Italy I

Italy!

As we eased through the 8.5 mile-long darkness of the Frejus train tunnel from France, the train slowed for bends in the darkness and seemed to feel its way toward the far-off spot of light that shined in from Italy.  With a rush of relief, the train accelerated forward into the lime-white light of a northern Italian afternoon.  We were very excited to see what was next! 

A Milan neighborhood

The train swept  along the great plains south of the Alps through Torino (Turin) to the great city of Milano where we were to stay overnight before catching the train to Rome in the morning.  Our short visit  to the city revealed great blocks of beautiful apartment buildings like those in Paris, but with deep, gorgeous colors and overflowing window boxes of flowers.  The streets were alive with tramcars and scooters and people calling to each other as far as the eye could see, all beneath the watchful eyes of older women leaning on the railings of apartment windows above.  We laughed that Milano was, indeed, like a big Italian neighborhood.  The elegance of the buildings seemed a sideshow to the life on the street, whereas in Paris the majesty of the buildings, the majesty of the past, had seemed to dominate.

Our little room in a grungy building near the station was hot.  The manager said the heat was unusual for early September – in Milano “always the first week of September was cool before.”  We walked the nearby streets a bit, undecided on where our first Italian meal should come from.  Our decision made, we sat down to be served by a Ukrainian immigrant who clearly appreciated the gregariousness of his new home city.  Thank goodness for the fan in the hotel room.  The heat would accompany us on our journeys through Italy until almost the last day a month later.  

The train ride to Rome the next day was a tease for what we would be seeing for several weeks.  Gorgeous farmland, vineyards and hilltop towns flew by the windows.  We had the sinking feeling that we would not begin to see all that Italy had to offer.  

Suddenly, we were in Rome's Termini rail station in the modern whirl of that ancient city. 

Where was the car rental counter?  There were no signs that we could see.  No-one could point us in the right direction.  We parked Kate with the luggage in a safe spot and searched the huge station, high and low.  Finally we were told “Track 24”, which really meant a whole additional section of the station beyond that track, where the rental signs appeared only when the desks were in front of us.    

And so we were in Italy, where there are signs by the thousands but none with the information you seek.  We had thought using Hertz would be clever, since they would obviously cater to Americans or at least be able to give better service.  Nope.  We were directed in Italian down the street to an indeterminate point where we would ascend to the seventh floor of a parking garage and the car would be there.  We felt like the hopeless dupes in some film about disappeared Americans.  Lo, the dudes lounging and smoking on lawn furniture on the seventh level of what we prayed was the right structure (there being no helpful signs) showed us our car.  Kate, as always, lightened things up with her enthusiasm for the new, cute-as-a-bug Fiat 500.   

Fiat ad for the 500

Jenny held tightly to the map and unintelligible directions as we corkscrewed down the tightest parking-garage descent in all Christendom, figured out the exit requirements with no help from the chain-smoking garage attendant, and forced our way out into the heat and chaos of the Roman streets.

The Hertz clerk back at Termini  had explained, as he argued with someone on the phone and took hopeful drags on an unlit cigarette hanging from his lip, that we needed to go right from the garage then right because of the construction and then left – you’ll see, not the first left - and then left and then you are back at the station but go right under the tunnel and then bear right but there’s construction and it might be the second right and then follow that all the way out the Via Tiburna to the autostrada and it might be 10km.  "Easy! Firenze?"  he asked.  "No.  We’re going to Montefalco", I answered.  "Yes! Yes!  Firenze!"  he insisted, and then turned to another customer.  Huh?  Only later, after over an hour of our insides in knots, did we realize that he meant we should go in the direction of Florence when we got to the autostrada, or freeway.

By the time we got to the autostrada, Jenny had two maps and the clerk's unintelligible handwritten directions in moist wads in her lap, exasperated at the terrible signage and the incredible driving we’d seen.  There was no use of lanes in the few places they had been painted on the road.  We saw few traffic lights even at some big intersections.  Traffic bulged into oncoming lanes where it suited and contracted back to our side like some bilious snake making its cumbersome way out of the city.  Scooters jammed every available gap between cars, shunting forward, threading sideways across traffic, and streaming along the sides of the flow like schools of remoras following a pod of whales.  Every few moments we gritted our teeth, expecting a scrape along the side of the car as they squeezed by.

