As this entry was going to press, the sports media were having a field day reporting on the exchange of insults between two of the world’s top women’s tennis players in the run-up to this year’s Wimbledon tournament: Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. The snarling arose from a convoluted story involving ex-boyfriends, coaches and you-name-it, but it all boiled down to trash talk. And was it ever thus?

In Rome’s Piazza Navona is a remarkable example of pretty much the same thing, with the difference being that the Serena / Maria verbal catfight is probably pretty much already forgotten by the time you read this, but one battle in the war between the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the architect Francesco Borromini is quite literally carved in stone in the Piazza Navona.

One side of the Piazza is marked by a beautiful church, Sant’Agnese in Agone (the Agony of St Agnes), on which the aforementioned Borromini was the lead architect. He and Bernini were frequent rivals for major architectural commissions and Bernini is said to have been somewhat miffed when his rival landed the contract to do the church.

However, Bernini did win the commission to do a magnificent fountain in the Piazza – the Fountain of the Four Rivers – and therein lies the root of the legend. One of the rivers represented in the shape of a man in Bernini’s fountain is the river Nile and Bernini has positioned him looking right at the front of Borromini’s church, but with his arm upraised and protectively shielding his eyes. In effect, according to the story, Bernini is trash-talking his rival with the message, “One day, the front of your church is going to fall right over but my sculpture will be protected and will endure forever.”

Unfortunately, I took a photo of the fountain before I’d heard this story, or I would have grabbed a better shot of Old Man River Nile. But here he is in my shot anyway:

Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona. The representation of the Nile is the figure on the right and you can just make out his left arm raised protectively in front of his face directly across from the façade of the church.

The second photo is someone else’s (From a webpage called mw-panoramio/photos/) and is a much better look at the Nile figure specifically.

In this wonderful church, unfortunately, visitors were barred from taking interior photos, which is too bad because there are some stunning works inside, including a statue of St Agnes somehow going unscathed atop a burning pyre. So if another shameless theft (Uh… “artifact protection”?) might be permitted from someone who obviously wasn’t barred from taking the photo, here is that very statue as it appears on the Wikipedia site.

St Agnes, completely missing the point and the pain of being cast atop a flaming pyre, thanks to a supposed angelic intervention.

(It’s a long story. In a nutshell, Agnes apparently was a stunning young woman with multiple suitors even as a very young girl. At the tender age of 13 she was pledged to the Governor’s son. However, she vowed never to “stain her purity” and refused the marriage, enraging the boy’s father, who accused her of being a Christian and had her condemned to death. She proved harder to kill than the Russian “mad monk” Rasputin, however, because a series of interventions – supposedly by God’s angels – protected her. Eventually, the one that neither she nor a guardian angel could stop was a headsman’s sword and, even then, the stories tell of her smiling “beatifically” as the blade came down.)

Here is a shot I took that shows Borromini’s façade – still a long way from looking like it’s about to fall over onto Bernini’s Fountain. So trash-talk that, Serena and Maria!

As a footnote, serious researchers do not attach much credence to the fountain’s being a statement in the Bernini / Borromini feud, arguing that the timing of the respective works’ completion would have made such a spin on Bernini’s Nile figure impossible. But the story endures and it probably has everything to do with the simple phrase uttered by a journalist at the end of the James Stewart / John Wayne / Lee Marvin movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Speaking of agony, here is Leslie waiting for a pizza at a sidewalk café on a side street linking the Piazza Navona to a second piazza where the Pantheon is located.

She probably looks a little surly. It’s not because of the Carabinieri’s paddy wagon parked right beside our table, although the cigarette smoke wafting over from the heavily armed and armoured tactical policemen standing beside it – just out of sight behind the pillar – was occasionally annoying. However, noting “heavily armed”, we chose not to tell them to butt out. Turns out they were simply standing by in case a demonstration of loudly chanting people with some unknown (to us) cause that developed in front of the nearby Pantheon turned ugly. (It didn’t.)

No, Leslie is looking a little surly because she’s hungry. (So was I, but I’m the one with the camera and it’s pointed the other way.) This is probably a good two hours after we had placed our order and the restaurant so monumentally screwed things up we were convinced for a time we had stumbled into Basil Fawlty’s dining room in the John Cleese British TV series, “Fawlty Towers”, complete with the restaurant’s hilariously inept version of his waiter (“You’ll have to excuse him; he’s from Barcelona”), Manuel. Being Canadian, we did eventually file that most Canadian of poor-service protests… we paid our bill but didn’t leave a tip. (Take THAT, pizza place!)

