The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Second: The First Three Days in Rome

We left Florence with the intention to go to Siena for the day, and then arrive in Rome in the evening. However, the train we were planning on taking disappeared, leaving us with no option but to head to Rome early. Our train rolled down through the beautiful Tuscan countryside, passing fields which in spring would have been filled with grain, grapes, and olives, but which now lay fallow. The ride was beautiful, if somewhat slow, and we arrived in Rome around 2:30. We disembarked and boarded the metro for our ride to the hostel. There we checked in and promptly went to sleep. We woke up around 7, and went for a walk, buying gelato on our way to St. Peter’s Square. The square still contained a large nativity scene, built around the massive obelisk in the square’s center. We walked around, admiring the floodlit facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, before walking down the Via della Consolazione to the River Tiber. Our meandering way took us up the river to Castel Sant’Angelo, an ugly fortress which functioned for centuries as the papal residence. The building, now a museum like many of Rome’s old edifices, is still surrounded by the trenches and breastworks built during the 16th century to fend off the warring French and Spanish armies which used Italy as battleground for their conflicts.
The next day we took on Ancient Rome, which lies in the southeast of the city. Our first stop was, naturally, the Colosseum. The Colosseum was built between 72 and 80 AD, and was begun by the emperor Flavius Vespasianus, and it was known to the ancient Romans not as the Colosseum but as the Flavian Amphitheater, a name which belied the slaughter that took place within. The Colosseum usually hosted games for a certain period of time, usually 100 days, twice per year, with an off-season in between to recruit and train new gladiators. Contrary to popular belief, Christians were not thrown to the lions here; that happened in the Circus Maximus. The Colosseum was a place for combat, between gladiators, between animals, or between hunters and their prey. The Roman Empire spared no expense in stocking the Colosseum, and beasts from every corner of the known world were butchered there: tigers and elephants from India; lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, zebras and hyenas from Africa; wolves, boars, and wild elk from Germany and Gaul.
The structure gradually fell into disrepair after the fall of the Roman Empire. Citizens of Rome removed its marble and limestone for their houses and churches and, more importantly, the iron clamps build into the pillars to prevent collapse due to earthquake, which they melted down to forge into weapons. The Colosseum is basically built of bricks, with marble or limestone cladding to give it the appearance of being far grander. With only its brick and mortar remaining, the structure collapsed into its current state due to earthquake. We entered the Colosseum below the area where the emperor and his guests would have sat during the games, then traversing one quarter of the elliptical perimeter before climbing to the second floor, where we walked around the entirety of the building.
After we left the Colosseum, we walked north a bit, trying to get to the Church of St. Peter in Chains. The church has two claims to fame: it possesses what are supposedly the chains worn by Peter during his imprisonment, and also the tomb of Pope Julius II [check this, and add a bit of history], which has Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses. The church was closed when we arrived, so we turned around and headed for the Forum.
We entered the Forum at the base of the Palatine Hill, upon which the Palace of Domitian resided (and still resides today, if in ruins). Domitian, a somewhat unbalanced emperor with a tendency toward obsession and paranoia, built the palace in 92, 4 years before his assassination. The palace was according to contemporary accounts a masterpiece of architecture:

“Awesome and vast is the edifice, distinguished not by a hundred columns but by as many as could shoulder the gods and the sky if Atlas were let off. The Thunderer’s [quite possibly a reference to Augustus] palace next door gapes at it and the gods rejoice that you are lodged in a like abode […]: so great extends the structure and the sweep of the far-flung hall, more expansive than that of an open plain, embracing much enclosed sky and lesser only than its master.”