It was fantastic.  One of the moments we loved best was driving by a freeway onramp and seeing a middle-aged lady on a scooter coming toward us in the wrong direction, talking happily on her cell phone.   We’d wince as scooters going our way yawed into oncoming traffic just as scooters coming at us did the same thing and the two would weave past each other with inches to spare.  But what we noticed was that there was no horn honking, no anger.  Our dumb moves were ignored; there was nothing personal.  There was none of the sociopathic road rage of a traffic tangle in Boston. 

Montefalco

Once on the autostrada we were relieved to see lane markings and people staying in them for the most part.  Italians don’t often bother with direction signals and frequently straddle lanes as they decide which they prefer.   As we tooled up country toward the Appenine mountains that form the spine of Italy, we saw more farmland and hill towns.  We noticed that Italy uses more tunnels than the US, preferring to go under features rather than digging huge gashes across the landscape.  One tunnel went right under the old town and fortress of Spoleto.

The Montefalco Party Lair

Doug’s sister Carol and her husband Bob were to meet us for a week in the Umbrian hilltown of Montefalco.  Our digs were in the middle of the old town and were a refuge from the heat.  We also had a little pool for cooling off.  Carol and Bob stayed just outside of town in a very nice B&B they had won in a Planned Parenthood charity auction back in PA. 

Montefalco street

Our image of this part of Italy was stuck sometime in the Renaissance.  At first we were turned off by the presence of a freeway, power pylons and construction cranes over some of the hilltop towns.  What, no gaily-dressed peasants leading donkeys home from a day's work in the vineyards, accompanied by accordion music?  The longer we stayed, the more we loved it.

Umbria is right in the middle of Italy and has therefore been in the middle of a lot of history.  Hannibal did indeed stop by 2,200 years ago with his elephants to slaughter two Roman legions on his way to Rome.  But that's recent history!  The province is sometimes considered to be the poor cousin to Tuscany, its neighbor to the north.  The provinces have had very different histories, the consequences of which are very evident today.

La Turita, Bob and Carol's B&B

 Several very narrow streets led uphill to the center of Montefalco where a broad piazza occupies the highest point on the hill.  We drove up there but were intimidated enough by various incomprehensible road signs to retreat to a parking lot just outside the gates.  We left the car and puffed back up to the piazza to have a gelato and wait for our host, Francesco.  Jenny, who likes having things figured out, didn’t see how Doug would make the connection with Francesco in crowd if he had no idea what Francesco looked like.  Doug countered that all doctors have a certain look.

At a little past the appointed hour, Doug quietly rose from his seat, crossed the piazza and introduced himself to Francesco.  Jenny and Kate were agape.  How did he know?  Doug smiled generously at them.  That guy looked and acted like a doctor, so he was Francesco.  Simple as that.  Later, Doug’s stupid luck was exposed when Francesco revealed that he had a PhD in business, not medicine.

Francesco led us down an impossibly narrow, steep side street to the parking spot for the car.  The street had steps built into it, so it was a rough ride.  To drive back up the steps was even more traumatic. Later, we found that we had to get a running start from the parking area and make a blind hard right into the street.  Jenny and Kate would post themselves to watch for other cars or pedestrians every time we ventured out.  Finally we decided it would be easier on all of us if we parked back outside the walls.

Our apartment was cool and dark, a welcome refuge from the heat, which ran into the 90’s every day we were there.  We had a nice little pool in the courtyard that we used for cooling off.  It was one of the better spots we’ve stayed on this trip.  We could walk to the center of town in a  few minutes.

Carol on a Montefalco street

The hilltop towns present some practical problems for the residents as well as for those trying to wedge Fiat 500’s down side streets.  How do you get deliveries in, especially construction vehicles and materials?  The answer in most places is a number of semi-permanent construction cranes that stand over the towns.  They’re ugly, but necessary for lifting materials from outside the walls and dropping them where needed in the warrens of alleys.

The Italians are absolute masters of stone.  They use it as if it were plastic, raising incredibly pleasing interconnected buildings and spaces that have windows, doors, roofs, cobblestoned streets and archways over the streets in just the right places.  We never tired of finding out what was around the next corner.  From the central piazza, two main one-lane streets and three really narrow alleys radiated out to the walls.  They were connected by very narrow alleys that transected around the hill, forming a loose spider-web design.  Doug’s inner real estate lawyer was tormented.  “How do they keep track of lot lines and property descriptions?   The title work must be a nightmare!”  he wailed.

