods in Rome's history. Masterworks of classical statuary (including the famous Lacoan, which was discovered in Michaelangelo's time and is said to have inspired him), Etruscan art, roman mosaics, and on and on. I particularly enjoyed the Rafael apartments, especially the room dedicated to scenes from the life of the Emporer Constantine, meant to demonstrate the triumph of Christianity over Paganism. This theme was depicted on the ceiling with a toppled and broken Classical statue, replaced by the crucifix. And all those reproductions of the Sistine Chapel did nothing to diminish its impact. You could see the progression in the development of Michaelangelo's skill as he painted across the ceiling: the Drunkenness of Noah, at one end, is rather stiff; by the time you get to the Creation of Man, the figures fairly dance off the plaster. The Descent into Hell, which he painted twenty years later (under threat of a lawsuit) was also quite stunning.

Moving on from Rome, we were initially going to fly to Venice. We had bought tickets on Ryan Air that sounded like a steal: 4 Euros each. But on reading the fine print the night before, we realized that we'd have to pay over 100 Euros in baggage fees (we were, and still are, carrying a stupid amount of luggage -- a situation soon to be remedied), and a 50-70 Euro taxi ride to the obscure airport they fly from. An evening spent weighing bags on the hotel bathroom scale didn't reveal much savings from redistributing the weight (we even half-jokingly considered strapping books onto our persons to get the charges down), and we finally realized that the marginal cost of taking the train was much lower. In the end, the ride to Venice took about four hours and was infinitely more enjoyable than the stress of flying.

Duino castleWe spent a couple of hours wandering Venice, found a local cafe for a late lunch, and then continued on to Duino, a small fishing village on the Adriatic. In Duino, we stayed with friends, Anne and Jean-Paul Ginestier. Jean-Paul had been my math teacher in high school: being truly interested in his students' lives, he went out of his way to stay in touch with me and some of my friends after we graduated. He now teaches at a United World College, where students from all over the world go to study for their last two years of high school (though it is a private school, many of them are on full scholarship and all are chosen based on merit). The kids seemed really nice, not clicquey at all, and I found myself wishing I'd known about UWC when I was in high school. We didn't do a lot in Duino, which was perfect. It's a fairly sleepy town, pretty but not spectacular. The Adriatic was a beautiful shade of blue, but the beaches are all privately owned, which kind of ruins it.

detail on a Venetian houseWe spent our last day and night in Italy back in Venice. Venice is truly lovely, but I found it had the feeling of a museum. At one time, this was one of the major ports of Europe, through which all manner of goods, slaves, merchants and sailors passed. Whatever bustle once existed has been replaced by the press of tourists. Though there are clearly still people living and working in Venice, it has a sleepy air to it, and architecturally it is almost too perfect. Nonetheless, we did enjoy ourselves, and went out for a very good meal that evening.

Over all, we felt that Italy had big potential for another visit some day, with more time, more sleep, and some Italian lessons under our belts.