Ciao bella!

Time is flying. Let’s do a quick recap. I hit the road and started posting to this blog starting on the 15th of January. That was over three months ago. Three weeks of traipsing about Xinjiang and Gansu Provinces in China’s wild and exotic far west, one month in Russia along the frozen Trans-Siberian railroad, and one month in Europe, cutting south from Scandinavia and working my way west along the Mediterranean coastline. I’ve come a long way. It’s about that time where I need to do a quick budget check to ensure I have enough money to get back home. But offhand I figure I have at least a few more weeks left, both in money and energy. The goal right now is to travel along the French Riviera, along the Cote d’Azur, in southern France to Spain, hit some of the major coastal cities of Spain down to Malaga and Gibraltar, take the ferry to Morocco (Africa!) and then work my way north to Madrid, Paris, and finish in London. But can he do it?!

Italy is one of those storybook countries that you want to preserve forever for humanity’s sake. There economy is on the rocks but I feel like the whole world should do them a favor, pitch them a little money, and invest in a land that serves as a future travel destination, a place you know will always be available to escape to on holiday. Alex (from Milan) put it to me this way. Italians are characterized and identified by their culture and their history. It is the one thing they hold on to so preciously and it is the one thing that they cannot lose, the one thing that will keep the country rolling into the future. It is also the big draw for tourists and what will one day bring me back to this country to continue to travel around. This was my last day in Rome and my last full day in Italy. The next day I took a train along the coast to Nice, in the south of France. Four short days in Rome and one and a half weeks in Italy is not nearly enough to get a sense of the country. I’m missing out on such places as Florence and Bologna, Siena and Pisa, Napoli and the south, and much more obviously. At least now I’m aware of how much I want to go back. And the food! Oh, the food. How I will miss eating pizza and pasta everyday (and there are other things too).

But I still had today and I still wanted to see a few more things that I missed out on over the last couple of days. First up was the Castel Sant’Angelo, a papal fortress and ancient mausoleum. This huge structure was first built in the second century AD to serve as a mausoleum for Roman Emperor Hadrian and his family. The building is a huge cylinder shape that rises high above the banks of the Tiber, and right next door to St. Peter’s Square. Since then, the Vatican has taken over its use and has turned it into an ancient fortress that could be used to protect the Pope in times of war. There is a secret tunnel that leads from the Papal offices of the Vatican, straight into the cellar of the castle. The castle has also been used as a prison (in some quarters) and as a residence for the Pope (in other quarters). An additional fortified wall had been built around the cylinder for added defense and today, each tower in each of the four corners of the wall, each named after the four books of the Gospel, holds cannons and a solid stock of cannonballs. The Pope no longer lives there and since then the Papal quarters have been turned into museum rooms and the Vatican uses the place to rotate through exhibits, showcasing its collection of art that it doesn’t keep in the Vatican museum. 

View of St. Peter's Basilica from the top of Castel Sant'Angelo

The castle itself is really cool. You enter though the fortified wall on the ground floor and then straight through inside to the heart of the cylinder shape. This part looks like an ancient crypt. It’s very dark, everything made of stone. The inner most room is the Hall of Urns, where Hadrian and his family were buried. But here a series of creepy passageways take you around and up the cylinder to the upper portion of the castle where the passageway breaks free to the air above, into plazas and walkways, office rooms and now, exhibit halls and cafes. The whole complex is a confusing arrangement of secret passages and hidden terraces, and even some trap doors. Eventually you wind your way up to the top for excellent views out towards Rome and the Tiber. The castle is named after the Holy Angel because, as legend goes, one day, after a plague had broken out and ravaged the Roman population, an angel appeared over the castle, like an apparition, bursting with fire, and it was witnessed and later recorded by hundreds of people. The day after the angel appeared over the castle, the plague broke and people started getting better until the plague was eventually wiped out. Since then, they renamed the castle (from Hadrian’s tomb, I think) and topped the structure with a statue of the angel.

The angel that appeared over the castle, but this time in statue form

The round, cylindrical structure of the castle

The castle was a pretty cool place. I left after a few hours of wandering. I walked back behind the castle to the neighborhood by the Vatican where I knew there were some restaurants where I could sit outside and eat some pasta. I walked across a lawn where some Italian school boys were playing soccer, still in their school uniforms, and then made my way to the alley where the restaurants were. I took a seat in the sun by one of them, ordered a dish of stuffed rigatoni and a glass of wine, and watched as priests and nuns and tourists walked along the street’s narrow walkways in and around the Vatican. It was another bright, sunny day, a little warm in the direct sunlight. The food was good (if not a little overpriced) and then I walked back to the river and back into the heart of Rome. I was looking for the last big tourist attraction that I figured I should see before leaving, the Pantheon, a massive church dome structure near the Trevi Fountain, built atop Agrippa’s ancient temple. This dome is probably the single best preserved structure still standing from ancient Rome. You approach from a plaza, deep in some neighborhood in central Rome, and walk through the huge pillars of the entrance and up the steps and into the massive structure inside. The Pantheon is an architectural marvel of size in its simplicity. You enter into the single large space, centered around and under the one massive dome. It is hard to see from the outside how big the space is because the church is buried in between buildings and hidden away inside this little back alley plaza. But it becomes quite apparent when you get inside how huge the place is. And best of all, free entry! I walked around the church for a little awhile, admiring some of the artwork hanging on the walls and then walked back out to go sit by the fountain in the sun in the middle of the plaza like everyone else.