Breakfast at Carol and Bob's

Carol and Bob and their friends Steve and Jane from Berwyn, PA were about two miles away at their B&B in the middle of vineyards outside of town.  We went back and forth for visits but it was much easier for us to get to them than for them to get to us.  Mostly we got together for meals at various restaurants and field trips out to other sites.  One real gem of a restaurant within walking distance of our apartment was “L’Alchemiste” on the main square.  We couldn’t believe how good the food was.  MSG? we wondered.  Ohhh – the scrambled eggs with truffles, the pasta, the wine!  We had to force ourselves to eat at other places so the owners wouldn’t think we were helpless in their thrall, or some weird species of culinary stalkers.

Out to dinner in Trevi with Bob, Carol, Steve, Jane, J & K

As absurd as it seems, in the early Middle Ages the hill towns were independent little burgs only a few miles apart that went to war regularly with each other.  They kept a close eye out  for the telltale clouds of dust that would herald a mob coursing across the valley, intent on plundering marble facing off the churches, stealing saints’ relics, kidnapping good-looking women and hauling off whatever else they could lay their hands on before retreating back across the valleys to the safety of their own walls.
 

Relative calm of a sort came later when Umbria fell under the yoke of the Papal States, and here the fortunes of Tuscany and Umbria diverged.  Tuscany had its own problems but never suffered the privations that Umbria did under Papal rule.   The Papal States were the feudal property of the Pope as a temporal lord, meaning they were his personal possessions apart from his position as head of the Church.  For hundreds of years the popes squeezed every penny they could from the Umbrians.  As the people began to starve and thus to produce less tax revenue, their frustrated lord decided to tax what seems to be the last resort of every tyrant: salt.  Like everyone else around the world, the Umbrians used salt mainly in the making of bread.  They revolted and stopped using salt, a symbol of their resistance that they maintain, unfortunately, today.  They forgive but they don't forget.  For a time we couldn’t figure out why, in the midst of such culinary fabulousness, the Umbrian bread was so insipid.

The ancient Etruscan Gate, Perugia

Don't mess with the Pope.  In the mid-1500's he decided that, salt or no salt, the Umbrians needed to be reminded of who was boss.  Especially their uppity aristocracy.  In Perugia, where the griping was loudest, the Pope decreed that he would build a fortress on top of the aristocracy.  Literally.  He used the walls of their houses as the foundation for a massive fortress, leaving the streets and structures below as a downright weird example of his power.  We walked through this very strange section of the city, with its entombed cobblestone streets leading from the walled-off Etruscan gate and two or three stories of the old house walls still visible around us, complete with window and door holes. 

Street scene under Perugia

In the 1870s, the creation of modern Italy meant Umbria was finally freed from hundreds of years of decline.  The Perugians celebrated by having the popes’ hated fortress torn down.  Today it's a broad piazza.

We walked up through Perugia's underground streets until they joined those on the surface.  The main main thoroughfare was full of life and lined by magnificent, if crumbling, buildings.  Perugia’s Duomo, or cathedral, was butt-ugly, however, for all its fame as the repository of the Virgin Mary’s wedding ring.  Our guidebook explained that the Duomo had been repeatedly stripped of its marble facing, statues and many of its treasures by rival cities and Popes who wanted to obliterate monuments to certain predecessors.

Another street under Perugia

Medieval symbols of Perugia's leading famili

We weren’t allowed to enter Perugia’s duomo because we weren’t dressed “modestly” enough, prompting muttering about the Church’s priorities in protecting its treasure instead of its children.  It was a hot day and we limited our grousing to each other’s hearing.  The Etruscan well nearby was a marvel of engineering and a nice cool place to take a break from the heat.

Bob and Carol's host, Susan Armstrong, is a Pennsylvania transplant. We were all in Montefalco because she had donated a stay at her B&B to a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood of SE Pennsylvania, where she had been a board member at one time.  Bob and Carol had bid on the stay and this was their second visit to her B&B, www.casaturita.com (for those interested in a wonderful place to stay).  She arranged for a tour of the ancient parts of Orvieto with an Italian archaeologist.  She translated for him as he explained the Etruscan tombs that ring the bottom of the cliffs below the city.

