A Season of Wonderlust: Dusty feet, dirty streets, redolent heaps of interstellar life: orchaostral Roma, Part I (dates fixed

[note - title originally read 6/22 to 6/27, I corrected this to 6/12 to 6/17]

When I arrived to my short-term home, I was greeted by a shout. Looking up, I spied my smiling host, peeking out of a first [second] story window and raising a hand to greet me. Gestured directions took me around a corner to the entrance, where I waited while her quick, muffled footsteps descended unseen stairs. The large, wooden door before me opened, she appeared in that dark, cool portal out of the bubbling soup of a summer afternoon, and she welcomed me in. My Roma host showed me the basics of her home and asked if I needed a shower. I did, and when I emerged, she invited me to join her for dinner and conversation.

I have encountered so many irrepressible, generous people in Italy. If behavior and body language tell the true story, then they love life, they move eagerly to find and fulfill themselves, they embrace the gift of presence and company that other people may provide. Those whom I have been blessed to meet are relentlessly curious beings, gleaming with facets and always carving new ones - they pursue wisdom about people, language, art, science, travel, and so many other things. Finally and significantly, they love to share - not just materially, but of their time, beliefs and physical space.
[To acknowledge what some may be thinking, and what I have certainly considered: I realize that money has changed hands, but I am paying these people for their room, not their personal time, and even in spite of my own occasional fears, I sincerely believe their generosity goes beyond what the transaction requires.]

I arrived in late afternoon on this first day in Roma, so while my host addressed some needs of her own, I spent my evening walking about.

Everywhere I go, it is my habit to walk as much as possible (I have averaged 7.5 miles per day, and I think altogether 250 miles of walking since I began this journey). Wheeled vehicles offer a different experience and appeal, but it is a more aesthetic one, or inasfar as I engage my environment, on mass transit my senses touch the mass transit more than what surrounds it: I am watching fellow passengers, feeling the sway, listening to metal and plastic creak and grind. I look outside from time to time but it is more like a moving picture - a spectacle rather than an experience.

When I walk I really sink into a place, really feel it for the first time. I touch it, and it touches me back. Thus, this first night in Roma, I strolled about 1.5 miles until I was at the famed Colosseum. Of course, it loomed before me for fully half of that walk, and upon arrival before it, the monument’s sheer bulk pressed the breath from my lungs as completely as one would expect. Again, I felt the visceral blessings of physical presence. Cobblestones rose up beneath me while a vast edifice towered above me, seemed to advance and recede, like a glacier, in both space and time. Its gravity pulling me, but alas, I resisted it for not just one, but two days.

Approaching the Colosseum - still about .25 miles away

I hope you will recognize this without a caption

Why did I take my time digging my heels into Roma? Well, I realize I have not made this easy on readers but please recall that, temporally, I was just coming off of a lackluster (and terribly hot) experience in Firenze. I was tired, just about aching for human contact, and therefore not raring to go on more solo explorations. In terms of reprieves, Roma showed no mercy in the temperature department, but I found a refreshing interpersonal oasis in the company and care of my fascinating, warm and compassionate host.

When I awoke to my first full day in Roma, my host invited me to join her on a day trip to Tivoli. She retired to La Terme di Roma, while I explored the decayed vastness of Villa Adriana (Hadrian’s Villa, for English-speakers). The mixed experience of Firenze, and even the hubbub of Roma which had so quickly consumed me just a day prior, both faded in the face of a 2000-year-dead emperor’s humbled grandeur.

Villa Adriana - Canopo

(pool, statuary, etc, meant to be imitative of Egyptian city of Canopus - also part of Adriana's empire)

Villa Adriana - Canopo

Villa Adriana - Centocamerelle

Beside the Pecile. Housed imperial guards, servants, perhaps stable animals and storage as well

Villa Adriana - Heliocaminus

(named incorrectly as a solar heater due to an earlier theory; believed now to have been a large, private bath)

Villa Adriana - view from Pecile area

(Pecile is an arcaded court, holding a large, long, open-air pool and garden, framed at one end by porticos, eventually surrounded entirely by porticos. Believed to be part of a complex, with the baths and other buildings, comprising a Roman gymnasium)

Villa Adriana - Teatro Marittimo

Villa Adriana - unknown location...I like the view and the size perspective

Villa Adriana - To dust...and flowers

My emotional and physical response to these environments is always the same, and I must ask myself: is it the desolation that I respond to? A sadistic pleasure at witnessing faded echoes of grandeur? Such sensations play a part, but I like to believe that the song being plucked on my soul has two, complementary melodies - one of our inevitable, individual dissolution and another of our corporate endurance, of bondedness, of familial resonance. We exchange shapes, we circulate the organic matter which composes our bodies, we recycle names, but we are still here, we persist and touch one another across all the dimensions we, together, have access to life.