Thus spoke the poet Statius of the palace.
The entire Palatine Hill is covered in buildings, both above and below ground, and the Palace of Domitian is only the topmost. Archeologists have discovered and excavated the palaces of Augustus and Tiberius as well, and are currently preparing for another excavation campaign. After walking through the ruins of the dwellings of both Domitian and Augustus (the latter being far better preserved due to being underground for a long period of time, we walked down, past the Arch of Titus, and into the Forum proper. Several buildings of the Forum are particularly well-preserved: the Courts of Maxentius built shortly before the reign of Constantine in the 4th century AD and whose roofs aided Michelangelo in his design of St. Peter’s Basilica; a temple to Romulus and Remus which possesses the original bronze doors and locks it was built with in the ; and a crematorium where the body of Julius Caesar was burned. Of the reconstructions, the Curia (the building where the Roman senate met) is perhaps the best, as it contains nearly all of the original material. We left the forum by passing near, if not quite under, the Arch of Septimus Severus, one of the last of the Roman emperors.
The next day we set to the Vatican Museums in quite the same fashion with which we accomplished the Uffizi. Of the many galleries that we walked through, the best in my opinion were the art galleries, both antique and modern, which contain among other things Raphael’s massive Transfiguration, paintings of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, and several works by Matisse and Dali; the old papal apartments which contain Raphael’s School of Athens and other famous frescoes; and of course the Sistine chapel, which was very crowded and not very visitor-friendly (no photographs of any kind allowed). Regrettably, the galleries containing the Museums’ collection of Roman sculpture (including well-known works such as the Discus Thrower by Myron, the Laocoon, and the statue of the she-wolf nursing the infant Romulus and Remus) were closed.
After the Vatican Museums, our next stop was naturally St. Peter’s Basilica. This building is huge. The interior is easily massive enough to contain several modern-day churches insides its walls adorned with sculpture, gold, and painting. While entry to the basilica was free, entry to the treasury and old sacristy, which contain a goodly deal of treasures and artifacts, as well as the dome (which can be ascended in a manner similar to the Florentine Duomo), was not thus cutting our visit much shorter than it might have been. After a brief journey through the crypt below we left and crossed the Tiber, our goal now being to see some of the sights in central Rome.
Our first stop was the Pantheon. Originally built as a temple to all of the Roman gods in 126 AD (hence the name) it was later converted into a church. In it are buried Italian heroes such as the kings Victor Emmanuel II (the first king of the unified Italian state) and Umberto I (his son and successor), as well as famous painters such as Raphael and Carracci, as well as the composer Corelli. The building is famous for its dome, which is half a meter longer in diameter than the dome of St. Peter’s, and which inspired the Renaissance obsession with domes. The height from the floor to the oculus in the top of the dome is 43.2 meters, the same as the dome’s diameter, thus allowing the interior chamber to accommodate a perfect sphere. After the Pantheon we proceeded to the Trevi Fountain. The fountain was built in 1453 on the site of an ancient intersection of 3 aqueducts (today only one remains), and embellished heavily from 1751-62. The massive facade depicts the Tritons (Roman sea-spirits) guiding the chariot of Oceanus (the god of the seas and oceans).
As we left it began to rain, which was followed by dozens of street merchants emerging to try and sell us umbrellas. We walked to the Spanish Steps, an large and elaborately adorned staircase which used to lead to the Spanish Embassy (now a library) and which are now a popular location for pictures, con artists, and vendors. As the rain began to come down more heavily we made our way to the Piazza del Populo, a large square in the northern area of downtown Rome. It is know for the two church which flank the Via del Corso as it enters the Piazza, churches which are also nearly exact copies of one another, with only small differences in dome and bell-tower to tell them apart. As the rain began to let up and the street merchants exchanged their umbrellas for postcards (“20 postcards 1 Euro please”) and trinkets, we walked back to our hostel.