Orvieto had a rough history.  The earliest historical inhabitants (of the entire area) were a group called the Villanovans who seem to have migrated from Greece.  They were the forebears of the Etruscans and developed early forms of the style we think of as Etruscan and Roman.  They built a town on the hill and farmed there, but there was no reliable source of water.  When the Romans defeated the Etruscans they leveled the city and it remained empty for 700 years until the medieval town was built.  Part of our tour included a visit under a medieval church to see the mosaic floor of an earlier Christian church dating from about 700, the even earlier remains of an Etruscan temple and street, and beneath that some remains of Villanovan tombs.  Extraordinary.

Etruscan tomb inscription (read R - L)

Montefalco lies at the center of a broad valley and is ringed with many hill towns and places of interest, making it a perfect base for looking around.   Deruta is a short drive away.  It is where the eponymous pottery has been made since Etruscan times.  We trekked there with Carol and Bob and were glad in a way that we weren’t in a position to buy anything.  We wanted all of it.  Every goddam piece.

Traditional Deruta incorporates exuberantly colored Etruscan-era designs.  We noticed these elements, such as griffins and sea creatures, in ancient ruins and churches as we traveled throughout Umbria and Tuscany. 

Jenny set up a hike in the Sibillene Hills to the east of Montefalco.  Carol was enthusiastic, as expected, but Bob showed a suspicious eagerness as well.  “Right near the town of Norcia, right?” he asked innocently.  Yep.  “Let’s go hiking!” he exclaimed.  Hmmm…

Carol and Bob on the hike near Norcia

The Sibillene Hills are, as everyone knows, the very same place the sibyl came to hide in a cave after some godly disagreement in mythology.  We hiked downhill from a pass near Norcia with the intention of finishing at an abbey which is built on the site of several caves that may have been part of the myth.

"You toucha my truffles I breaka you face!"

Kate and Jenny on the trail, Umbria

Our trail hugged the side of the mountain and wound through gulches and small, very ancient towns.  We occasionally saw signs warning trespassers to stay out of truffle gathering areas.  Bob would gaze at the signs, sigh, and look reverently off into the woods where the elusive treasures were, even then, growing underground in preparation for the next truffle-gathering season.   The only way we could get him to move on was with the promise of even better gathering sites farther on.

The trail was an ancient way through the mountains that had been used back into prehistory.  By the side of the trail every mile or so we found shrines to the Virgin Mary, some of which had been “repurposed” from Roman and Etruscan shrines.  Some were in ruins.  Where the walls and altars had fallen apart we could see the Roman construction beneath.

View back up the valley

The crème de la crème of the hike was a Roman bridge over a narrow gorge.  The bridge had been built about 2000 years ago to carry the trail over a stream.  It was still in use.  As we approached it around the shoulder of a hill we could see the faint remains of other ancient trails converging on the bridge.  The grades were definitely Roman, graded for the use of pack animals and maybe small wagons. 

Still, it was quite hot.  We stopped here and there in the shade to cool off and to enjoy the various fountains offered in the little towns.  At last we descended a short, fairly steep path down a Roman stairway to the monastery.  We had a soda at a tiny store next to the entrance and then went in to see the beautiful buildings that hugged the hillside beneath some hermit caves.  Kate and Doug climbed to see the icons and simple furnishings in the caves.

At the Abbey

We all crammed into the Fiat for a laborious climb back over the pass to Norcia where Bob's ulterior motive for going on the hike was revealed.  Norcia is famous for its cured meats.  Bob was in heaven as we toured the town’s famous stores where all kinds of mouth-watering Proscuittos, salamis and other cured meats from the local area were sold.  We didn’t have to worry about Kate shrinking in horror at the various boars’ heads nailed over the shop doors or un-butchered carcasses on display.  She’s a carnivore at heart and took a lively interest in what Bob was getting.  In one store she almost got kicked out for “rearranging” the Proscuitto display, her eyes gleaming unnaturally as she pawed the inventory.    Luckily we had two cars to carry all the loot back to Montefalco.  It was another great day with Bob and Carol.

Montecastelli Paisano, Tuscany
 

We had planned to go to Rome when Bob and Carol departed.  Yet the heat was pretty intense, making Rome and all its crowds unattractive.  We decided instead to decamp to rural Tuscany for a week to see some of the area and to wait for cooler weather.

View from our window, Montecastelli

We found a wonderful little apartment in the village of Montecastellini about 25 miles west of Sienna.  The hill town was very quiet and undeveloped except for a small hotel and some very rustic agroturismo B&B’s in the surrounding woods.  The view south from our windows was nothing short of spectacular.  We could see the rolling hills covered with forests, vineyards, hill towns and farms for about 50 miles, depending on the haze.  At first we thought a nuclear power plant was in view also until we realized the cooling towers and chrome pipes snaking here and there were part of a huge network of geothermal generating plants.  Italy pioneered geothermal power generation and currently gets about 30% of its power this way.