As my Roma host reflected during my stay (I believe it was her, please forgive me if I have misattributed the conversation), and as I have heard before, we are all made up of the matter of the heavens. Furthermore, we are all made up of the matter of one another. Think of the oxygen we share, the sneezes we inhale, the saliva we exchange, the sounds we give and receive, the ideas that we sow in one another’s spirits. Think of how we gleam in one another’s eyes, how we shimmer in our enthusiasm, glow in our anger, how we cast tails of reckless, eager debris in our moments of passion that paint a streak across the sky for others to witness, interpret, follow or spurn.

As I trudged in shoes made halfway around the world, trailing the cumulative dust of dozens of other places I had already visited, as I circulated through the remains of roads and buildings conceived, built, inhabited, and explored by countless others, the motes on my shoes, on my skin introduced me to small parts of a hundred thousand other humans who took the same footsteps as me.

Once I finished communing with Villa Adriana, I had a choice (sort of): I could brave the cresting heat of the day, as well as the foreign bus system, to visit Villa d’Este (known for its many, many fountains), or I could return and spend time with my host at La Terme di Roma - for this is another star attraction of Tivoli, which for many centuries has drawn people to its naturally-occurring thermal baths, full of healthy minerals, most especially sulfur. La Terme was a spa but also a swimming pool - a tempting and therapeutic refreshment from the heat of the day.

I very much wanted to reunite with my host, who had already proven to be such pleasant and interesting company, but I wasn’t sure whether a) my phone would work or b) she would be available, or would want, to join up. Therefore I tried to split the difference - buying a bus ticket at the Tabbacheria (smoking is very popular in Europe but these places are also one of the main points of sale for transit tickets) at the same time that I sent her a message: How is the pool? Mind if I join you?

For the next twenty minutes I learned (for about the tenth time) that a few weeks in Europe does not make me an expert on anything in Europe, as I missed the bus, even with help from the clerk at the Tabbacheria, then misunderstood her directions and walked a mile in the wrong direction until I was in a field, staring at horses in a pen, then walked 1.5 miles in another direction before finally, and quite accidentally, coming across a bus going away from Villa d’Este and toward La Terme, which was perfect, because just a few minutes prior my host had said yes, indeed, the pools were fantastic and I should come.

So I did, and enjoyed several pleasant hours in the shade, in the pool, eating apricots and almonds, chatting and learning how not to sink. When I hesitated to swim, my host - but let's start calling her my friend, for that is what she became - laughed at my melodramatic assertion that everyone else could float except for me. Everyone floats, she said, then taught me something I’m not sure I ever learned before, or at least that I had forgotten a long time ago: to always hold onto some breath in the water so that, if all else fails, this air will keep you afloat.

So I found human connection in two ways that day - the quiet melodrama of faded glory, and the resonant simplicity of communing with another human being over a very simple, everyday human concern, benefiting from the exchange of experience, perspective, and insight, but most especially benefiting from the exchange of caring.

Over the next three days I logged many miles, walking all over Roma (visiting the Colosseum, the Forum, the Palatino, the Scalina Spagna (the Spanish Steps, which honestly I found a bit underwhelming), the Pantheon, some magnificent fountains, most notably Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (The Fountain of the Four Rivers) in Piazza Navona and also Trevi Fountain. However, I am not going to talk very much about any of these things, except insofar as talking serves a different purpose, that of illuminating the filthy, heavenly cross-pollination of human contact, which I will talk about in my next post.

Postscript: since I won't talk, I'll show:

Roma - Pantheon

Roma - Pantheon interior

Roma - Forum - Arch of Septimius Severus

Roma - Forum - Basilica di Massenzio

(those arches were enormous. Now imagine, where you see the small stone outcroppings, arches about twice as enormous as the intact ones, spanning the sky to reach the pillars in the foreground, which used to be as tall as the the preserved ones, which is to say about 3 stories high)