Rome: The Gilded

In Rome we stayed a few blocks away from Vatican City. Despite not having a single Catholic bone or tissue or neural path in my entire body, it still only made sense to make a pilgrimage to St. Peter's as soon as we arrived. Its size and grandeur are such that other cathedrals around the world must all be forced to have an unshakable inferiority complex. It bears the kind of earth shattering significance that makes a city like Geneva create the most conspicuous phallic symbol the Swiss could ever imagine. And yet, in spite of a church whose mere facade made me say, "Holy shit," the first thing I saw were two beautiful and hopelessly, inextricably bored girls sitting by the gift shop door completely immersed in their phones, texting. In my mind, they were probably messaging each other: "Church iz so lame. Wut R U doin 2nite?"

To each their own.

As we walked back to our hostel we passed a cafe by the river that we would continue to pass each night on our way back home. Every night there was a new musical act that one might describe as the worst musical act they'd ever heard in their entire life. D described it as his own personal hell, a life aboard a cruise ship that is supposed to be fun but actually just sucks out your soul into overpriced and over-watered drinks; sharing the company of overweight souls who have given up just a little on life's possibilities and are ready to settle for calling the worst musical act of all time a really nice evening on their only vacation this decade.

Sundays have traditionally (We've been traveling long enough to have traditions) been our lazy days. We woke up this Sunday intending to continue that trend. D had said the night before that we should really drag ourselves out of bed and go see the Sunday mass at St. Peter's, but, as if I was back in my adolescence in the States, I slept straight through the church services. Luckily, as I mentioned, I am not Catholic, so I didn't feel guilty about it at all. Sometimes it's incredibly relieving to not need to be forgiven.

We decided through our afternoon yawns that a nice, relaxing Sunday activity would be to take a bike ride on the Appian Way - the old, old, very old road that used to be the main way in and out of Rome.

Unfortunately, we grossly underestimated the length of the walk to actually reach said road. And, yes, we could have taken public transportation there, but we have generally avoided it as much as possible - not because it is too complicated or logistically worthless, rather that we see so much more of a city if we make ourselves walk everywhere. Subway stations all basically look the same, after all.

It took us well over an hour to reach the mouth of the Appian Way. By the time we arrived we'd already drank both of our bottles of water and I was legitimately concerned about heat exhaustion. My dark gray shirt was sweat soaked and stained with white streaks from all the salt pouring out of my body. I'm surprised it didn't crystalize.

We hired our bikes with only an hour and forty-five minutes before the bike shop closed. They told us that we'd have to hurry if we were going to see all the sights along the way. I forced my rapidly liquifying legs to pedal hard up the first hill.

The landscape was dusty and barren, the sun was exceptionally bright and it washed out any colors that hadn't already been masked by the layers of summer dust. The road was paved with ancient stones that our bikes struggled to climb over and weave around. At some points the terrain was so severe that we had to get off the road and ride through the dusty ditches along the side. (You should make note of how many times I had to use the word "dusty" in that paragraph. There's no better word to describe it.)

The Appian Way is lined with ruins, monolithic piles of stones that no longer even resemble whatever they once were. There are catacombs and ancient bath houses - where only they mosaic floors and the outlines of walls remain.

Pushing ourselves and our bikes, gear boxes grinding, we made our way far enough to see planes landing at the airport outside of Rome. Later, after returning our bikes, we checked a map and realized we'd biked all the way past the last of the tourist destinations along the road and still made it back with time to spare before our bikes were due. Apparently we are pretty swift bikers and now I honestly wouldn't mind owning a bike again when I finally get home. I haven't had one since I was a kid.

On the return trip, beside one of the crumbling monoliths was a pair of lipstick red stiletto heels casually discarded beside the road. There was no one in sight, but the shoes were not there when we'd passed by fifteen minutes earlier and they had yet to be covered by the dust that blew relentlessly in the wind. Someone had kicked them off minutes earlier and scampered away, barefoot.

My Sunday was amazing, but whoever owned those shoes, I think, was having an even better one. Rome pulsed with passion, a thumping heart after a hard run or a first dance or a first kiss.

