At 90€ for a round-trip per person, the train ride from Rome to Florence doesn’t come cheap. But the lure of seeing Michelangelo’s David won and on a cool November morning, we found ourselves in Florence.
Here’s the first set of pictures of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. I don’t think I’ve seen something this intricate at this scale. I’d probably not be saying this if Taj Mahal wasn’t a distant childhood memory but whenever I visit next, I know what the Taj will be up against:
There was something about the marble of the cathedral’s floor that caused me to stare at it mesmerised:
The figures in the fresco painted on the dome, sometimes create a head-spinning illusion of being 3-dimensional figurines looking down on you:
Whenever I see an old couple now, The Beatles’ ‘When I am 64’ starts looping in my head even if the couple in question is decidedly older:
My most enduring memory of the Cathedral is that of its walls bathed in sunlight…
Invigorated by our coffee and a generous dose of sunshine, we spent a few more minutes walking around Piazza Navona soaking in the streets, the façades, the street musicians and other little surprises.
Vatican City features prominently in every school quiz book as the smallest country in the world. The word ‘country’ conjures up all kinds of imagery in your head – borders, security guards and checkposts. In reality, it’s hard to tell where Italy ends and Vatican City begins.
The Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome is just a kilometer or so away from the Vatican (so much for the separation of Church and State).
When you are approaching the Vatican from the Castle of St. Angelo, you run into a small flea market selling souvenirs, old books, LPs and B&W stills featuring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck from Roman Holiday. ‘Paradise’ from Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto blared from a shopkeeper’s stereo as I browsed through LPs of Mozart’s symphonies, operas, and piano concertos. I wonder how many people these days get to experience the paradise that springs into existence each time the gramophone needle touches one of those LPs.
When we entered the Vatican City precincts, a large crowd of immacualately dressed people was leaving the Vatican. As we reached St. Peter’s Square, the reason for the mass exodus dawned upon us on seeing the rows of empty chairs – the Pope’s Sunday mass had just finished.
Still, there were plenty of people queuing up to enter St. Peter’s Basilica. The queue was long enough to make us postpone our visit and go looking for lunch instead. We found a pizza shop in a small street doing brisk business – a sure sign that hot, delicious pizzas awaited us. Pizzas in street shops in Rome are sold in rectangular slices by weight (pizza al taglio). There were lots of vegetarian toppings to choose from – some a little unusual. What the wife took for pineapple turned out to be potato.
We spent some more time walking around the Vatican. It’s a funny sensation to be walking in a country that was just an answer to a trivia question for you until a few hours ago. It’s also easy to forget that people live here with the same mundane problems as ours – the Sunday load of laundry for instance:
Having bookmarked the pizza place for another visit, we left for the Spanish Steps. I kept seeing something interesting even in the commonplace buildings:
The Spanish Steps were overrun with tourists, so we walked to the obelisk in the square at the base of the steps and sat there for a few minutes.
There were a plenty of interesting buildings around.
Many luxury brands have showrooms in the streets around the Spanish Steps. We were visiting a country deep in the financial crisis. Their prime minister, Silivio Berlusconi, had resigned the day before and the government had just passed austerity measures to save hundreds of billions of Euros. But it looked like business as usual here. I guess history isn’t as dramatic when you are living it.
The old, ‘grungy’ façades of the showrooms are a perfect foil to the glittering, expensive products selling inside. The Diors, the Pradas, the Cartiers, the Louis Vittons were all here. Our relationship with luxury products is limited to parodying the brand names. For example, Bulgari becomes Burglary. It’s not a case of grapes being sour, it’s just that we prefer mangoes. Have spare money, will travel.
It was finally time to tackle the Spanish Steps and enjoy the view of the world along the way (and from the top).
By some quirk of fortune, we found ourselves at the Colosseum on every single day of our stay in Rome. Entry to the Colosseum closes at 3:30 PM and so we never got to go in till the very last day.
The Colosseo Metro station was undergoing repairs. Had it been any other Metro station, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed. But this station being next to a thousands of year old monument, the rubble seemed full of poignant irony.
The wife had singled out a nice dinner place while browsing a tourist guide at a bookstore at the Termini Station. We spent the evening looking for it. At one spot, as the wife raced ahead looking for street names to orient us on the map, I found myself standing across the road from the Ferrari store. A man stood at the stores’ door while his partner stood in the middle of the road to take his picture:
The food at the restaurant justified the effort it took us to find it. There was something special about the vegetables in Italy – especially the tomatoes. They seemed so full of flavour that for the first time in Europe, we found vegetarianism worth the trouble.
