Rome 2023

Yesterday I wrote about my experience flying on United's business class, and today I'm going to write about my week in Rome. In a separate post I'll talk about my impressions of the three days I spent in Munich, so you can see I'll be milking this trip for as much content as I can.

The trip to Rome was long overdue, in many ways. I was originally supposed to spend a few days there with my mom last year, as part of my first international trip since the start of the pandemic, but at the last minute my mom caught conjunctivitis and I had to just go straight to Turin for the full three weeks. Also, the last time I'd been to Rome was in 2017, and the time before that was all the way back in 2002, so it was clearly time to spend some time there again.

We used to visit both Rome and Turin every year for our family holidays in the summer, so I have some memories of the place and the sights. I associate it with staying with my grandma at my great-aunt's place, enjoying the large terrace overlooking a quiet residential street just a few metro stops from the touristy center. But all the same, Rome's always felt a little less like my place, because my mom's family is smaller than my dad's and there were never any cousins close to my age. In the years when we were going there regularly, I was also generally too young to venture out on my own, so this was the first time I got to explore Rome on my own.

Piazza Venezia from the Vittoriano

I had a couple of ideas of things I wanted to see, mostly in the round of really touristy things: the Capitoline Museums, the Galleria Borghese, various Roman ruins, and St. Peter's Basilica. I also ruled out a couple of sights, specifically the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums, mainly because I didn't feel like dealing with either the lines or the process for booking them.

(As an aside, trying to book sights online in Rome is brutal: not only are there innumerable fake sites, which tripped us up in 2017 when trying to see the Galleria Borghese, but when you do finally manage to find the legitimate site from the Culture Ministry, it doesn't always work properly)

I was also open to other suggestions, so was happy to go to the Baths of Diocletian with my mom and stepdad on the first day, even though I hadn't been planning to see it (it gets only a short mention in my tiny guidebook), and to check out the Domus Romane at Palazzo Valentini. I'd also gotten myself ready by rewatching Rick Steves' and Stanley Tucci's shows about Rome, though in the end the Rick Steves programs were more of an inspiration.

Bernini's David

Of course the ancient Roman sights dominated my sightseeing, in part because the Forum is just a block or two from my mom's front door. It also helps that the city center is so compact, meaning that most sights are within walking distance of one another. Popping out into the Forum, I could turn one way and walk past the Colosseum, or turn the other way and end up at the Vittoriano, Piazza Venezia and from there make my way to the Pantheon. And just behind the Vittoriano were the Capitoline Museums, which overlook the Forum. The only times I used public transport were when we went to visit my mom's cousin at my great-aunt's old place, and when I took the bus to St. Peter's.

The other thing that made me gravitate toward the Roman sights is, of course, my newfound appreciation for Roman history, thanks to Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast. I've mentioned before that his approach let me put the history of the Roman Empire into its proper context, and that context allowed me to better appreciate the sights in front of me. For example, the Baths of Diocletian had a room featuring inscriptions and tablets from religious rituals taken from pretty much every emperor from Augustus to the start of the Crisis of the Third Century, and knowing the sequence of emperors made it easier to understand the shift from one dynasty to another.

Incidentally, it was around this time that the meme about men thinking about the Roman Empire showed up, so I had it in mind when I was scurrying from sight to sight. I question how accurate a talking point that originated on TikTok could be, but it's true that Ancient Rome has always held a particular fascination for me. As near as I could tell, beyond the usual reasons relating to toxic masculinity (but without minimizing that, basically everything some women say about men on social media boils down to toxic masculinity), Rome is important for Italians because it's the last time we were powerful, rather than characterized as the effete aesthetes of the Renaissance or the corrupt buffoons of the post-WWII period. I certainly don't wish I lived during the Roman Empire, though.

As far as non-Roman sights, the Galleria Borghese and St. Peter's Basilica stuck out for me the most. My mom and I got a tour for the Galleria Borghese, which ended up focusing mostly on the Bernini statues (David, the Rape of Persephone, Apollo chasing Daphne), at the expense of most of the paintings. I may have seen less that way, but I understood a lot more about the statues thanks to our tour guide; the danger of such a sumptuously equipped gallery as the Borghese is that the artwork blurs before your eyes after a while, but the tour made me better appreciate the works that we did focus on.

If I had to pick a standout, though, it'd be St. Peter's. This is one of those sights that you encounter a lot on TV or in photos, but those don't prepare you for the real thing. I made the clever decision to go on a Monday (rather than Sunday, when Mass would have been in session), so it didn't take long to get in. When I did, I could hardly believe my eyes: every square inch, it seemed, was covered in decoration, from the floor to the ceiling. It was so riotous that I missed the artworks that everyone comes to see, like Michelangelo's Pietà - I just couldn't take my eyes off the ceiling.

To put it another way, the only sight that remotely compares, for me, is the Grand Canyon, which takes your breath away whenever you see it. This comparison came into my mind as I made one of several circuits of the church, and was undoubtedly helped by the thought that the alcoves on either side of the main altar were themselves bigger than most churches I've seen in my life. 

I rounded off the trip with a visit up the cupola, which gave me some amazing views of the city - even more amazing, I think, than the ones from the roof of the Vittoriano. I appreciated how there was a bathroom and a cafe midway up, which seems odd to have on the roof of the mightiest church in Christendom, but was undoubtedly welcome, since it was a hot day.

St. Peter's Square from the Cupola

As far as food, I got to try a number of local delicacies, though none of the restaurants mentioned in Stanley Tucci's show. The nice thing about Italy generally, though, is that most restaurants and cafes are just about as good as each other, so if you don't go to one place, the next one you find will also be pretty great. The important thing is that I got to have my pizza al taglio, my supplì, and my bucatini all'amatrician, as well as liberal helpings of ice cream. And all of it was at prices that you don't really find in the Bay Area.

This trip was a nice experience, because as I said, I'd never really been able to explore the city on my own. I don't know if I can cope with the chaos of the neighborhood where my mom has her house, but I felt like I was starting to understand it a bit better by the time I left. Maybe it'll never become my place like Turin or London have, but it was great getting to know the place. And the best part is, it's so saturated with things to see and do that I could probably spend another week there without repeating any of the sights I saw on this trip.