Incidentally, the pizza – when it finally did arrive – was delicious and the lengthy delay in service allowed us to wait out a pounding cloudburst from the shelter of a comfortably placed table while sipping cold beer and some not-too-bad vino bianco. Never felt a drop.

Another recommendation: Our next stop was actually at the start of our next day in Rome. It’s worth a mention if you have a strong interest in art, and because it’s not a Gallery that gets the same play as a lot of others do in the Italian capital.

There are few major art collections left in the world today that remain entirely in the private hands of a single family but the collection on display in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj is, and it’s worth a look for a couple reasons.

First, simply because it is in private hands. It is made available to the public – if you believe the family member who narrates the self-guided tour – simply because the family is proud to show it off. And small wonder.

Because the second reason for a visit is the quality of the family collection. Among the works are paintings by Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio and the collection’s “masterpiece”, a painting that is generally considered to be the finest that Diego Velazquez did – a 17thC portrait of Pope Innocent X that is so incredibly realistic (unlike the more stylized and artificially complimentary works that were more common at the time) that there is a legend that the Pope, when he first saw the finished painting, is said to have been greatly taken aback, slamming the result as “Troppo vero!” (“Too true!”)

Not surprisingly, there is no photography allowed in the Gallery but fortunately Wikipedia has an entry all about the painting, which includes an excellent look at it.

It really is an astonishingly lifelike representation, the more so for that contrast to pretty much all the other works in the collection, which although strongly representative of other masters of the period are, well, of the period – when artists were paid to do the 17thC equivalent of photoshopping, shorten overlong noses, and lose the bumps, blemishes and age-related wrinkles, rather than include them. Other periods represented in the collection, including some outstanding mediaeval and Byzantine paintings and sculptures, were added by later family members.

At one point during the self-guided tour, the recorded host, from the present-day English side of the family, points out in a sculpture gallery that the roof over your head calamitously caved in one winter and the sculptures on display are all painstakingly rebuilt from the dozens of pieces of the works when they were broken in the collapse.

That the Velazquez portrait is available for viewing at all today is no doubt due to the fact that the present-day Pamphilj family count among their ancestors – you guessed it – Pope Innocent X.

Up next – a tour so amazing it deserves an entry all on its own – a “Dark Rome” tour, this one, specifically.

Roaming around Rome (Lots of pictures this time, and some scintillating Italian history that does NOT once use the phrase “bunga-bunga”.)

Let’s start this column with some stuff about columns. For some reason, Italians in general and Romans in particular are – and always have been – nuts about them. Even here in Ottawa, you can pretty well bet that any neighbourhood house with columns and oodles of faux-marble “lawn friends” belongs to an Italian family. (Or… ahem… our local Member of Parliament, but the ones on the front of his house are wooden “colonial” square-post columns, so they don’t count.)

In Rome, columns are deployed for many reasons. One of the most famous (Travel writer Rick Steves calls it “the world’s grandest column from antiquity”) is Trajan’s Column, which sits at one end of Trajan’s Forum. A close look at it reveals that its carvings – and apparently there are some 2500 figures spiralling up its 140-foot height – collectively tell the story of the Dacian War exploits of the Emperor Trajan, who ruled the Empire for almost 20 years at its peak, from 98 to 117 A.D. Most people, when asked to name a Roman emperor who thought more of himself than of the people who made up his Empire, typically will come up with Nero, who famously and allegedly “fiddled while Rome burned”.

But Trajan was no slouch in the “It’s really all about me” department. His column marks just one boundary of what was the largest Forum ever. It actually incorporated the original Roman Forum into its massive dimensions and (again according to Steves) was a Forum with an “opulence [that] astounded even the jaded Romans”.

To build his Forum, Trajan literally removed a huge chunk of one of Rome’s famous “Seven Hills” and had his column erected to the exact height of the hill he removed – as a permanent reminder of just what he was capable of commanding. Then as perhaps the ultimate slap in the face of the shocked Romans, he had the column inscribed with this Ozymandias-like** nose-thumbing: “The Senate and people of Rome dedicate this to the emperor Caesar, son of the divine Nerva, Nerva Traianus Augustus Germanicus Dacicus, pontifex maximus, in his 17th year in the office of tribune, having been acclaimed 6 times as imperator, 6 times consul, pater patriae, to demonstrate of what great height the hill was and place that was removed for such great works.”

“Well gee, thanks Traj’ ol’ buddy… I guess. Too bad about losing the wonderful breezes we used to enjoy at the top of the hill, but I guess a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. Over-compensating maybe for where nature might have (*cough*) short-changed you?”