We found a neighborhood that night that we immediately recognized as the place where we would live if we ever actually moved our lives to Rome. It's called Trastevere and it is edgy and hip and full of plazas where young twenty-somethings seek out the kind of passion that leaves stilettos beside dusty ruins. We found a bar at one of these plazas that served shockingly good (and strong) micro-brew beers for a very reasonable price. We came here almost every night after we discovered it. One night we sat and watched a fire dancer in the square, swirling her burning ropes around that plaza as if to say that not even the night in Rome could stop the burning heat. She writhed on the ground as the fire spun in tight circles over her head.

This entry would be worthless if I didn't take a minute to talk about some of the food we had in Rome. The real highlight for me came from a place called Restaurante il Boom, which we chose because any place that names themselves "The Boom" is just kind of cool and because they had photos of 1950's pin up girls on their doorway. We were told by the owner that it's a rather new place, open only a few months, which I suppose makes us Roman trendsetters. They brought us free champagne and bruschetta and I swear they didn't pay us anything at all to rave about their food online. We had a plate of pasta carbonara that brought creamy, eggy little tears to my eyes and veal with a paste of rosemary and panchetta that was to die for. But, the highlight - and I don't say this lightly, because, honestly, I'm not a big fan of dessert at all - was their tiramisu. It was like being hit in your taste buds with the H-Bomb of tiramisu. It redefined for me what tiramisu should actually be. The shape, the presentation, the texture, the sweetness, the richness. It was flawless and inspired. D and I almost always share plates of food when we eat out (so as to maximize how much food we get to experience) but after this meal, we began to refer to having "a tiramisu moment," which is to imply a sudden feeling of ownership and entitlement that leads one to no longer want to share.

The pizza we had in Rome was also divinely inspired. In fact, it was some of the best pizza of my life, if not the best. But, what really struck me (while our mouths were in the middle of pizza induced orgasms) was the couple beside us. They were married. The husband had long, dark, flowing Italianesque hair and a face of casual stubble. The wife had brilliant green eyes and a figure that was an elegant balance between slim and womanly, garbed in a shirt that read "I left my heart in Chicago." They jokingly harassed the man trying to sell roses to the patrons, they were good friends with the servers at this incredibly hip restaurant and they never stopped staring at each other like they were freshly in love; making each other laugh all night. It made me feel very warm and optimistic to bask in the glow of their obvious love. At home, with a few exceptions, I feel like all I ever hear is, "Well, life is over now that I'm getting married," or, "Oh, I'm headed back to the old ball and chain." But, no. That's ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that way at all. It shouldn't. The "Good Life" doesn't have to end; with the right person it only grows and when two people like that make it grow it's so powerful that it even knocks over the travelers sitting at the table beside them who can't understand a word of their passing conversation.

When the scalding sun came up again we went to the Vatican museum. Their collection of timeless masterpieces is seemingly infinite (although often still radiating the faint glow of being stolen or corrupted.) The museum itself is a timeless masterpiece, every inch of wall is a work of art. There were rooms covered in frescoes by Raphael and an endless hallway of painted maps of the Roman empire at different times in history (something I assume served as the original Google Maps.) There were mummies and crowns and treasures piled on top of other treasures. I saw the corner of a door so ornately carved that it had been roped off from tourists so they couldn't pet the sculpted cherubs on their way past. There was even a contemporary art section with unseen works by Van Gogh (amongst others) that the tour groups just stomped casually past. I overhead an English girl passing by a towering abstract expressionist canvas painted bright red say, "I hate art like this." A statement from a person so selfishly involved in their own limited perception of the world that they couldn't even take the time to think that there might actually be some deep value in the piece that was chosen amongst thousands of others to be presented in the Vatican (which only houses treasures in the first place) as the last work of art you see before you step foot into the Sistine Chapel itself. "I hate art like this."

Oh, and by the way, I am not even going to try and write about the Sistine Chapel. I can't do it justice and the photos I took that I was technically forbidden to take can't do it justice either so I'm just going to not say anything about it except go there. See it before you die. This belongs on your bucket list. You have no idea.

Also, if you look very carefully near one of the upper corners in the Sistine Chapel you can vaguely see the outline of a secret Pope escape passage. And, my opinion is that anything that involves such important secret passageways is intrinsically worth your time, masterpiece or not.