Montecastellini

 The apartment owner’s parents, Vittoria and Aldo, met us enthusiastically and showed us around the property with a stream of Italian explanations that we hoped we understood.  They were wonderfully warm and checked on us periodically to make sure we had everything we needed.

We didn’t have many goals for our stay other than to walk off the incredible food we’d had in Montefalco and to see Volterra, Siena and Florence.  Every day we woke up and decided what we wanted to do.  We went to Volterra twice to explore the city and its Etruscan museum, Roman theatre and to soak up its creepy vibe from “New Moon”, the Gothic vampire movie that was recently filmed there.   The Etruscan museum was, frankly, a bore even for Doug.  How many funeral urns can you pretend to be interested in?  We figured about five was the limit for most people and the museum had hundreds, displayed unimaginatively in room after room.

Gate on the old Volterra road

One of our favorite days was spent hiking through the hills.  We learned that Italian hiking trails are not marked with the same logic as those in the US.  The same would go for roads when we got into more rural areas, and all of the Balkan countries.  We had a wonderful time stumbling around in the forest, ending up at a mountain-top fortress that once guarded the ancient route from Volterra to the coast.  Sadly, Jenny and Kate found the efforts of a large colony of ants to bring home parts of a sandwich more interesting than Doug’s lunchtime exposition on the transition from Roman to medieval transportation corridors.

Kate's future convent home near Elba

We had to decide whether to go to Florence.  It was hot.  The crowds were unbearable.  We knew all the sites would be there for another visit.  We opted to go to the island of Elba for the day.  It was a good decision.  From the ferry we saw the island where Odysseus battled the Gorgon and a rocky crag with a convent on top that will make a perfect home for Kate when she starts thinking about boys.  We had lunch in the very town where Napoleon planned his escape to France.  He slipped away under the noses of his British guards, making his way back to France where he was greeted as a hero.  One hundred exhilarating, manic days later, the great man led France to utter defeat at Waterloo.   The Allies were not amused and this time sent him to the frozen isle of St. Helena in the south Atlantic.   He should have stayed on Elba, where the pizza was terrific.

We decided to rejoin the tourist mob by heading into Siena on our last day in Tuscany.  Siena plays second fiddle to Florence just to the north but has some major sights of its own.  We liked it a lot.  We hung out on the main piazza for a time, wondering how there can be room for a horse race around the square, as there is every July and August.  The piazza is sloped like a huge amphitheater, focused on the stunning city building which dates from the 12^th century.

Main Piazza, Siena

Siena Duomo, pope heads above the arches

Our only disappointment in a way was the Duomo.  It is as splendid as any other cathedral we saw, perhaps even greater with its snappy black obsidian and white marble stripes.  What put us off wasn’t its creation from treasure bled from a poverty-stricken populace.  We were used to that.  Or even its appalling depiction of torture and violence in huge bas-reliefs in the marble floors.  What turned our stomachs was the overbearing celebration of the popes.  The entire top of the nave and transept was lined with the leering busts of something like 170 of them.  Compared to these, we would have preferred a hundred more weeping Marys.  Yuck.  We’d had enough of all the tawdry imagery.  We'd hit the wall.  One more cherub or bleeding Jesus and we would lose it!

We stumbled out into the sunshine, grabbed some gelato therapy and felt better almost immediately. We got a laugh out of seeing some pre-teen boys clustered around a Ducati motorcycle on the duomo square.  They were excitedly snapping pictures of the sexy bike, completely ignoring the massive edifice looming above them.  Some things will never change.  Ever.

We may not have had the right attitude for heading to Rome but temperatures had dropped, there would be plenty of pre-Christian sites, and we agreed that we would only go see churches if we felt like it.  We might even snub the Vatican.  We’d do Rome on our own terms.  That would show ‘em!  Off we went.

The tourist mob, Trevi Fountain

We were also ready for Rome traffic.  At least on a Sunday.  We navigated into the city without incident and said goodbye to our cute little Fiat 500 at the same grimy parking garage we’d gotten it from.  Though we were glad to be rid of a car for the duration of our stay, the Fiat had been fun, well-made, fairly well-powered and surprisingly roomy.