** “And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. (from “Ozymandias”, by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Some of the excavations near the base of Trajan’s column are opening up whole new sections of his Forum. They also reveal why any building project, which might seem ordinary to you and me, in Rome drives contractors right ’round the bend. In that city, no matter where you put a shovel in the ground, you likely are going to expose “scavi”, or ruins, perhaps dating back to antiquity. That requires an immediate visit from archaeologists and if it turns out you’ve dug into something significant, your building project is going to be set back for literally years while it is painstakingly excavated, mapped and documented. (More about that later when we visit the catacombs.) The discovery of these particular ruins pretty much put an end to any future development on the land and the excavation is now a permanent part of the entire Forum, Coliseum and Palatino complex.

Another form of column that regularly crops up is the Egyptian obelisk. As various Roman generals conquered whole sections of North Africa, loving columns as they did, they hauled back obelisks to present to the Emperor of the day as ready-made trophies of war. The trophies were then planted in various piazzas (public squares) throughout the city. (“Oh lovely, Tiberius Maximus… another obelisk. Put it out in front of the Basilica Santa Maria Soprana Minerva, would you? There’s a good fellow.”)

That kind of “artifact protection” (that’s the politically correct term for it; “looting” is the more accurate, albeit less complimentary, term) didn’t stop with the Roman generals. Crank up your Google machine and seek out, oh… say, “Rosetta Stone”; “Elgin Marbles” and even more recently, the Hermitage Museum’s “Amber Room” and Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1” for some background on other, similarly purloined pieces of national or family heritage.

The obelisk that really does sit in front of the Basilica Santa Maria Soprana Minerva. Actually, in the spirit of confession, it is not authentic Imperial Roman, but rather is in the style of the obelisks brought back by conquering generals. This one actually perches on the back of a Bernini elephant sculpture carved in the Baroque style. (I’ll pause for a moment while you purge yourselves of any “obelisk-that-baroque-the-elephant’s-back” jokes.)

Sometimes columns were employed structurally, rather than decoratively.

This line of column footings is at one end of one of Emperor Nero’s constructions, his so-called “Golden House” on the Palatino Hill beside the Coliseum. It is especially interesting in what it reveals of one particular construction technique – building the column itself out of brick and then giving it a marble façade.

While we’re on the subject of flattening hills to make way for statements of your own self-perceived grandeur, it wasn’t something unique to the Emperors of antiquity. One of the most controversial monuments in Rome today was actually built in the 20th century to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1861 unification of Italy under its first King, Victor Emmanuel II. (There’s more than a little touch of irony in the fact that the same year Italy was finally united, the United States was split with the shelling of Fort Sumter and the eruption of its own four-year long and exceedingly bloody Civil War, but I digress.)

Victor Emmanuel II is today entombed here, in Rome’s Pantheon behind an inscription calling him simply “Padre Della Patria”, (the somewhat redundant “Father of the Fatherland”). He is in good afterlife company. Also entombed in the ancient building are the remains of the painter Raphael and his fiancée, Maria Bibbiena, who died before they could marry.

(So why, you ask, is Italy’s first-ever King called Victor Emmanuel… the Second? Good question. It’s because that was his title when he ruled Sardinia, his own pre-unification section of the fragmented country. When unification was achieved, it was after a final battle at the very gates of Vatican City where his armies defeated the Papal forces. That final victory won him a unified country but got him excommunicated from the Church on orders from a pissed-off Pope. One assumes that, when faced with the need to assign himself a royal title, he thought it was probably more prudent to keep the one he had, rather than force a complete reworking of all the family monuments and palace dinner napkins back home on the Island. That’s why the newly united Italy’s first-ever king is actually recorded in history as Victor Emmanuel II.)

There is no middle ground when it comes to descriptions of the monument to unification under King Victor Emmanuel II. Writers either love it as a gleaming tribute to both the event and its history, or loathe it as a god-awful overblown pile of white marble that heaps tacky upon tacky.

Officially, the monument is known as Il Vittoriano (The Victorian, but in the sense of “the winner”, not the British Queen) or the Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland), but foreigners have pretty much unanimously dubbed it “the wedding cake”, and even locals know it more colloquially as “the typewriter”. (In fact it was Benito Mussolini who saved the thing from going visually even more over the top when he vetoed a plan to paint its gleaming white marble exterior bright yellow, a proposal intended to have it blend in with the delicate ochre colour of many of the surrounding buildings.)