Sistine Chapel, holy fuck. I am glad we didn't see these things before we saw the other churches in the other cities. They would have just seemed silly.

We walked to the Trivi Fountain and I watched tourists tossing in coins over their shoulders, hoping for the luck they'd need to return to Rome one day. We climbed a hill to a park that reminded me so much of Barcelona's Park Guell, except that this park didn't seem to be melting around us. Although, I must mention that much of the architecture that we saw in Rome was so old that the surviving stones actually resembled Gaudi's work that we'd seen in Spain. It was endlessly interesting to see the things that he probably saw at some point that inspired his designs and his dreams. The park atop the hill in Rome was filled with couples intensely making out, leaving their stilettos beside dusty ruins, I assume.

We went to the ruins of the Roman forum and wandered around them lost and confused. The forum ruins are interesting because no particular fallen column or broken wall seems all that interesting. But, when you find yourself able to step back and take in the entire, massive site it is imposing and tremendous and still filled with the echoes of the academics and scholars and philosophers and senators that once paced those dusty, broken floors.

We walked through the Colosseum in much the same fashion, our perception undulating like a sine wave between a feeling that this stadium is pretty much just like any stadium you've ever seen today (minus the flat screens) and a knowledge that the stone you just ran your hand across has been covered with layers and layers and layers of blood from warriors and criminals and the innocent and wild animals and that it was filled with the whole city of Rome and its emperors that once stared down on those bloody stones with cheers bellowing from their throats.

I loved Rome. Deeply. The heat, the passion, the love, the exhaustion, the hypocrisy, the lines of souvenir shops that seem to ruin the monuments that were technically already ruined, the dust and the sun and fallen columns and a shirt that read, "I left my heart in Chicago."

But this was the end of Southern Europe for us. We worked our way to the airport, where you could just make out the winding curves of the Appian Way we had biked a few days earlier and checked our bags into the comfortless belly of a Ryan Air jet and headed for Stockholm.

Firenze: Sometimes I Need Something Different

Arriving in Firenze was an odd experience for me. I hadn't realized how vividly I would remember the tracks that came to an abrupt end at the train station there.

Five years earlier, I arrived at this train station on my very first trip out of the country, my brand new passport clutched in my hand after just losing its stamping virginity in Milan. Actually, if I remember correctly, it was also my very first train ride ever. I spoke no Italian then, and wasn't accustomed to seeing signs written in different languages. Everything felt like a dream where all the letters and numbers are jumbled just enough to make you realize that you aren't really awake. Jessie walked me through the station, moving my hands for me to validate my train ticket; the spiritual guide in my lucid dream. She commented then that I seemed underwhelmed by Italy. But, that is often just how I appear when my mind has too many things to process. All my energy was concentrated inside my brain trying to make sense of this new world; my body was slack and willing to be led away without resistance.

But, that was not me this time. This time I arrived as a seasoned traveler. A seasoned traveler with a arsenal of ten or twenty surprisingly useful Italian words and a heady buzz from the train ride, rugged and unshaven.

We met a trio of English girls (one was Irish, to be culturally appropriate) in our carriage car on the train ride from Venezia. They had wisely packed a lunch for the three hour train ride and we had not packed a thing. They were kind enough to share some of their food and plenty of their stories with us. We all laughed together. The girls lamented that the only thing that could make the train ride better would be a bottle of wine.

As it turned out, I had just picked up a bottle of champagne and had it in my daypack. We joyously uncorked it and passed the warm bottle around our carriage compartment until it was empty, staring confrontationally at any new riders that seemed like they may be intent on crashing our ongoing feast to take advantage of the last empty seat in our compartment.

We met up with them again that evening for dinner at a small restaurant called Casa Mia which served family style portions of pastas and pizzas. We filled our table with dishes until the red checkered tablecloths could no longer be seen. After hours of effort, we drug ourselves from the restaurant and limped to a busy public square where a cheesy jazz band was finishing their set; each instrument taking their technical but emotionless final solos. A Senegali man walked around the cafe tables with twenty glittering hats on his head and arms full of light up toys, doing his best to sell them to the drunker Italians in the crowd. Stuffed animals with light up eyes blinked and whizzed and danced.

