Rome, Italy                                                                                            May 30, 2005

Lots of people love Rome.  Dick preferred it to Florence and Venice. 

Me, I thought it was OK, but I'm not planning to return.  Rome feels too hectic, too frantic, too frenzied.  It's a city crowded with buses, taxis, cars and motorcycles.  Vehicles are everywhere, and I mean everywhere!  Cars and motorcycles fill the streets, of course, but they're also parked on most sidewalks, crosswalks, walkways and footpaths.  No Parking signs mean nothing.  Narrow sidewalks force you to venture into the traffic just to get around the vehicles strewn all over.   Even crossing the streets at a pedestrian crossing is a challenge in Rome.  Sometimes the cars do slow down, but only if there is a critical mass of walkers.  Often the motorcycles just drive around you. Vehicular noise is an unending dissonant whirr; in an hour the constant cacophony produced by the incessant traffic noise bouncing off walls and into alleyways infiltrates the soul and jars any tranquility you mat have.

One of the scariest parts of our visit to Rome was the taxi ride to the train station.  Obviously the Italians know how this driving thing works -- we saw no accidents in 5 days -- but I wouldn't drive here.  Everyone seems to just go, left turns on red or whatever.  There's obviously method to the madness, but it wasn't clear to me.

Rome is also dirty.  There's lots of rubbish and dog doo to ignore, and an endless barrage of unattractive graffiti everywhere.  I'm sure it's hard to keep such a large city clean, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.  The dirtyness and distracting graffiti really detracted from the experience, especially since we like to spend a lot of time just wandering around.

Still, the historic sights -- ruins and excavations, including the Coliseum (wonderfully lit at night) and Forum were awesome.  We tried to imagine the city of Caesar, senators and gladiators, the city of citizens and slaves.  Rome was at the center of an enormous empire that lasted for hundreds of years.  Today, it's hardly possible to dig a hole anywhere in central Rome without uncovering another layer of history.

The Vatican is in Rome.  Saint Peter's Cathedral IS amazing -- huge, with ornate fresco ceilings and treasures, such as Michelangelo's pieta.  The lines into Saint Peter's Tomb inside the Cathedral and for the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel were really long; we didn't visit these gems.  It's probably best to come off-season, if these are your objective. 

Dick and I did join the many tourists, monks and nuns who arrived in Saint Peter's Square at noon on Sunday to be blessed by the new Pope, Benedict XVI.  There were lots of people, though it wasn't body-to-body crowded.  I expected the Pope to pop out onto Saint Peter's ornate balcony.  But Dick pointed out that there really weren't enough people looking that way, and the crowds were rather thin in that direction.  Moreover, two huge TV screens seemed to be focused elsewhere.  Sure enough, we asked and discovered that Papa appears in a top floor window, second window from the right, of a rather plain-looking building near the Cathedral.  We headed that way and were easily able to get a good view. 

Other sights like the Spanish Steps, once bare but now covered with flowers (and tourists) and the nearby narrow, mostly-pedestrian streets filled with luxury, brand-name shops were fun to explore.  The huge Trevi fountain was impressive -- Neptune surrounded by rearing horses and horsemen, in a scale much larger than life.

But in the end, the noise, the graffiti, the ever-present traffic, and the never-ending barriers of parked vehicles were too jarring for this former New York City gal.  I'm happy to put Rome behind me.

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