To create the land space for the unification monument, a vast tract of one of Rome’s original seven hills – the Capitoline – was simply made to disappear, along with literally hundreds of important mediaeval structures and even older antiquities and, most controversial of all, several Catholic churches and basilicas, some of those already built on foundations of earlier Roman or pagan temples. In fact, one doesn’t even have to read the article when it has a title like “Outrage – the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome”, by Peter Davey in the October 1996 issue of The Architectural Review to appreciate that the monument has a great many detractors.

I couldn’t find any better summation than that written by Kevin Fernando, an Honours student in Art History, as the last sentence in an article that systematically reviews everything about the symbolism of the “wedding cake”, as well as the reasons it is so widely despised: “The overarching theme of Il Vittoriano,” he concludes, “is one of overwhelming folly and hubris; it is a reminder of the Italian government’s historic impotence, and its inability to sew together the hearts of a fractured, confused people into one cohesive identity. And this is the great irony of Il Vittoriano: it is ultimately a celebration of Italy’s disunity rather than its unity.” (The full article, if you’re interested, is here).

All of that being said, the tourist and the military brat in me did find a couple of positives about the wedding cake.

First, the military brat. After WWI, pretty much every country that had been a combatant in the Great War disinterred the remains of an unidentified soldier from one of their own national cemeteries on the countless battlefields of the War and brought him home to rest in a Tomb of the Unknown.

The ceremonies throughout the world by which respective Unknowns were carried to their final resting places were enormous and went a long way to help heal the uncertainties of families with no body to bury, or no known grave to visit to commemorate the soldiers they lost. As astronomical as the odds were, many of them came to cherish the thought that just maybe, their relative would forever lie in the nation’s memorial, rather than among the countless “Known but to God” war graves, or with only their names poignantly inscribed on battlefield monuments as being among those “with no known grave”.

Italy’s Tomb of the Unknown is contained with the monument. From the outside, it is marked by two soldiers perpetually guarding its external cap while the actual remains are encased in a black marble sarcophagus lying a couple storeys below in the bowels of the monument. Like the other national “Unknown” monuments I’ve seen (Canada’s in Confederation Square in Ottawa; America’s in Washington’s Arlington National Cemetery and France’s beneath the arch of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe) it struck me as a very moving and respectful tribute.

In seeming defiance of the external gaudiness of the Victor Emmanuel II monument, deep inside, Italy’s national Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a sombre and respectful combination of red brick, black marble and brushed bronze lettering.

Digression: In an unusual (to say the least) coda to the whole intent of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in 1998 as the result of an intensely researched article written by a US Missing in Action activist and subsequent political pressure, the remains of the Vietnam War Unknown in the Arlington Tomb were exhumed and subjected to mitochondrial DNA testing, positively identifying him as an Air Force First Lieutenant shot down over An Loc in 1972. The remains were returned to his family in 1998 and the Vietnam crypt within the US Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has remained empty ever since.

Now in the US, a DNA sample is required of everyone accepted into their Armed Forces, circumstances which prompted William S Cohen, Secretary of Defence in 1998, to observe, “It may be that forensic science has reached the point where there will be no unknowns in any war.”

= = = =

And the second positive thing I found about the wedding cake? This positive is from the tourist in me. Admission is free, but for a few extra Euros (From now on, I’ll just add "HOAWGTBH?" You can fill in, “How often are we going to be here?”) you can take an elevator to the observation deck on the roof for one of the best views of Old Rome you’re going to get without chartering a helicopter tour ride.

Old Rome from the rooftop of the wedding cake. The Coliseum is smack in the middle of this shot.

And remember my earlier recommendation to pop into every Church you can. Right beside the wedding cake, at the top of the steps you climb to reach its front door, is this place, one of the oldest basilicas in Rome, Santa Maria in Aracoeli (St Mary of the Altar of Heaven). It is so named because when it was built it capped the Capitoline Hill, much of which was torn away to build its gaudy next-door neighbour. Its foundation was put down in the 6thC but its present structure is a 13thC rebuild because that 6thC place of worship was non-Christian.

Not that one needs confirmation of this magnificent basilica’s age, but check the date on this stone, sealing the crypt of a distinguished religious leader of the church. D.O.M., incidentally, crops up frequently on Italian religious tombs in which are buried monks, abbots, bishops, archbishops and the like. It stands for Deo Optimo Maximo and means “[We commit this person to] God, [Our] Best and Greatest”. OBIIT ANNO MCCCCXXXIX (That’d be 1439, 53 years before Columbus’s first Atlantic crossing!) On one website I read, some wag suggested it was an anti-Zombie warning and meant, “Don’t Open Me!”)

