Rome

Everyone is on high alert when arriving in Rome on the 14th of August. After all, Roger has been schooling the kids in hyper-vigilance for the last seven months, to the point that Jasper now thinks there are grandmothers in disguise, waiting to grab our bags.

This is of course, not the lesson I wanted the kids to take away from a year of travel.

As it turns out, Rome airport is one of the most organised and safe airports we have been through so far and rather than struggling through pickpocketing crowds of pseudo grandmothers and onto the metro, we are approached by a taxi driver who takes us all the way to Trastevere where we are staying. With a pack full of rocks, we are pleased to avoid the metro and the taxi is virtually the same price for the five of us, as train tickets would have been.

Trastevere is a lively Medieval area within walking distance of all of central Rome. It is filled with crazy buskers and street sellers and our little apartment that we’ve rented through Airbnb, is on the edge of the Piazza Santa Maria where everyone gathers in the evening.

We have to wait on the doorstep for a couple of hours and play cards. People take photos of us as though we are part of a street performance. We consider doing a bit of busking but we don’t want to tread on any toes. As it turns out, the buskers in the square seamlessly take turns and no one has a licence.

We’re all quite exhausted at the moment and the reality that we are now in Rome, by special request of the kids, but are too busy bickering to really appreciate it, makes it seem a bit sad. This is the day I start drinking red wine. Not only is it cheap, it feels very sophisticated and I realise that my excuse all these years, that it gives me a headache, is not true.

We have four nights in Rome which  gives us plenty of time to spend at least one whole day arguing. The apartment is very small and the kids are sharing the couch bed in the living room but our separate room is in demand for private pen play and song writing. Louie does a lot of pen play, but it must be done in total privacy as there is a lot of make believe and sound effects. From what I understand, the pen takes on the role of several different characters at one time, who are in battle with each other. At one point, Louie explained that he would need to stop playing with his pen at bedtime because it was giving him nightmares. He recently drew a picture of one of the characters of the pen, a kind of winged demon. No wonder, when he has received rocket pens in the past as presents (which we all thought were the ultimate), he was less than impressed. The Bic Pen is just fine.

We wander around in the square in the evening, looking for a cheap place to eat and watching the buskers. There’s a hilarious one-man band and a number of graffiti artists making scenes of Rome on big bits of card.

The Basilica Santa Maria is just a few metres from our door and the clock tower chimes every quarter of an hour (one bell for the number of hours and another bell that chimes 1, 2 or 3 bells for the quarter of the hour). You can imagine that at 12.45, there’s a lot of dinging. It’s hard to sleep through this for the first couple of nights.

We visit the Basilica where there is an hour of peace and  reflection, with a small local choir. We creep inside and sit down, marvelling at the beauty inside. This is the beginning of our European Church touring and from Roger’s reaction, he won’t be joining us on the church touring circuit again.

I know I have written about this before, but Roger’s jokes verge on religious intolerance and for some reason I get particularly sensitive when he makes fun of religious music. The kids and I would be quite happy to sit and listen for a while but Roger is whispering and poking us and doing imitations and in the end, the hour of peaceful reflection is more of a five minutes of hissed reprimands followed by an argument outside.

To add insult to injury, we can’t even find any cheap pizza.

The next day is for exploring. We get up nice and early (despite the fact that we have probably woken up every fifteen minutes through the night thanks to the Basilica clock) and walk to the Colosseum. The walk from from Trastevere across the Ponte Garibaldi, past the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, is one of the most beautiful and interesting city walks we have had on our trip and everyone is in high spirits.

We arrive at the ticket counter to pick up our pre-purchased tickets only to find that we need to have them printed on paper. What is this, 1997?

By the time we’ve run around trying to print out the tickets further down the road and return to the ticket counter we end up in a huge queue anyway but perhaps it is a lesser queue than the one we might have been in.

It takes longer for queues to move at the moment anyway, because there is heightened security at the entrance of all major tourist sites, but it gives us lots of time to stare up at the Colosseum’s impressive walls.

I’ve stood outside the Colosseum before, but never been inside and it is really quite exciting. It has recently been given a clean of its hundreds of years of grime and is looking a bit like it might have looked one thousand, nine hundred and forty six  years ago.

I’m not sure what happened when I last came to Rome when I was 22 but I remember being miserable and not seeing half of what there was to see in this beautiful city.