Our second day in Rome began with a visit to Trevi Fountain. The walk from the Barberini metro station to Trevi Fountain is a short one but I found plenty along the way to click. This was the first time I was seeing Rome in proper daylight and I was as fascinated by the colours of the buildings as their textures. Parts of Rome felt as if an artist had taken Paris and had applied a grunge filter to it in Photoshop.
I heard Trevi Fountain before I saw it. It wasn’t the trickle of a fountain that I heard, it was the roar of a waterfall. That should’ve prepared me for the scale of what I was about to see but it didn’t. My jaw dropped at the sight of the 4-storey building they call a mere fountain.
Hundreds of coins were lying on the fountain’s floor. According to local legend, throwing a coin into the Trevi fountain is supposed to bring you back to Rome. We didn’t throw any, but we’ll probably return to throw one in.
Our next stop was the Pantheon. On the way we came across a structure that looked suspiciously like it, but it wasn’t the real thing.
We also came across a closed shop that specialised in pendulum clocks. Christiaan Huygens would have been delighted. If you stare at the picture for a minute, you can actually hear the clocks tick in your head.
From the outside, the Pantheon looks simple and very time-worn. We never got to go inside as it was closed that morning to the general public for a private ceremony. A choir was singing inside and strains of beautiful music drifted out. And so we got to see Pantheon aurally.
It was a sunny but cold morning and by now we were craving a cappuccino. We decided to walk to Piazza Navona and sit for some time in one of the many street cafes there. Rome is the sort of city that makes you feel that you could spend a lifetime there and you still wouldn’t have seen anything. There was something interesting waiting to be discovered at every turn.
After walking around Piazza Navona admiring the various fountains there, we finally sat down for a cappuccino.
My mind had obviously been picking up a lot of religious iconography consciously and subconsciously. That’s the only way I can explain why I saw cassocks, chausubles and priests in the folded umbrellas of the café.
It took us a while to find our feet in Rome. The signage at Fiumicino airport was a bit confusing. We kept walking through long, empty corridors that looked like they would terminate into a wall but when we’d get there there’d be another long stretch on our left or on our right. We eventually made it to the train station at the airport, bought tickets for a ride to Tiburtina station and waited for the train at the desolate platform.
Although we were carrying a printout of the map showing the route from Tiburtina station to our hotel, it took us a while to get to our hotel. I guess that bit of rear-view mirror wisdom, with a little change, can be applied to maps too – routes on maps are longer than they appear. It was just half past five in the evening, but this being November, the sun was already setting. The top floors of an apartment building close to our hotel caught the last of its golden-orange rays. The cluster of delicate, quaint TV antennas on the building’s roof reminded me a lot of India of my childhood (I am sure that the rundown/ramshackle footpaths did their bit too).
We were eager to make the most of whatever little was left of the day. We dumped our suitcase at our hotel and walked back to Tiburtina station. From here we caught the metro to the Colosseum. You see the Colosseum the moment you step out of the station. For a building of that size to be merely standing there after thousands of years is nothing short of a miracle. It’s beautifully lit up at night – a sight that’ll stay with me for a very long time.
We picked a detailed map of Rome from a souvenir shop close to the Colosseum. Emboldened by our latest possession, we spent close to an hour wandering around the Colosseum but only managed to find another Metro station for a ride back to the hotel. While I tried to sleep, the wife studied the map and chalked out our route for the next day. I could tell that there’d be no purposeless dawdling the next day.
Some random observations from our flight back to Amsterdam from Prague.
Czech Airlines’ ads had imagery that felt a bit odd for an airline ad. A commercial flight in which you get to experience zero gravity cannot be a very happy a one:
The in-flight sales catalog had a section dedicated to cigarettes. Dire warnings were plastered in big lettering. If this is the extent of their concern for smokers’ health, I wonder why they bother selling it on the flight anyway?
As our flight entered the Netherlands, we could see green fields with endless rows of windmills wind turbines through the clouds. They are quite a sight from that height:
I wish one could stop a flight mid-air, roll down the windows, and compose that perfect shot. Perhaps this is what the aforementioned Czech Airlines ad was trying to tell me?