Not so very long ago, CBC radio ran a regular and hilarious 15-minute comedy show called “The Dead Dog Café”, featuring the on-the-surface thick but beneath-the-surface brilliant and caustic First Nations couple Jasper Friendly Bear and Gracie Heavy Hands, along with the hapless “white guy” on the show, Tom King. I mention this only because they used to end every show with the same statement: “Stay calm; be brave; wait for the signs”.

Well, if one believed in the auspiciousness or its converse – inauspiciousness (very occasionally, English is eminently practical) – of signs, we might have thought seriously about travelling at all, based on how day 1 of our trip began. It would have to go a considerable stretch to have started off on a glummer note.

After rattling out of bed very early and shuffling to the kitchen to begin the morning rituals (1. COFFEE!), I opened the window blinds that overlook our street and found myself staring at two City of Ottawa Police Service cruisers and, in my neighbour’s driveway, two Emergency Medical Service ambulances.

What made the whole image especially ominous is that not one of the vehicles had its lights flashing and the dozen or so uniformed personnel seemed to be giving off no sign of any need for speed. Sure enough, not long after, a black mortuary service vehicle showed up and the body of my long-time neighbour was gently removed from one of the ambulances, placed into one of those awful black zip-up body bags and taken away.

Ed Taber had been our neighbour since we moved into the neighbourhood in the summer of 1991 and was another of those classic, wonderful gentlemen cut from the same cloth as both my Dad and Leslie’s Dad – the kind they don’t much make any more. We’re going to miss him. I left his wife, Irene, a note later that day just before we left, expressing our sorrow at her loss, and our regret that our trip would keep us from attending any funeral services.

A few days later in Rome, I read Ed’s official obituary in the online Ottawa Citizen, and gave him more than a few kind thoughts as I recalled what a great neighbour he had been for over 20 years. This year would have been his and Irene’s 60th anniversary. Rest in Peace, Ed.

= = =

When we did get airborne out of Toronto later that afternoon, as comfortable as the flight was, I didn’t sleep a wink the whole eight hours. Needless to say, I caught up on a boatload of reading and found a “Classics” folder on the in-flight movie channel. Between the two, the eight hours passed quite quickly.

Leslie had done all the bookings for the trip and one thing I like about Leslie’s approach can be summed up in eight words: “How often are we going to be here?” It doesn’t mean money is no object, but it does mean that if spending a few extra dollars or Euros buys us a little extra comfort or convenience, or allows us to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime experience as long as we’re in the neighbourhood, then spend the few extra dollars or Euros, because… (Altogether now), “How often are we going to be here?” What it meant right at the start was that, for the first time in my life, a highly professional looking driver met us at the airport customs exit carrying a sign with Leslie’s name on it.

Giovanni was his name (Well, of course it was!) and the run into Rome from the airport to our hotel in an exceedingly comfortable Mercedes mini-bus was a combination of both expert driving and very well-informed local history and lore.

When Giovanni found out we were Canadian, he told us a rather startling fact about his own experience. For some 15 years, he had been a driver for the Rome office of the Government of Québec. In that capacity, he had met and chauffeured – several times – René Levesque and Jacques Parizeau. Studiously avoiding the local federal politics we had left behind just hours before, we turned to commenting instead on the passing scenery and architecture.

To hear Giovanni describe it, there were only two periods in all of Roman history when any building at all took place: under the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, and 300 years before Christ. Every single building he pointed out to us seemed to be either one or the other.

By the way – if you’re taking notes, and mindful of my introductory comment that I will be making a lot of recommendations in this travelogue – booking a private limo and driver from the airport cost us exactly two Euros more than the fixed cost of a taxi for the same trip. (Altogether now… “How often…?”) If you’re staying at a hotel, before you leave home ask your hotel to recommend a limo company and then get them to book it for you. (There actually are a few Rome hotels, in fact, that may include this service for free if you’re going to be staying a minimum number of nights – our hotel required five – with them.)

Our home for the next few days was the Lancelot Hotel and to describe it as “central” is an understatement. Our room (#60) had a marvelous private balcony set with a bistro-style table and chairs. Surrounded by a railing full of greenery, it offered an amazing view of the already-mentioned Coliseum.

Granted, I have cranked the zoom on my camera here to frame the Coliseum itself as seen from our hotel balcony, but even allowing for the miracle of modern optics, it was no more than a 15-minute walk away. Ten, if you’re power-walking. 25 if you’re ambling back after a big dinner and a bottle of Montepulciano at a nearby ristorante.

Despite our arriving after what amounted to a 24-hour period of being awake, we opted for no more than a brief power nap of a couple hours because, on Rome time, we still had most of the day in front of us. So – feeling surprisingly refreshed – we set out on a get-to-know-the-neighbourhood walk and to recapture the amazing feeling we experienced last fall of being in old Rome… REALLY old Rome.

