Mike Welch Goes to Rome, Days 4 - 7

Day 4

Saw the Borghese Gallery. That Bernini guy can make sculpture that is not statuary in the sense of standing still, but seems to actually be moving. For a second, I thought David was going to sling his shot at me. Caravaggio, who apparently was a bit of a prick, has got some pretty great stuff too. I liked St Jerome writing the Vulgate the best.

There is dissension in the ranks. We were told, or at least everyone thinks we were told, that transportation to and from Rome was provided. Apparently, now, it costs twenty euros a day. And the pool is filled with algae, and the gym is a couple of dumbbells stored under a tarp in a storage shed. Lots of grumbling all around. The weather is beautiful. Sunny and in the low 70’s. Took a double decker bus tour around the city. Weird, and great, how the styles from all the centuries are stacked higgledy-piggledy next to one another. The Termini (their Grand Central Station) is chaos itself. The vendors in the shops range from the brusque to the outright rude. I saw two beggars, and one homeless person. Dinner at an outdoor café (spaghetti Bolognese and some sausage dish) was nothing you could not have gotten in NY. Tomorrow we take a walking tour. We have figured out how to get trains and cabs, and have given the bus company the big raspberry. They are always late anyway. People are starting to talk about Italian time. And the singers have decided they are not chipping in for the bus in any event.

Day 5

The prostitutes park on the shoulder of the road on the way to the train station. Quite out in the open. Some of them look quite beautiful, but I think I will abstain. I guess Rome is a city of both pagan excess and Christian asceticism. I don’t tend towards the latter, but have a feeling an assignation with a hooker would not turn out well for me.

There are regional differences here as in America. I heard our tour guide refer both to Northerners and Southerners, Florentines and Venetians and Sicilians. I am not sure what the differences are yet, but I will keep my ears open.

Day 6

OK, I am getting tired of statues and paintings, statues and paintings. Enough. Some of Caravaggio’s stuff is pretty impressive. It is hard to explain—they are so bold and hit you so hard. But in a good way. Finally had a really good dinner. At an outdoor restaurant. Or an indoor outdoor one. Most of them are like that. It was Halloween, and at night the little beasties and goblins and Ghoulies were out in force. The drivers really are terrible. And you take your life in your very hands when you cross the street. My friend David is driving me nuts. I love him, but he is very OCD and very particular. One of those people who always wants things in a special way, off the menu, off the map, off the wall. He got mad at a store clerk for getting thumbprints on his post cards. And we went to a café where they were selling different things by the pound, and he wanted them to mix everything together for him, a little of each.

There is a revolution brewing. Or at least a minor uprising. We’ve decided the tour manager ripped us off on the tours. On one of them, he charged us each $92. Later we found you could go on that one (the Vatican) for fifteen Euros. So there has been a lot of complaining on that count. The internet works only on the sun porch outside the main office (sometimes). People are pissed. Day after tomorrow it is up at 3 am to head for Krakow. Why Krakow? That is probably what the members of the party that settled it said to their leader.

Day 7

Quite a day. One of the guys, Don, an older guy who is a math teacher, and I went off on our own. The subway has as much graffiti as NY. I think graffiti was originally a Latin word. I took a cab, and the cabbie took offense at the driving of another car. He pulled alongside and let loose with a string of invective, real juicy expletives. I joined in. I caught imbecile and mongoloid. I tried y tu mama tambien. That was fun, kind of a cleaning of the emotional pipes. Kind of like NY.
We found an Irish pub, of all things. They were playing saccharine American music, though. No Pogues, no Chieftains, no Irish Rovers. I didn’t say anything, keeping in mind the cabbie’s titanic tirade. They have an Italian beer called Peroni.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Mike Welch Goes to Rome - Days 2 and 3

Is Italy one of those countries where everyone is late and nobody worries about it? I think it might be. Our bus into town was an hour late on the way into town and then a half hour late coming back.