The next day I hit the scorching streets of Firenze with my camera, intent on having another photo session like the one I had in Venezia. Maybe it was that I had been overstimulated by the beauty of Venice, or maybe it was because I'd already seen most of Florence or maybe it was just so damn hot I couldn't focus through the beads of sweat cascading across my eyelids but I just couldn't find the same visual inspiration on these streets as I had in Venice. As I've thought about it since then and maybe it's really that Florence is just so full of so many gorgeous gorgeous things that the streets between them are given a free pass to be a bit lackluster.

The first of the beautiful things in the less-than-beautiful city we saw was the Galleria Accademia. This is the gallery that houses Michelangelo's statue of David. David may be the most iconic statue ever shaped by the hands of a man, but despite having seen it before in photos on no less than 1,000 occasions, I was still intimidated by the towering stature of the man reveling in his victory over Goliath. There are a couple of copies of the statue around Firenze, but they just do not adequately capture the grandeur of the real sculpture.

Still, to me, this was not the highlight of the gallery. The hallway leading up to David is lined with unfinished works by Michelangelo. In these, you could actually see the original stone blocks giving way to the master's vision; artist and stone both coming to a compromise on what image may emerge. The strokes of Michelangelo's hands were still apparent on these statues, unpolished and undisturbed. And that is where I found the real art, in the strokes, the effort, the perfectionism, the process, the path, the swing of the hammer. It made me want to create.

From there we moved on to the Uffizi Gallery which was so packed with Renaissance masterpieces that statues were stacked in front of other statues and stuffed away into corners near the toilet and the portraits of once powerful and influential men were crowded up the wall so far that you couldn't even make out the faces of the ones at the top. We saw huge paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci and Botticelli. You remember Botticelli, right? The painting of The Birth of Venus, where she surfs into the world as a full grown goddess in her birthday suit on a surprisingly buoyant sea shell? It's another image that has been so ubiquitous and overplayed in books and television advertisements that you can't help but be taken aback as you stand in front of the expansive canvas which holds that image you've seen 1,000 times thinking to yourself, "Wow...yes, this really IS a masterpiece." And then you walk away. And then you walk back. I used to think this painting was boring.

My own face scrunched in front of the nude Venus, her tender face, wondering how many other of my preconceptions primarily consist of the same sort of naive bullshit that this one did. I appreciated the soft colors of the painting a bit longer than the tour group passing through the room did and made the correction in my mind.

That night we filled ourselves up with more amazing food from a restaurant called Il Aqua Due which served me a house selection of five brilliant pastas (the best one one was surprisingly simple, made with fresh pasta and earthy cabbage - fresh pasta makes dried pasta seem like a cruel joke) and a platter of three individual filet mignon steaks, one in a light salad, one covered in a syrupy, confrontational balsamic glaze and a third in a sauce of tart blueberries and peppercorns. All three made me close my eyes and forget how to speak for at least forty-seven minutes.

After eating all that food we decided we'd pass out on the spot if we didn't have a walk, so we strolled along the Arno River with no particular destination in mind. We passed the Ponte Vecchio, the covered bridge goldenly lit up, its arsenal of jewelry dealers closed for the night. We passed by the handrails at the riverbank which were covered in padlocks decorated with lovers' names, symbols of their devotion. Whenever I see this I can't help but picture them laughing, kissing, tossing the key away into the Arno without cares. We kept walking, past the new dresses and leather shoes of the shopping district and away from the city center.

After some time, I looked over the bank of the river and saw movement at the next bridge. As we walked closer we realized that there was a cafe with a small outdoor bar set up by the river. We immediately resolved to have a drink there.

As we climbed down to the cafe, we also saw a stage set up with instruments and lighting. We had accidentally showed up an hour early for an outdoor performance of an Italian cock-rock band. We found a table and settled in eagerly.

When they finally started playing, the sound was incredibly unbalanced, the vocals too loud and the PA system was trembling with the staticked buzz of overworked electronics rapidly on their way to meet their maker. Every kick of the bass drum sounded like a small explosion. I sat nervously, waiting for the singer to receive a lethal shock from his alcohol soaked microphone.