This remarkably well-preserved little circular temple (It’s about 2200 years old!) was originally thought to be dedicated to Vesta, goddess of the hearth but is now believed to have been built to honour Hercules Victor (“Hercules the Winner”). It sits beside a couple of gorgeous Mediterranean pines in the Piazza Santa Maria di Cosmedin, not far from the Coliseum.

Here’s another recommendation. Whenever you’re walking about in Rome, or pretty much any city in Italy, make a point of popping in to just about every church you encounter. We are talking, after all, about the very heart of the world’s Roman Catholic Church and in Rome, they take those religious roots very seriously. To enter a church or basilica in Rome is to be reminded of just how profoundly the depth of faith resides in the people of this country.

And for heaven’s sake (I guess that would be “literally” for heaven’s sake), look up. I’ll be describing and showing you a few churches in this travelogue – most of which are (insert countless synonyms for “moving” here because they are just too beautiful for a humble wordsmith to describe, so I’ll let my camera provide the proverbial worth of a thousand words). But there are also occasionally ones that tilt away from the sacred to the downright macabre in what they have chosen to preserve as “relics”.

As a general rule, we found that photography is not a problem unless there is a specific sign posted right inside the front door – or a stern warning from your guide or an official inside the church when he or she spots your camera – prohibiting it. (The Sistine Chapel is rigid about its prohibition, as you’ll read later on.)

Here’s a couple of teasers: Not far from our hotel is San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains), a basilica built to honour the man to whom Christ is said to have offered the “keys to the Kingdom” and the mission to found His church on earth – St Peter. It is also where you’ll find what is probably Michelangelo’s third best-known sculpture (after “David” and “The Pieta”): “Moses”. Moses sits with very little fanfare in an alcove to the right of the main altar. Even its illumination is offered as an option by a little coin box into which the insertion of a Euro will throw more light on the sculpture.

I’m trying to imagine what a US setting would do for an artwork of this significance… probably throw a ton of ever-changing coloured spotlights at it while a Disney-animatronics robot of Michelangelo stood just off to one side – looking a lot like Charlton Heston and playing an eternally looped speech about the difficulty of working as a starving artist in the middle of the Second Millennium for Popes who thought the simple glory of crafting religious statuary should be payment enough. In Rome, most statues speak with beautiful eloquence entirely for themselves.

Michelangelo’s powerful representation of “Moses” is in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli. A, quiet, perfect example of humility of display or, as someone once put it, “When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.”

Looking up in San Pietro in Vincoli. Directly below this half dome, which frames the basilica’s main altar, is a reliquary in which is displayed an ancient set of shackles that give the basilica its name, and supposedly are the chains that, on the order of Herod, bound St. Peter until he was crucified (upside down, choosing not to be crucified in the same manner as Christ).

We finished the day with a wonderful dinner at a restaurant called The Aristocampo. The staff, who were unanimously young and male, understandably devoted most of their attention to a table of young, female customers – fortunately not far from where we sat so on the one or two occasions when we had to get their attention, a simple wave was enough.

This next bit is going to sound hopelessly cliché but I’m mentioning it here because it’s also quite funny. In Europe, the bathrooms are different. It’s almost universal in Italian restaurants that the toilets are down a full flight of stairs from the main dining room. (How in God’s name anyone with a physical disability is expected to be able to use them is beyond me. I can only assume that people who are mobility impaired either don’t eat out, or they are members in a club with a secret list of known “handicap friendly” toilets throughout the country.)

But beyond their inaccessibility to wheelchairs, Italian bathrooms also are typically arranged so you enter a common door to the washing area, and then hive off to stalls behind closed doors on one side or the other, depending on your gender.

The first time you encounter this can be a bit disconcerting when you casually walk through the door marked “Toilet” to find yourself almost crashing into a woman using the sink. My expressed “Whoops” was quickly overridden by this young woman, who pointed to the right and said simply, “Men’s on that side”.

A few minutes later, I emerged to find her still standing in front of the same sink. Stepping up to a second sink, I noticed a faucet, but a complete absence of water controls. “Wow… pretty modern in some ways,” I said, and waved my hand around in front of what I was sure would be some kind of sensor to activate the water flow. “I already tried that,” she said. So for the next couple minutes, we both tried to get a flow of water from our respective faucets by waving our hands all over the place. Nothing worked, so after agreeing that our shared perception of “modern in some ways” was prematurely optimistic, we compromised and scrubbed our hands vigorously with paper towels.

