Roman Roamin'

The Tiber River at night. During the day Rach and I walked along here and saw a wild otter in the river near a grassy bank. Cool.





   Rome is, of course, renowned for its ruins. And being tourists here in the Eternal City we're obliged to go and visit (I think it's a law here). So we headed off to the Colosseum, the Forum, Palatine Hill, Circus Maximus, the Cestia Pyramid, and the crumbling remains of numerous Imperial Palaces.













   The famous Colosseum is magnificent, especially when you think about how old it is and what it looked like back in its hey-day. It was covered in marble and had hundreds of marble statues in every nook and cranny. But the Roman Empire declined and along came the Christians who looked on this fabulous structure as a convenient place to get marble from. And so all the marble was stripped off. Plus the bronze staples that held the structure together were just a bit too tempting to leave where they were and that was nicked too. Most of the outside wall was dismantled as well. Where did all this go? Well, look down this page and you'll see a posting on St Peters Basilica. Made from recycled Roman stadium. Don't like the huge pagan buildings? No problem. Build a church out of them. I'm sure in a another few hundred years some new cult (Jedi Knights, in all probability) will knock down St Peters to build an even bigger temple. Not that the Romans were above pinching stuff from other cultures - the Obelisk in St Peters Square was originally taken from Egypt by Caligula, and then appropriated by the Christians who jammed a tiny crucifix on top of it just to make it all OK with God, in spite of the fact that it had already been used by two different religions in the previous centuries before that. Recycling isn't just a new concept after all.












While fruitlessly trying to find a restaurant that was recommended to us we came across this - the Cestia Pyramid. It dates from about 12 BC and to our surprise it isn't stolen from Egypt. Well the design certainly is borrowed from Egypt but the structure was built here to serve as a mausoleum for a Roman Magistrate. We may not have made it to the pyramids in Cairo but at least we got to see a small, well preserved one here in Rome.







Rach and myself in front of the Trevi Fountain. Of all the 'throw-a-penny-in-the-fountain' fountains around the world this is the biggie. The Trev is the place where, legend has it, if you throw a coin in the fountain then you are guaranteed to return. It sure worked for Rachel. This is her third time here. The place is teeming with tourists, certainly the most concentrated numbers of people we've seen in Rome yet. Legend aside the fountain is extremely beautiful, a baroque masterpiece that seems to grow out of the side of a building.

   Imagine what would happen if you combined the artistic sensibility of primary school children with the macabre imagination of a serial killer. Then throw in a dash of Damien Hirst, a smidgin of Salvador Dali, and top it off with lashings of Vincent Price. Sounds pretty screwed up, right? Well I invite you to visit the Cemetery of the Capuchin Monks. This crypt has to be one of the weirder places I've been. Almost 500 years ago the Pope's brother, Cardinal Barberini, thought it would be a neat idea to exhume thousands of corpses of monks and place these remains in a bunch of crypts underneath a church. Not just put them in there in piles, mind you.
   "Let's arrange them in pretty patterns, guys" he must have said to the bewildered monks who were given this bizarre task, "why don't we stick the bones everywhere, even on the ceiling, and we'll even make lampshades of bones, and yeah, get this, let's get one of the more youthful skeletons and make that the Angel of Death and give it an hourglass and scythe made out of other kids bones."
   The place is downright creepy, but not in the way that one would expect rooms full of the bones of 4000 dead monks to be. To me it is mostly disturbing because of the strangely haphazard way it has been done, looking half unfinished like a rushed job, or even just a trial effort. I does remind me of pretentious 'installation art' that sells for ten of thousands of dollars. But that's just my opinion. The teenage American kid who stood next to me kept whispering to himself "this is so awesome", at every different room. And he's probably right.


"What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be." This is inscribed on the floor of the last tomb. Hard to argue with that one.

This is actually a bit of a cheat - it's a photo of a postcard as no photography is allowed in the crypt.