Not that any of you care about this, but I got a great night's sleep last night. I think I'm finally adjusting to the time difference. The rule of thumb is that when traveling it takes 1 day to acclimate yourself for every hour in time change. Rome is 9 hours ahead of Sacramento and I've been here now for 7 days. Which means I should be fully adjusted by Monday. Perfect. Cause I'm returning on Tuesday.
For those of you who have not traveled abroad, what the time change means is that your sleeping pattern is f'ed up for the first few days. People who travel a lot all have their own theories about how to get acclimated quickly. I've heard people say that you should not sleep on the plane so that when you arrive at your destination you're really tired and thus you'll sleep very well and get caught up and acclimated right away. It's a good idea -- in theory. If you're like me, you don't sleep on airplanes anyway, which means I should be a good test case.
It works like this: You leave SF in the afternoon. You've been up since, say, 7am. The flight is about 10 hours and you arrive around 10am, meaning that you've flown through the night and arrived the next morning. At this point, your body feels like it's 1am. Now, you stay awake all day and you go to bed at, say, 11pm, whis is like 2pm back home. You should be really, really tired because now you've been up for 31 hours straight. In fact, you are really, really tired. But when you go to sleep, naturally you wake up at 2am. Because even though you're exhausted, you're body thinks it's 5pm and you've just had a little afternoon nap. You try to go back to sleep, maybe you get an hour or two of sleep, and bling! you're wide awake again at 4:30, by now absolutely exhausted but completely unable to go back to sleep.
That's what happens to nearly everyone.
Other people have different theories: Some say you should take Tylenol PM (or other sleep aid) and sleep the entire way on the plane so that when you awake at your destination you're rested and ready to start the day, now on European time. Others say you should try to adjust your body's clock before you leave by changing your sleep patterns and even your diet.
In my opinion, there's no secret recipe. The key is how much you travel. If you travel a lot, going back and forth between the US and Europe or the US and Asia, I think you have an easier time adjusting because your internal clock just get used the idea of being screwed up. For those of us who are infrequent travelers, the time change is a bitch, and there's no way to avoid it, no matter what theory ascribe to. But I don't mean to complain; it's a small price to pay for the opportunity to go to foreign lands -- and make a fool of yourself as a stupid American.
Speaking of which, I have a retraction. In my last dispatch, I misspelled "sera" as "serra," which pretty much invalidates my comments about that word. But you could substitute "oggi" for "buona sera" and draw the same conclusion. Like formaggio and regazza, oggi (which means "today) has that "double letter / let's pause for a moment and smell the roses" thing going on. And that seams somehow fitting for a culture that gave the world the notion of carpe diem.
On Thursday afternoon I finally got a chance to walk around the city center. From the little walking tour I did, which basically spanned the distance from the Spanish Steps to the Colosseum, I was amazed by the sense of history and, for lack of a better word, the enormity of Rome. The city has a scale unlike anything I've seen in the US or other cities like London and Barcelona. Without coming here, it's not possible to fathom how magnicent the ancient city of Rome must have been, how rich, how grand -- and how complex it is today with layer upon layer of history. By way of example you can look at the underground. Unlike many major cities in Europe, Rome has a very simple underground metro system. There are only two lines, which don't go very far, and which are basically useless if you're trying to travel around the city to see different sights. Compare that to London's tube, which goes in a million different directions all over the city center and out to surrounding environs. There's no point in walking around London or driving, because the tube will get you wherever you want to go so much easier.
Not so here. But the reason that the underground metro is so simple is that there are so many layers of history below the surface of modern-day Rome. I talked to a woman about it yesterday and she told me that there actually have been attempts recently to add more lines to the underground, but every time they do they run into buried history and have to stop digging.
Here's another interesting fact I learned while here: the first city in the world to reach 1 million citizens was Rome, and it achieved that size around the time of Christ (or slightly before, if I remember correctly). Here's what's really amazing about that: No other city in the world reached a million inhabitants until the 19th century.
Today, Rome is a chaotic, teaming mass of people -- and life. The city is very alive in every sense of the word. Everywhere you go -- down the main thoroughfares, through the winding narrow side streets, across the numerous plazas scattered randomly around the city -- there are people, cars, and especially scooters. When you walk around the city, as I did all day yesterday, you are constantly bumping into people. People don't get out of your way. This is a concept that surprises Americans, and it's not just my impression. My tour guide through the Vatican yesterday, an expat who is studying Renaissance art and working on her PhD dissertation, told me that it's one thing she is tired of. In the US, she said, people walk carefully around each other, politely moving out of the way if a pedestrian is walking toward you on the sidewalk. A friend of mine from Germany had the same observation about the US, and also said that the US is unusual in this respect (at least compared to Europe). She told me a story about how one time when she was in New York, she tried an experiment. She walked directly against the flow of people who had just gotten off the subway or a bus or something like that. She walked straight into the crowd, like a fish swimming upstream. She said that without exception, everyone parted around her and no one bumped into her at all. Like Moses parting the red sea.
My own experience here in Rome hasn't been quite that dramatic, but probably in part because I carefully avoid hitting people myself. I think by and large Americans are a polite and considerate people. Sure, we'll invade your country, take down your government, and attempt to establish our own way of thinking, but we're polite about it. At the end of the day, after we've bombed the shit out of your infrastructure, we want to make sure you still like us.
When you're walking around the city center, one thing you'll notice is that there are churches everywhere. Some are humble neighborhood chapels, stuck between buildings and overlooking tiny plazzas. But many churches in Rome are amazingly ornate structures. You would not necessarily guess that though from the facade, which is often comparatively simple, composed of white stone with a few words in Latin to signify the saint or the patron to whom the church is dedicated. But when you walk through the doors, the churches can take your breath away. The Basilica di San Pietro (St. Peter's), where I went yesterday, is of course the most incredible Catholic church in the world. Its sheer size is impossible to comprehend, even when you're standing in the middle of it. It contains an incredible array of art, including the Pieta by Michelangelo, one of my very favorite pieces of art, and a stunning mosaic based on a powerful painting by Raphael. Of course, the church itself is a work of art, one that in sheer beauty surpasses almost anything ever created by man. Being in it, one cannot help but feel its divine inspiration.
Before I went to St. Peters, I walked into a number of smaller churches and basilicas, in part to get a better sense of what I would be looking at when I went to the Vatican. One of the churches I went to was the Chiesa Nuova. Its actual name is Santa Maria in Valicella, but Chiesa Nuova, or "New Church," is how it's generally referred to. I'm assuming it's the "new" church because it was built recently, which is to say it was built in the 16th century. Now that's history for you.
One of my favorite churches of those I saw was Il Gesu. As my guide book says, it was started in 1568 and was meant to be austere, but had a baroque makeover in the late 17th century. I liked the baroque character of the church, which in a way echoed (for me anyway) the baroque quality of Rome itself. The church has an amazing abundance of gilt, marble, painting, and sculpture: everywhere, gold and marble, a blaze of color that is almost overwhelming. It is over the top -- and by that I mean WAY over the top -- in its artistic extravagance. It's as if the artists tried to cram every possible square inch with vibrant color. The art itself on the ceilings and on the walls spills out of the canvas and onto the frame as sculpture, fresco painting literally becoming 3 dimensional, in a sense leaping off the background to become almost real. As if the art were irrepressible. As if the art were somehow touched by the dvine spark and made living, the way Adam is brought to life by God in Michaelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chappel.
That sense of the irrepressible is how I find Rome. It's the Eternal City, a city as alive as any I've been to, with all the energy and chaos that make life the strange and wonderful thing it is.
Alla prossima.
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