She returned to her companions at the centre-of-staff-attention table and I returned to our table, regaling Leslie with, “Don’t plan on any water to wash your hands”. When it came to be her turn to visit the facilities, however, she returned a few minutes later and said, “You didn’t look around enough… foot pedals under the sinks.”

Well geez… the only place I’ve ever seen foot or knee-operated water controls are in environments like hospitals or kitchens where you’ve washed your hands with sterilizing soap and want to rinse them off without picking up any potential contamination from the faucet controls.

Later, on our way out of the restaurant, we stopped to chat with the young ladies who, it turned out, were visiting from Arizona at whose state university they were students. After letting them in on the Great Bathroom Sink Water Mystery Secret, we shared travel plans. Turned out they were on their way to Florence so of course we both recommended as a must-visit, the famed Uffizi Gallery.

ASU is home of the Sun Devils, Sun Devil Stadium and an amazing athletics program but not, I'm thinking, much depth in its fine arts programming.

And being a bit of a clown, I added that they would get to see all of the “original Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles” in the gallery: Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo. This prompted one of the girls to ask, “Oh wow – like a pop culture exhibit you mean?” Leslie and I then both realized that our first question, before recommending a visit to the Uffizi, should probably have been, “Do you like art?”

There is nothing like a trip to get the creative juices flowing and shake out the cobwebs that have been gathering for months around the ol’ writing desk. So… having just returned from a three-week sojourn we’ll call “Italy II” or “Italia Interruptus”… I think I’ve got enough material in my notebook to bore you all silly, likely for weeks. And bonus! The launch of the House of Commons’ summer recess will help me keep my government-related snarls to a minimum. So everyone wins!

You might recall that Leslie’s and my first trip to Italy late last summer was cut short when I discovered the joys of a slipped disk. You might also recall that, despite this, we still managed to get through a single day in Rome, a few days in Venice and Florence and several days at an Umbrian villa when I finally decided after several sleepless nights and a growing immunity to the painkillers I was gobbling that the planned conclusion of our trip – a week along the Amalfi Coast and a visit to Pompeii – was simply not going to be in the cards. For another thing, even though Leslie never said so in so many words, after her having rolled me around Venice and Florence in a wheelchair, I have no doubt that the thought of pushing me through Pompeii and wherever else I could manage was clearly going to be more pain than pleasure.

So after getting an OK from our travelling companions, we took the single most expensive limo ride I have ever taken – from Umbria a couple hundred kilometres to the Rome airport (But oh Lord, was it worth it!) and caught a re-scheduled Air Canada flight back home where I committed myself to the swift and thorough care of the Ontario Health Care system. Within a week, I was mobile, upright and wheelchair-less, and within two weeks I had even chucked the cane I had been relying on, thanks to a completely accurate diagnosis by my GP, and astonishingly good physiotherapy at the Carleton University Sports Medicine Centre.

One thing we discovered, however, was the huge advantage that a wheelchair accords you when it comes to moving through airports – whether connecting or clearing customs. I confess to feeling some guilt when the Air Canada flight assistance person rolled us right past literally hundreds of people waiting to clear customs when our flight – and from the numbers waiting in the queue, at least three other flights – simultaneously hit the clearance line. But with my having already done several agonizing days of penance, any feeling of guilt at getting through the system quickly only lasted a few brief minutes.

So with that background and with fingers crossed, late in May we embarked for Italy II – several days in Rome and Orvieto on our own, then a week-long small-group bus tour booked through an organization called Back-Roads of Britain Tours that carried us through Naples, down the Amalfi Coast, including Pompeii, Capri, Amalfi, Ravello and Positano. Then, bus tour concluded, we returned to Rome for a few days on our own. So that’s the travelogue you’ve got in front of you, Dear Readers.

Let me end any suspense from the outset by revealing that I am very happily writing these coming travel notes. So no wheelchairs were involved this time around and you will find in the coming days – weeks probably – a whole heck of a lot by way of recommendation. It was just an amazing trip and there were parts of Italy I feel like I fell in love with.

It seems a simple thing, but would you drink from a decorative public water fountain in your town? Throughout Italy, unless a fountain carries a specific “Non Potabile” warning, its flowing water has been perfectly drinkable for centuries. And depending on the fountain’s sculptures, the “aqua potabile” can flow from any orifice you can possibly imagine, and probably a few you never thought of. A local resident, pausing open-mouthed to quench his thirst directly from the flowing stream, or a tourist pausing to fill a water bottle are routine sights.