School kids playing soccer outside the castle

My simple lunch of stuffed rigatoni

A fountain I stumbled upon, one of many in the city

The entrance to the Pantheon

After another espresso and gelato, I made my way back to the hostel to do some laundry, it was early afternoon. I met up with Alex (cycling around Italy Alex) and we talked awhile while I waited for my laundry to finish washing and he caught up on some emails. Since he was cycling and not always staying in hostels, he brought along some of his camping gear which included a small kitchenette set of pots and pans and a burner with a small propane gas tank which he lit and used on the small balcony out the window to cook up some pasta he had bought at a shop nearby and some pesto sauce. The room smelled pretty good. I sipped a beer and caught up on emails myself. He was going to meet up with a cycling buddy that he had met during his trip through Florence at 8 o’clock that evening and my only plans were to go back to that pizza place in Trastavere to eat one last Italian meal. So we decided to kill a couple of hours until then and walk somewhere for a beer. We took a route walking south from our hostel into a neighborhood we hadn’t explored. It took us to a little park full of local Italian kids and their parents watching on. In this park was an old structure, probably an old Roman one, that had fences around it and some people working in the area, probably restoration work. It seems no matter where you walk in this city you are bound to run into some ancient ruin or other.

We continued on back to the street that leads from the train station and works its way south to the Colosseum area. We didn’t make it quite that far but we did stop at a small place for a beer, the first one we came across after walking for 20 minutes or so. We should have shopped around though. We were approached by a woman asking us to look at a menu, we said we wanted to sit for a beer. Then she told us, in broken English, that it was happy hour. We asked how much it cost for a beer and she said that it was very cheap. We said, great! Of course we’ll go for a beer. So we took a seat outside at one of the tables along the side walk and ordered our beer. She came out a moment later with two, one liter glasses of beer. That is a huge glass of beer. We looked at each other in surprise and with an eye of suspicion, wondered how much these were going to cost. After all, Rome is an expensive city and just a normal size beer goes for 5 euros or more. But we sipped them anyway, kind of laughing it off. Then the waitress arrived a minute later with a plate of cut up sandwiches and chips and said they came with the happy hour deal when we protested the order. Alex started getting very upset about the whole deal and asked the waitress more directly this time how much all this would cost. Instead of telling us, she said she would go get a menu, and upon arrival, we discovered that the deal cost 15 euros. I was pretty annoyed that we had been duped so badly but Alex was livid. He demanded to see the manager or else we would simply walk away. The manager came out and she tried to calm him down, smooth talking as it was, but he refused to pay more than six euros for the beer. When she heard that, she said, “Six euros each? Okay, they’re students. (To the waitress) Give them a discount.” Then she walked away. First of all, Alex was like 35 or something, clearly not a student and I’m not either, although I look much younger than I am. I was shocked she so easily let us bargain down from 15 to six euros for a liter of beer and food. That’s quite a deal. To be fair, we were very clearly taken advantage of and all we wanted was a normal size beer which any honest place would have happily provided for a normal five or six euros. Bringing out a pint of beer is a little absurd. But lots of tourists get duped like this. Anyway, we squeezed out of that situation no worse for wear and then laughing a bit, we parted ways, he to meet his friend and I towards Trastavere and to the best pizza shop on earth.

I was still a little put off. No one likes to be taken advantage of. Especially when your mood was so good to start off with. Even with the minor victory of escaping unharmed, it still affects your mood. Rome thus far had been filled with wonderful places and wonderful people and you hate to come across people like that. I was even more determined to walk all the way over to Trastavere just to find this one pizza place again in order to restore my faith in the people of Rome. But I was a little worried about finding it because when I went there the first night, I only stumbled upon the place by accident, wandering around the dense network of alleyways that is the neighborhood. When I got to Trastavere, I indeed had a difficult time. I spent at least 45 minutes wandering around hoping by some small miracle I would accidentally stumble upon the shop. In the meantime, I got to know Trastavere quite well. After circling around the neighborhood for what felt like three or four times, I was about to give up, it was around 9:30 in the evening, when lo and behold, I found it. I have rarely been this happy. And since it was a little after the dinner time rush hour, I went right up to the guy and ordered my pizza. I ordered a good size helping of pizza, baked with olive oil in place of tomato sauce, covered in blobs of what I think was mozzarella cheese and portabello mushrooms. Ooh la la. What a pizza. And here’s the best part. I went to pay, to the same old lady behind the cash register as last time, and with a coke, the total owed was 6 euros 10 cents. I only had two fives and 10 cents. So when I handed her the two fives and 10 cents, she said, in Italian, something to the effect of, “Here, we’ll make it 5 euros 10 cents. Much easier.” I said, “Grazie” and that was that. I ate my pizza and drank my coke and was relieved that my faith had indeed been restored in the wonderful people of Rome. I walked back through the dark of evening back to my hostel and slept soundly.

The best pizza I've ever had at the best pizza shop in the world

The pizza shop from the outside, called Forno Renatto in Trastavere

I was going to wake early the next day because I had a 7AM departure to Nice, France, with a transfer in Genoa and Ventimiglia. More on that later...