We had a basic hotel room on the Piazza del Santa Maggiore from which we could walk to all the central Roman sites.  That evening we strolled down toward the Colosseum to get our bearings for the next few days of sightseeing.  We were startled to walk past a side street and see the huge structure off to our left.   Most of the tourists had departed, so we had a nice time walking around the area between it, the raised foundations of the Temple of Venus and Rome just to the west, and the Arch of Constantine.  We couldn’t wait to come back the next day to see the area again and to check out the Palatine Hill and the Forum.  We were in the heart of the Empire, arguably the heart of Western civilization.

Arch of Constantine from the Colosseum

 Next day, our stroll through the ancient center was full of surprises.  Seeing the huge original bronze doors of the Temple of Romulus, the Arch of Titus with its reliefs of treasure being brought home from the sack of the Temple in Jerusalem, the place where Caesar’s body was cremated (with a mysterious offering of fresh flowers), the Senate, the temple of the Vestal Virgins and the enormous Basilica of Constantine made a whole lot of history much more real.

As I've said, one of our goals of this trip is to peel back the layers of Western civilization to get to some of the places where we could sense the real roots of our Western consciousness.  The Forum was intense because it was so profligately polytheistic and yet it contained all the elements that would later be associated with Catholicism and Christianity.  On the south side of the Forum we walked through the temple and home of the Vestal Virgins, who guarded the sacred flame of Rome.  It could easily have been mistaken for a convent, complete with its cloister.  The Vestals, who would transform into Catholic nuns, guarded the sacred flame of Rome and studied the ancient devotional traditions.  If the flame were ever allowed to go out, the Empire would fall.

Theodosius I, the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire,  must have had at least a little superstitious twinge when in 394 he ordered the sacred flame extinguished and the Vestals to disperse.  He banned religious freedom, closed down the Olympics and the Greek schools of philosophy and ushered in a thousand years of the Dark Ages.  Not bad for a day's work!  Ironically, the prophesy of the sacred flame came true:  he died a year later and the Empire was split permanently.

Like the Vestals' cloister, polytheist basilicas were the model for cathedrals.  Our first impression of some of the ruined temples was that they were churches, but some preceded the coming of Christianity by centuries.  Temples like that of Saturn at the western end of the Forum were modeled more on the Greek style and more what we had expected.  Vestals became nuns, orators became Christian priests, the semi-divine Emperor (Pontificus Maximus) became the semi-divine Pope (Pontificus Maximus).  The transition from polytheism to Christianity would be a major theme for the next couple months. 

We walked and walked through Rome.  Though some of the streets were choked with cars and difficult to walk down, many had been converted to pedestrian ways.  One long day ended with us going to the Vatican to see St. Peter's Basilica, which reminded us of St. Paul's in London, and Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.  Even though the chapel adjoins the basilica, we had to exit St. Peter's Square and walk a long way around the Vatican walls to the Vatican Museum entrance on the north side.  We felt guilty zooming through the huge collection to get to the Sistine Chapel before it closed, but the run was worth it. 

The frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were cleaned and restored a few years ago.  Wow!  They were vibrant and absolutely stunning.  We had always hoped that Kate's first view of Michelangelo's masterpiece not be in a book, and here we were.  Every few minutes a recorded voice came over loudspeakers asking people to be quiet, which worked for only a moment before the excited clamor resumed.

The Pantheon

 We capped our stay with a long walk through the streets to see the Pantheon.  One of the great things about Rome is just walking around, seeing the bustle and peoplewatching. We like heading out in the morning with only a vague idea of what we want to do and then allowing the day to happen as we see new things.  Since the streets curve around, you never know very far in advance what's next.

The Pantheon is truly a marvel.  It is still the largest unsupported masonry dome in the world (though why anyone would try to beat it with modern building methods available is a question). For many generations it stumped architects and mathematicians who thought they could calculate the weight of the dome.  The dome was too flat and the supporting walls too light.  By all standards they were aware of, the dome should collapse.  What they didn't know is that the Roman builders had used ultra-light pumice in the thinner part of the structure near the oculus in the center.  By creating an oculus instead of a finial at the top they also lessened the weight of the dome.  The Romans really knew their structural dynamics.  The Pantheon is also important for being the oldest continuously used public building in the world.  The appropriation of the building by the Church saved it from being mined for building materials in the Dark Ages.

Rome was all we'd hoped it would be.  We were ready to head south to see more of Italy's marvels.