We wandered around the Vatican, and it was OK. I am not an art kind of guy, but our tour guide, Ellen, gave us the history of Italy in a nutshell as we wandered around. I liked looking at her as much as I enjoyed the paintings. Our fearless leader, Carmella, who runs the nonprofit that sponsored the voice contest and then set up this concert tour for the winners, is forever wearing a jaunty hat, and has a way of putting her fist on her hip which is very Mussolini like. I think she is a little whacky. Hard to say why. Not Mussolini whacky, but maybe arty-whacky, like not too concerned with mundane details like getting us a hotel that isn’t out in the middle of nowhere, or making sure the bus is on time to take us back from Rome when we are standing on the street in the rain at 11 pm. We are dinner at 11 pm, after travelling back on the late bus, and paying twenty euros for a bus that was supposed to be paid for as part of the tour package.

I hung out at a sidewalk café, outside a gelateria, or ice cream shoppe, where I had a few draught Spatens, a German beer. It was good. I said slainte (Irish for salud or cheers) and the fellow at the next table pulled down his shirt to show me a tattoo on his shoulder that said the same. He ended up being from New Hampshire, and thought we had some kind of deep connection, the kind you can only have with complete strangers when you are frighteningly drunk. He started to talk about racial mixing, and I couldn’t tell if he was for or against. I was grateful when he wandered off to buttonhole another group at the next table. I wonder what kind of deep connection he felt for them.

I guess Italy is still a pretty Catholic country. I saw a number of handbills on walls protesting attempts to pass a law legalizing gay marriage. I thought Europe was supposed to be more enlightened than we are. No one has called me an ugly American yet. Tomorrow we see the Borghese gallery.

Day 3

Today we are going to take the train into town. Supposed to be 70, and it is absolutely gorgeous right now. My fellow travelers are not exactly extras from a production of the Canterbury Tales. They are opera fans the way some people are Star Trek fans. Fanatics, and able to conduct social intercourse only when they are with other fans. We went to a concert last night, and the performances induced a lot of tears among the fans. I was dry-eyed, but I was impressed with some of those impossible notes they hit.

I could appreciate the love for a discipline, an art, these young acolytes have. They were yelling and bellowing and emoting all over the place, and I could see they had put every bit of nerve and sinew they had into practicing and performing their pieces. One fellow, Galliano (does he have a brother Amaretto and a sister Anisette?) is apparently a real prodigy. The whole thing reminded me of a high school theater production, but like I said, the dedication to an art, to love something that is beautiful, unattainable, and is probably not going to love you back, is something I can appreciate. I could have cried for that, for these young and hopefuls who are willing to give, with the ascetic dedication of monks, all for art.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Mike Welch Goes to Rome

I wished, when I was younger, and then as I got older, to be able to travel to Europe and do The Grand Tour. It seemed like a lot of kids did it the year after they graduated college. But it is pretty much rich kids, or poor ones much more adventurous than me, who end up doing such things.

The Grand Tour is a tradition wherein, and, as a way to complete your education before you begin a lifetime of work (or at least of exploiting the working class), you spend a year, and Daddy’s money, wandering Europe in the way the idle rich do, learning about how Western Europe came to dominate everything (and pretty much screw it up). It’s the kind of thing you would do if you were a character in a Henry James novel (along with reading a lot of Henry James novels), or if you were one of those loveable young nitwits like, say, Lady Mary on Downton Abbey.

I will be 53 this Sunday, and I never thought I would get the chance to do such a thing. And yet, as I write this, I am sitting in a 16th Century Roman villa outside Rome, in Pomezia, a kind of suburb Mussolini had hastily erected in the years before WW2. Yes, here I am, and I am going to see Rome, and perhaps Prague, Budapest and Vienna, in the next two weeks.

My friend David loves Opera. Nevertheless, I like him quite a bit. He belongs to this group of opera buffs who go around to all manner of these bellowing fests, and the group organized a trip to Rome and Krakow, of all places. I signed on for the ride, and will be going on some tours with these people (who are a little bit out there, I think I can say without fear of being contradicted, but who seem harmless enough) in the mornings, and then escaping in the afternoons to wander Rome and the above-mentioned cities, learning what I guessed I should have learned a long time ago.