You will read occasional episodes of my amazement, too. How, I wonder in retrospect, did I ever get this far in life without ever having heard of Paestum, a 2500+ year old ruined town whose city plan is clearly visible in its excavated streets and foundations, and whose trio of Greek temples (yes, Greek… more about that later) are in an incredibly well-preserved state despite having been, among other things, at the very point of the spear of a World War II Allied invasion of Italy’s Salerno coast region, an invasion code-named Operation Avalanche? (You might also note that I’ve lost none of my penchant for eschewing the period in favour of yet another comma and one more subordinate clause.)

Paestum is about 80 km southeast of Naples and, archaeologically, is every bit as fascinating as Pompeii. There are no crowds in Paestum, however, and probably for the simple reason that it lacks Pompeii’s hugely romanticized tragedy of a smothering Vesuvius ash cloud to mark its abrupt and total destruction at so precise a moment in history: 12:00 noon, August 24, 79 A.D. More about Pompeii – and Paestum – farther on in this diary.

You will also read of my awe – no other word for it – when I finally found myself with Leslie, standing in an almost-empty Sistine Chapel, looking up, for a full hour before it was opened to the public. Awe, too, at viewing a magnificent sculpture in Naples that, like the ruins of Paestum, I had never heard of before – Cristo Velata, the Veiled Christ.

But even more generally, I found myself many, many times simply pausing in the realization that just scant feet below my own dusty shoes were pathways that have been trodden by over a hundred generations or more of all of our predecessors, whether in a collective assembly like a marching legion of the Roman Army, or in solitary rumination like Nero, as he tramped about his magnificent palace on the Palatino and tried to craft yet another visible manifestation of his insatiable ego.

One reason that the Colosseum is as well-preserved as it is today is because Pope Benedict XIV, who headed up the Church in the mid-18thC, was alarmed that so much of the structure was being plundered for stone to build Christian churches throughout the city. So in a most prescient burst of preservationism, he had the whole site declared a Christian place of worship to honour the Passion of Christ, as well as the many Christian victims who died in the arena. The plundering stopped instantly. There is a marker set in the Colosseum wall (visible here) bearing a Christian cross, which casts that Papal declaration, literally, in stone.

Some of the coming weeks’ writings will feel like bits of déja vu for my Facebook friends – I posted a few photos and regular brief updates from Italy thanks to the ready availability of free Wifi almost everywhere we stayed. So apologies for any redundancies but most of those brief notes will have considerably more detail here.

Before Italy was Italy, it was Rome. Not simply a city, but rather an all-conquering power that eventually came to rule an incredibly large portion of the Mediterranean, North African, European and Near Eastern worlds before it began its long slow slide into the decline into which every Empire must necessarily sink when its own corruption eats it away from within.

If you believe that Ben Hur was a documentary, then this is where the chariot race took place, the Circus Maximus (Great Circus) of Rome. This large, open space is all that’s left of an arena that could seat over 100,000 people at capacity. The echoing cheers seem to ring to this day.

And it was that sense – of global power won and lost – that really struck me in almost every place we visited. Pick your cliché, but the one that struck me most strongly was that I often felt like I was surrounded not by the ghosts of a hundred generations of dead Romans and their descendants, but rather by living history.

I also came to realize almost with a laugh that – the few lumpy remains of Viking settlements in l’Anse-aux-Meadows notwithstanding (on the northern tip of the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador) – the oldest European-built structure in Canada is likely to be found among the waterfront buildings hugging the St Lawrence’s north shore in Old Québec and rings in at about 400 years old. But in Italy, I discovered in casual conversation with someone else in our tour group that she has a friend living in a house that is older than that!

Or… amazement when shown by our bus driver a passing line of Mediterranean pines that marks a still-used portion of the Appian Way, a road built so well by the Caesars to unite their Empire at its height that even to this day whole sections have not had to be repaired to support the hikers and domesticated animal herders who still make use of it.

We’ll also meet a woman who, with her sister, are together only the most recent generation of the same family that has run a small-town winery for at least seven hundred uninterrupted years! (I wrote that out lest you read “700” and think I added one zero too many, or accidentally keyed “7” when I meant “2”. No – seven hundred years is correct.)

The Mustilli Winery. Now THIS is a cellar! – a subterranean cave about 50’ underground.

And although they have recently moved their storage to a more modern and larger cellar, they still use portions of their original cellar for storing several bottles from each vintage. The cellar was cut centuries ago from the soft “tufa” (the lava rock that underpins huge swaths of the Italian countryside even today) when the winery first discovered the cellaring benefits of constant temperature, constant stillness, and a perfectly controllable, constant level of light – candles originally, for centuries in fact, and then low-wattage electric bulbs.

Phew! And that was just the introduction!… Back soon.