I’ve been reading a work of historical fiction based on the Roman Empire and it has fuelled my interest and understanding in Rome, particularly of the area around the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill.

It is very hot by the time we come out of the Colosseum and everyone seems to have their own ideas about which direction they want to travel. For the first time on the trip we all lose each other, perhaps intentionally.

It is supposed to be one of our rules, not to lose each other but we are all so utterly sick of each other’s company that it seems very tempting to spend some time alone. Jasper and Roger go off to find an audio guide, Louie has already taken off to find something specific that will see him bypass half of what there is to see, and Stella and I have a disagreement and I leave her behind.

So here I am on my own, quietly wandering around like a woman on an arts and history tour of Rome. Perhaps I’ll have a gelato or go out dancing. After a while, I’m a bit sad that no-one is with me as I have lots of interesting history to talk about; but my freedom is short lived when the family is reunited.

It is an amazing day. The history is quite overwhelming, not only for the kids, but I learn more today than I probably would have, had I done Classics and History at College.

On our last day in Rome, we head to the Pantheon. It seems incredible that a place this old (built in  120 AD) still looks so good. even with a circular hole in the roof!

I suppose that because it has been in continuous use over that time, as a spiritual meeting place, it has been well looked after. There are hundreds of people pouring in through the entrance and not a single security check point anywhere. There seems to be some disparity between the  hyper vigilance at the Colosseum and the freedom to wander in and out here.

We walk from there to the Vatican where we have tickets to the Sistine Chapel. There is a queue of about 1km to get into the Basilica of Saint Peter so we head straight to the entrance of the Vatican Museum. The crafty Catholic Church have turned the entrance to the Sistine Chapel into a 2km art trail which really stumps all of the Americans who have clearly come to tick the Sistine Chapel off their list as quickly as possible.

“‘So is this it?’ No, well where the heck do y’all think is it then? Raphael, is he famous? Is he the one who painted the ceiling? No, well where’s the guy that painted the ceiling?”

There is such a crush of people moving through the maze of rooms and corridors that we get separated and Jasper and I end up on our own. The Vatican art collection really is amazing and we spend a lot of time in their mid-century room which is filled with amazing sculptures and paintings.

If you were wondering where all the world’s treasures had got to:  look no further, the Vatican has them all!

When we do finally arrive at the Sistine Chapel, two hours later, there are so many people inside that we choose a spot and subtly start applying pressure until we reach the one wall where there is a bench seat running the length of the chapel. We then surreptitiously stand very close to someone until they finally stand up and we rush at their seat like we were in a game of musical chairs. Once we are sitting down, it is much easier to stare at the ceiling for half an hour.

Everyone seems to be shouting despite repeated attempts by the priest and guards inside, for people to stand in silence.

It would be nice to be amongst so many people and be in total silence but I guess everyone is discussing the paint job.

When we are finally reunited with the others, outside, it seems that perhaps there was not enough discussion of what we were supposed to be looking at. In fact, it turns out that neither Roger, Stella or Louie realised that they would have seen the hand of God reaching for Adam if they had looked at the middle of the ceiling.

Roger was under the impression that Michelangelo had painted the Basilica and Stella thought the Sistine Chapel was one of the ornate corridors on the way in.

Oh well, it’s good for people to have their own experience of a place, although it’s a bit like going to Paris and climbing the wrong tower.

We’ll call it ‘Floundering Fogorelli Tours”.

It turns out that both of our rule-shirking children have taken surreptitious photos of the ceiling anyway and we are able to zoom in on the photos and see what they missed!

We head to the Trevi Fountain to finish the day, where we find hundreds of other people doing the same thing. Selfie sticks really make these places dangerous and we don’t stay for very long.

The amazing thing about Rome is that you can hop onto a tram or bus with no ticket and hop off again 15 minutes later without anyone checking. Perhaps, because we are there during the week that most of Rome has a holiday, the system is a little relaxed. Either way, it makes it very easy to get around.

We have dinner at our favourite restaurant where we have all found something we like to eat and a litre of house wine is two euros. Sometimes there is even a magic show.

The rest of the evening is spent in the square, under the watchful eye of the police who are on constant patrol with guns. The kids who have finally stopped pissing off the bubble guy by popping his bubbles before they get to full size, chase bubbles for an hour and watch their favourite street artist making the same piece of spray art as the person next to him, the only difference being that he has an extra flourish when he puts a lighter to the spray can to dry off the painting.