Days 3 and 4

Italy 2011

Days 3 and 4

In places with major historic features, guides with groups are a common sight.  On all our other trips to Italy, Jan Studer has been our special personal guide.  Due to her absence on this trip, we hired Maximilianao (or Max) for a tour of the ancient ruins of Rome. It started badly with Max.  Our written instructions were to meet him at the McDonalds (it’s very hard to even use this word while in Italy) in a piazza.  A piazza is what we would call a plaza or town square, not the thing you eat!   The company that set up the tour neglected to inform us that the McDonalds had closed for three months and had removed the sign on their building.  We were searching for a no-longer-existant McDonalds, and our guide who didn’t know us was trying to pick us out of about 2000 people who were milling around the Pantheon and surrounding restaurants and shops.  By divine intervention, Max found Shari about the time Robert found out that McDonalds had moved out of the immediate neighborhood.  Also, the other couple scheduled for the tour didn’t make it, so we had our own personal tour guide. 

Max turned out to be a moonlighting archaeologist and possessed a wealth of information and knowledge regarding the ancient Romans.  One of the first sites he took us to was the murder scene of Julius Caesar, and he provided an interesting history of why he was murdered.  The Italians have excavated the temple site shown here.

Back in Caesar’s time, the government was run for the people (much more for the men than the women).  The government back then was run a lot like it is in the U.S.A., and Julius wanted to change things and become emperor.  In any event, the government worried about popularity (kind of like now) and so they mark many of the parts of the public buildings with SPQR, perhaps the first government acronym, and it stands for Senate, People, and Rome (Senatus Populusque Romanus).  In Latin, the Q works.  It was a small thing to notice, but suddenly it was everywhere chiseled into marble.  I guess it was the precursor to our E Pluribus Unum.

Then in succession he showed and told us the origin of the Forums, several Arches to Triumphs including the one to Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, and the Coliseum.  There is more than one forum and the word means marketplace, which we hadn’t known.

The finale of the tour was the Coliseum, and it’s almost unbelievable what the Romans built.  The engineers who designed it definitely earned their sheckles. 

Some final pieces of information we gleaned from our personal archaeologist were

• The Romans were small in stature, somewhere between 4½ to 5 feet tall. Max explained they ate little protein, as it wasn’t readily available. Yet they conquered and ruled lots of people, including larger meat eating peoples.  Tough little roosters were the Romans.

 

• Eating was one of their passions.  They occasionally had 45-course meals.  How would you like to be the chef for such a dinner feast?  They were also the first bolemics, but only in order to stuff more food in.
• The word “arena” means sand, and that is what they put on the floor of the coliseum where the gladiators and wild beasts fought. Sand provided traction and absorbed the blood (another piece of engineering).  In the movies, the gladiators seem to fight lions, but they were only part of the animal kingdom that was part of the show.  Several types of exotic large animals were used to please the audiences, including giraffes, bears, etc..  The shows were to win the support of the public.

We concluded our day with a meal at the Hostaria Romana, our new best restaurant in Rome.  Sorry, no pictures, but all the courses (just 4), were excellent, and our waiter made everyone laugh. After another day of walking many of the streets of Rome, we headed back to our excellent hotel, Hotel Oceania. It has the best staff in our travel history. After climbing the 114 steps several time each day to this hotel, coupled with the miles and miles we walk every day, Shari is realizing she is getting sufficient training for the Grand Canyon.

Day 4

After a sad good-bye to the friendly staff at Hotel Oceania, we walked our suitcases to the huge Rome train station, where Bob has gotten quite good at avoiding the long lines of foreigners seeking to buy their tickets from a live person. Instead, he buys them from one of the machines, which makes the task a quick five-minute process. He has also learned to read the boards to find the correct track. It was a quick non-stop trip in a first-class car on the fast Eurostar. We then had to change to a slow train for the rest of the trip to Lucca. It’s slow because it stops at every little train station along the way. It took a total of three hours to get to Lucca.

We walked our suitcases into the old town, which is surrounded by a 60-foot thick wall that is about three miles around. The top of the wall is a park-like place with trees and a path/road where people walk and ride bikes. Cars are not allowed on the wall. And even down below in the town, cars are allowed by permit only. Therefore, it seems that every local, young and old, owns a bike. Even dogs ride bikes.

Bikers and pedestrians rule the narrow streets, but unfortunately there is no organized direction of riding. Throw in a few cars and a few large tour groups and you might have what you’d call chaos. Fortunately we arrived on Sunday, and things were quiet. The tour groups come from the cruise ships only on certain week-days and for only a few hours.

We found our apartment from memory. There was no check-in. All we had were the keys that had been mailed to us months ago from the owner in Massachusetts. We were so excited to be back in Lucca and “our” apartment that we dropped off our suitcases and were out the door within minutes. We had a late lunch at our favorite ristorante called Da Francesco. We shopped at our favorite shops for meat, cheese, wine, eggs, etc. and walked around the town. We paused to watch an Italian rock concert held outside in a large piazza. We then had dinner at our favorite pizzeria called Mara Meo.