The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the First: Florence

As you might have known (although you probably didn’t), students at the University of Innsbruck have the entire month of February as winter break. Naturally, for we in the Innsbruck Program, this length of time off means but one thing: travel like crazy. On or around January 29th (our first day of break) all of the students in the program scattered to the four points of the compass and the four in between. This month, we (though not necessarily me) will be traveling from Dublin to Cairo, Athens to Paris, Rome to Berlin. This post and the eight following it will describe my own hectic travels, which lasted 23 days and which took me in a great loop through Italy, Malta, and Greece.
My itinerary, as it finally resolved itself (sometimes in a panicky and last-minute manner), worked out so:
January 29th to February 1st: Florence, Italy
February 1st to February 6th: Rome, Italy
February 6th to February 9th: the island of Malta
February 9th to February 10th: back in Rome
February 10th to February 16th: Athens, Greece
February 16th to February 17th: 18 hours of hectic traveling trying to get back to Innsbruck
February 18th to February 20th: Vienna
In this blog, I shall record my experiences, observations, and petty witticisms, and in general chronicle what I have dubbed the Great Continental Gallivant.
Pictures are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words at least, and I have at least a thousand pictures for your. You will find them at picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten . If you’ve never been to this site before, it contains all of the pictures I have taken in Europe, as well as some from back in the States. It would behoove you to bookmark the site or otherwise make note of it, because I will be referencing it constantly during the course of these entries.
And now, without any more gilding the lily and with no further ado, I shall begin with Florence, the gem of Tuscany and center of the Renaissance. Florence rose to power during the 14th century as a center of banking and trade, helped by the powerful Medici family, who, in addition to being fabulously, obscenely wealthy, were great patrons of the arts, sciences, and learning.
Florence is of course best known for its role in the Renaissance, where it played host to the creation and invention of so many classic treasures of that time: the dome built on a large scale, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and many other Renaissance artists, too many to be enumerate here.
I traveled to Florence with five friends. We would remain together throughout most of Italy, and I would rejoin three of them for my time in Greece. We had originally planned to leave for Florence very early indeed, departing Innsbruck at 5:30 am and arriving in Florence in the early afternoon. The night before we abandoned that option in favor of taking slower, cheaper trains. Thus we left Innsbruck at 11 am on January 29th, traveling first to Brenner, a town close to the Austrian-Italian border. The ride to Brenner was itself noteworthy, since the rail line wends its way through a deep alpine valley, past small villages and under massive bridges. The morning was bright and clear, and the countryside was stunning. At Brenner, we changed trains and boarded one heading south to Bologna. Those hours were spent in reading, napping, and occasional conversation. The train was quite empty until we reached Trent, about 4 hours into the journey, when it filled with the evening’s commuters heading home to Bologna.
After arriving in Bologna, we changed to our final train heading to Florence, arriving in that city at around 10pm. We trudged through the mostly empty streets to the hostel where we stayed at, which proved to be quite comfortable: our room was an apartment with extra beds, with a balcony providing a nice view of the street behind us. After a rather late dinner, we retired and went to bed.
The next day was an exercise in speedy tourism. We arose at 7am and were out of the door by 8, heading to the Uffizi, Florence’s massive art gallery, well known for its Medieval and Early Renaissance collections, with such works as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera being among its most noteworthy. The museums building was originally an office complex for the Medicis in the 16th century hence its name (Uffizio being the Italian for ‘office’), but it soon took on the role of an art gallery, first holding the Medici’s private collections, and later transforming into a museum proper. We saw it in 2 and a half hours, which if you’ve ever been there is no mean feat. It perhaps helped that none of us were particularly interested in looking at galleries full of medieval Catholic art (and after a while most of the works started to blend together).
After we exited the Uffizi, blinking in the morning sun, we went to the Duomo, the local nickname for Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. The Duomo was originally built in the 14th century, but the dome which gives the cathedral its name was not built until the early 15th, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi determined how to construct a dome of the magnitude required without that dome collapsing under its own weight: he supported the dome independently of the roof, and built it of much lighter brick, as opposed to the three kinds of marble used to build the rest of the church.
Since the dome contains passages leading up to its cupola, it was only natural that some ingenious and anonymous Florentine conceived the idea of using the climb to the top as a tourist attraction. Our ascent to the top took us through sets of spiral staircases leading up to a high balcony just beneath the curve of the dome, where we could look down on the people inside the cathedral and view the frescoes painted underneath the dome. After that, we climbed up inside the dome itself, between the outside layer of stone and tile and the inside layer of bricks. The view from the cupola, or rather the small balcony around the cupola, was spectacular as promised, giving us a 360 view of the city and the surrounding countryside.
After we had gotten down from the dome, we entered the cathedral proper. The inside was cavernous, although compared to sights I would see later in my trip, it was only moderate inside. Of particular note are the frescoes on the interior walls, commemorating those buried inside the cathedral.
We left the Duomo and walked north to the Accademia gallery, which house Michelangelo’s David. Although the Accademia is a respectable art gallery in itself, the David is naturally the main attraction, which has the unfortunate effect of eclipsing everything else in the gallery, and of making you wonder why you paid 10 Euros to see just one thing.
We then made our way slowly to the Ponte Vecchio, the “Old Bridge” over the river Arno. The bridge is lined with buildings, erected there when it was customary to build shops and businesses along a bridge. Today the shops all house jewelry stores in a vast and sparkly multitude, with a few open places where people can look out over the brown, sluggish expanse of the Arno River. We took the time to stroll down it, before walking along the river and onto another bridge, this one more conventional. We paused there for awhile, taking pictures and basking in the early afternoon sun, before returning to our hostel to join the rest of the Florentines in a siesta.
Dinner we had in a small, hole-in-the-wall trattoria near our hostel. It was moderately priced, and quite good, and I feasted on tortellini in a meat and cheese sauce, a carpaccio of arugula and beef, and naturally bread, olive oil, and vinegar, all washed down with the house wine. We returned to the hostel, packed, and went to bed.