If I was doing this when I was 23, I would be hoping to fall in love, a love which would probably break my young heart, teach me about the ways of the world, and which would remain something I could throw in the face of the woman I eventually married whenever she fell short of the ridiculous expectations I had for her after the love itself was long a bittersweet memory. But I guess I won’t be doing that. Especially with a much older woman, like in those coming of age movies, because women much older than me are pretty much already dead.

There are two candidates I have found so far for the role of tragic lover. One, whose name is Anne, is a tenor, a lovely tenor, as delicate as a flower but who apparently has lungs that could blow your windows out. Unfortunately, she is married to an Israeli fellow (aren’t they all in the military, and they know how to kill you with their bare hands in a depressing number of ways?), and from the way she talks about him, they are copacetic. Oh, well.

The other is named Simonetta. She is apparently a real big deal in opera circles, and is very pretty, in a dark Italian way—olive complexion, big eyes that look always ready to fill with tears or light up with the wonder she seems to still feel for the world even though she must be familiar with the darker side of life, if not in practice, then in theory, for all these operas are filled with passion and deceit and double dealing and tragic and poignant circumstance. Her English is not too good, but then again, neither is mine. Stay tuned.

The trip down to JFK from Albany was uneventful, just the way I like it. I sat all the way in the back corner of the plane in a seat that was made for a kindergartner. The woman next to me was German, and she had a kind face, and would occasionally look at me and say things in German that I think were kind, although most things in German to me seem somehow less than kind. Eight hours, and my butt was hurting after four, and asleep after six. Finally, I fell into a fitful doze, dreaming that my lower legs, completely asleep from the awkward position I sat in, had been amputated in some freak accident in Italy, a place where freak accidents are expected to occur.

Things went relatively smoothly when we got there, although it was raining hard in Rome. I thought of A Farewell to Arms, where the hero, Frederic Henry, is always drinking grappa and a cold rain is always falling and the boredom of his life is punctuated by the violent death of battle. And he falls in love with that nurse. Simonetta is not a nurse and I’m not Frederic Henry.

On the way to the Villa, I am astounded by how so many ancient buildings are preserved here, as well as how much the Roman suburbs look to me like West New York, NJ, a Cuban enclave near the George Washington Bridge known for bodegas, graffiti, and old men sitting outside on the sidewalk playing dominoes, and talking about the extremely macho exploits of their youths. Anne talked for the last ten kilometers about how wonderful her husband and kid are. Blech. Simonetta talks in animated Italian on her cell phone, and I don’t think she notices me beyond noting I am an ugly American (I hope only metaphorically so).

We stop at a bank to get some Euros, and I am surprised to find you must enter a bulletproof tube and be fingerprinted before you can enter. Are these Italians masters of the bank robbery? I know they specialize in homegrown political terrorism on both the extreme right and left, and kidnappings and strikes by the continually disaffected workers, but I didn’t know bank robbery was on the menu too. I have been looking at all kinds of Italian women but have not been struck by the thunderbolt yet. And I don’t seem to have particularly struck anyone myself. The Villa is as beautiful as advertised, but seems awfully remote from everything. The only things nearby are goats and cows. Tomorrow is another day. We visit the Vatican.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Crime Writer in Italy: Week Three--AH, Roma

 Words are unnecessary to tell the glory of Rome.  The pictures below will give you a tiny taste.  But I will tell you a story at the end--a very brief and funny one.  In the meanwhile all you need to do is look a these:

Church View

The River Nile

Here's the story I learned in school:  In the center of the Piazza Navona is Bernini's Baroque masterpiece, the Fountain of the Four Rivers.  Evidently, there had been a competition to build the Church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, which you see in the church view above.  Bernini entered the competition, but the commission was given instead to his rival Borromini.  Bernini was asked instead to design and sculpt a fountain for the center of the piazza.  The statue representing the river Nile faces the church.  If you look carefully, in the center of the church view you can see the statue's hand raised.  The gesture is plain in the front view of the statue representing the River Nile.  Bernini's statue raises his hand to protect himself from the church when it falls down, since it was built by the winner of the competition who was, by Bernini's reckoning, an inferior architect!

When this blog goes up, we will be flying home.  It's been a cultural and culinary delight to be here.