But, it never happened. Instead, in true Italian form, the band said some annoyed words, the only ones I understood being variants of "fuck," shrugged and after three songs or so the issues with the equipment had all been straightened out. The area around the stage had also transformed from empty to packed, with Italian couples laying on the banks of the river with bottles of wine, a few of the drunker girls dancing loosely to the music and one strange man prowling the crowd with a faceless mask adorned with blinking LED's where his eyes might have been (had he possessed three of them.) The band was sloppy but talented, the songs were raw but catchy. It was immensely fun. It reminded me so much of my old band and all the music we used to play and loved to see so often. It was rough and angry and silly and full of life. They played just to be playing. No better reason to play. You could tell. You could feel it. We ended the night as the band ended their set.

A common motif in our travels has been climbing. The next day in Firenze, we decided that our first climb would be to the top of the Duomo, a beautiful church whose green and white marble walls can't really be appreciated until you are standing beside it, straining your neck to try and see the top. (Failing.) The church takes up an entire city block and towers above the rest of the city. Climbing to the top of the dome was an experience in itself. The stairs seemed to wind up steeply forever and the hallways might have been designed by an ultra-modern architect with a fresh-out-of-university appreciation for severe materials and dystopian visions. Obviously it wasn't. But, the walls of the passageways came at you at the most acutely jagged angles, the staircases meandered aimlessly at times, doorways weren't square, walls didn't seem continuous. Despite being several stories above the ground, you felt like you were crawing in a cave.

Before you emerge at the top of the dome, you are given a chance to have an up close look at the frescoes that adorn the inside. This particular painting was a dramatic depiction of heaven and hell, with angels kicking back happily near the top of the dome and the tattered bodies of sinners being beaten and devoured by demons and lizard creatures along the bottom edges. There were skeletons and twisted screaming faces and flames. I pictured myself actually being in that church on a Sunday morning, looking up as a child to see those demons.

I can see why they chose them. Maybe had I been constantly exposed to such terrible visions in my youth I wouldn't have been able to so cavalierly toss aside my religious affiliations as I got older. Who knows. Imagery is a powerful thing.

From the top of the dome we could see all of Firenze, including our next destination: a pilgrimage to the top of a mountain; the Piazza del Michelangelo and the monastery that capitulates that hill.

There was another stream of endless steps to reach the top of the hill, and the church that adorned the top was gilded and beautiful. But, our main desire was to buy some of the special liquors that these monks have made for generations and are still making today.

When we stepped into the small shop, we were greeted by the sound of intensely technical piano playing, the notes chromatically crunched together in a way that clearly fingerprinted it as a product of the 20th century. We bought our liquors randomly, since we had no idea what they actually were. The monk smiled happily at us and wished us well on our way.

Sitting outside, watching the sun start to settle into the horizon we decided that what we really needed to do was march back into that shop and ask the monk what the hell he was listening to, because it was an absolutely striking piece of music.

So, that's what we did.

When we asked the monk about the music, he was a little bit taken aback by our ignorance, but then said (in that very adult kind of way), "Oh, yes, you are probably too young to know."

The artist was Keith Jarrett, a jazz pianist, and the monk was easily one of his biggest fans. He described to us the story of one of the earliest Keith Jarrett recordings, that it was accidental - the recording engineer just testing the equipment, that the sound was unique because the piano itself had a very broken midrange, forcing the player to focus on extremely low and high notes only. The monk pulled out this album and played us the intro. He said, "The whole album is amazing, but the first seven minutes that introduce it - for me - these seven minutes are perfect." When a man who has dedicated his entire life to a humble worship of God calls something "perfect," you need to be paying attention.

And it was brilliant. Keith Jarrett humming harmonies to himself and stomping beats on the floor as he improvised his way around the crippled piano. The monk's eyes closed and he smiled. He watched us for our reactions.

"You know, in here, all day we have to play Gregorian chants. You know these? Yes, they are very beautiful. But, sometimes, in the afternoon...I need something different."

That was the wisdom the monk left us with.

We bottled it up with our liquors and packed our bags for Rome.