Turning Left Until Lunch

Every time we'd gone out of the hotel so far, we'd turned right and I'd begun to wonder what was to the left. I knew the Colosseum was over there somewhere, but I knew it wasn't just around the corner.

So today we turned left. We had a guide today, Rob, a guy from Palmyra, New Jersey of all places, who's lived in Italy for 11 years and teaches art history in Temple University's program in Rome. How's that for a small world kind of feel. The next thing we learn about this guy is that he likes to talk a lot. This is a good quality in a guide and he was very knowledgeable.

Rob is also a seriously left-wing, anti-corporate atheist. When you combine that with an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient cultures, you get a really entertaining take on the origins of Christianity. We learned all about the pagan resurrection holiday revolving around a goddess' lover who was hung (with nails, not a noose) from a tree in late March and resurrected 3 days later. And about the long history of pagan rituals that had a special celebration on December 25 where gifts were exchanged. And how as these pagan "resurrection cults" maintained their appeal as Christianity was beginning to take hold, how the priests and politicians (often the same people) crafted the Christian holidays to build on these rituals, to incorporate them, rather than to fight against them. And also how to move Christianity away from its Jewish traditions.

He admits that obviously this is only his interpretation, but that there's a lot of historical information that backs him up. He's telling us all this stuff while he's also giving us a well-informed tour of Palantine Hill, where the Emperors lived and the place where Romulus, founder of Rome, supposedly lived and where the word "palace" was derived.

As a sidebar, I should mention that there's something about being in Rome that makes me constantly aware of the language that I'm using. I don't mean swearing or English versus Italian or anything like that. I just keep hearing the derivations of all the words I'm using as I say them. It's weird, but I guess somewhat natural in a place where so many words come from.

If you've studied Roman history you might remember the "Seven Hills of Rome." Well, this was one of them, (as is, we found out later, Capitoline Hill, where the original Senate building which is now part of Rome's City Hall stand- see sidebar above) and it must have been a nice place to live. One of the challenges in imagining these places as they looked 2000 years ago is that the Church used the buildings as quarries to build their own big buildings, so all the marble and decorative stone has been stripped and all that's left is bricks (a Roman invention, by the way, as is concrete). Nobody has any idea what materials went to which church, but there are fragments here and there that give you a sense of what might have been, and there are also a couple of buildings that were converted to churches and so retained some of their original grandeur.

And speaking of grandeur, out next stop was the Colosseum. Again, it's been stripped of its original marble facade and the 120 foot-high bronze statue build by Nero was melted down by the Church. But it's still a huge, impressive, and surprisingly modern design. The Colosseum is so famous that I won't go on and on about it, but what kept grabbing me was that I've been seeing pictures and hearing stories of this thing since I was a little kid and actually being inside it felt really strange. Good strange, but a little disorienting. I also found out it had a retractable roof. Or at least a retractable sun shade, made of sail material and hoisted by sailors during their time on shore.

At this point we broke for lunch and I'm going to give my hands a break too. Before I get back to today I'll do a quick entry on what we did yesterday. Hopefully that'll come later today. Here's a few pictures:

From Palantine Hill and Colosseum