Roma: Day II

The other day while searching the bowels of my computer for a lost file, I came across a travelogue I'd written nearly 10 years when I went to Rome on vacation. At the time, I shared it with a few friends. And it seems appropriate to share it here now. Enjoy.

Ah, the coffee in Rome (or Roma as the natives say. Roma has a beautiful ring to it, so I quickly adopt it into my vocabulary) is thick and strong without being bitter. Three cups and I’m wired. Four and I’m a restless wreck, racing around the city like a human Vespa.

Vespa, which means wasp (and they do sound like angry insects), is a brand name for those little scooters that zip through the warren of streets like toddlers without proper supervision. In Roma, there are no traffic rules. Scooters are on the sidewalks. They skip stop signs. Turn left on red, go the wrong way down one ways and routinely play chicken (and oddly win) with the little Smart cars and Peugeots that clog the roadways. Not even the lone Jeep Cherokee (deep green and dented) barreling down the street like a Sherman tank could scatter the swarm.

Hyped on caffeine, I do what I always do when I’m in a strange city where I do not speak the language. I go for a walk just to see what I can find.

I find the Capitoline.

Roma spreads itself out over seven hills, although one of them was destroyed by the Roman equivalent of a bulldozer (its army) during the reign of Diocletian to make room for some monumental building project. The Capitoline was the seat of power in ancient Roma, and it is the reason so many school children misspell the U.S. Capitol Hill as Capital Hill.

 

Gentle steps, designed by Michelangelo, lead to the top of the hill, where replicas of ancient statues of Castor and Pollux, twin gods worshiped by the Roman Republicans because they supposedly helped the army defeat bad king Tarquis, stand guard. Behind them are two museums that hold many of the surviving works of ancient Roma.

The Dying Gaul is among them.

So is the head of Constantine (the marble one, not the real one) and the Equine Statue of Marcus Aurelius, but those are stories for another day.

I climb the steps and my heart races. In heavily accented Frentalian, I buy a ticket and begin wandering through the marble corridors, making the acquaintance of headless gods, badly reconstructed athletes and disembodied heads of emperors, senators, and high-born Latin ladies.

Up the stairs. Straight ahead. Look right. There he is. The Gaul.

Now some people like paintings: oils, frescos, watercolors, the two-dimensional renderings of a world more colorful and static than reality. Others prefer architecture, the reach for a perfect balance of form and function, the conflict of man against nature stated in brick, wood and stone. But I am drawn to sculpture, marble brought one step shy of breath through chisel and hammer; our ideal form fashioned through violence by the hands of a man obsessed.

Phideas. Michelangelo. Rodan.

The Dying Gaul is the center of a room of warriors, and I wait until a tour group leaves before I approach. Able to get “this” close to the copy of the third century masterpiece, I study him intensely. The gash in his side. The tangle of hair that frames his face. The resigned look in his eyes as he gazes at the empty spot between his hip and hand. His hands are veined. His sword lies slightly behind him and he has fallen over his broken shield.

And I learn something new.

This Gaul, resigned to death, is part of a larger piece, now broken up and partly lost. Originally, the bodies of his wife and child lay in the empty space between his hip and hand, and they are what his fading sight fixes upon.

To his right, not far from his hand, stood another pair of figures that survive in a museum closed to the public. This Gaul holds his wife, whom he has just slain, in his left hand, pulling her close to his body even has he plunges his own short sword into his heart, going in just to the front of the collar bone. They die rather than face life as slaves.

In Italian reference books that I can only half-read, I find a drawing of what art historians think the entire grouping looked like when it adorned the hill, and there, captured in cold marble is life, death, war, and love - the best and worst of the human repertoire.

Tomorrow:  Keena and the men of Roma

Roma: Day I

The other day while searching the bowels of my computer for a lost file, I came across a travelogue I'd written nearly 10 years when I went to Rome on vacation. At the time, I shared it with a few friends. And it seems appropriate to share it here now. Enjoy.

Caesar crossed the Rubicon in the twilight of the BC years and made this city his own. Caesar Augusta made it marble. Almost 1,000 years later, Alfred the Great of England took a break from slaying Vikings to venture to Rome and returned a changed man. The popes claimed it. Michelangelo adorned it. The barbarians laid waste to it (and what they didn’t destroy Bernini did) and Richard Coeur de Lion had his mother and unwanted bride follow him here as Queen Eleanor pestered him to “consummate the marriage already.”

Ah, Rome. The eternal city. A collection of ruins and monuments and history that changed the course of the Western World more than once.

My trip to this mecca of history and Roman Catholicism in the Jubilee year of A.D. 2000 begins like so many other overseas adventures: a long wait at the airport and an even longer plane ride. To be honest, November is not shaping up to be a banner month for me. Job woes. Soured relationships. The IRS writing to say I owe them more money. So, in true egomaniacal pessimism that the universe IS out to get me, I fully expected the plane to do a belly flop into the ocean within minutes of take off.

It was worse.

Much worse.

Not only are Kate (my friend who went with me on the trip) and I the youngest people on the plane, the entire cattle-class section is filled with sixty- and seventy-something retirees off to cruise the Mediterranean for a few weeks. The woman behind us is not only blessed with the most obnoxious Southern-sorority accent imaginable, but she is also loud and squeaky. Throughout the movie she keeps repeating what are supposed to be funny punchlines, except they aren’t funny, especially not the second time around.

If it is bad for me, pity the flight attendants. Example:

Squeaky: “Stewardess, do you always start serving dinner from the front to the back?”

Surprised and wary flight attendant: “On this flight, yes.”

Squeaky: “Why?”

Attendant: “We just do.”

Squeaky: “Then people like us in the back never get our choice of steak or chicken then do we? Now that doesn’t seem fair to me. What if I don’t like steak or are on a restricted diet?”

Attendant: “We usually have enough, and you can order special meals if you want. Are you on a restricted diet? Do you need us to prepare something special…”

Squeaky: “I’ll have the steak.”

Squeaky’s companion (her husband or perhaps a very large, very manly woman who keeps kicking the seat, hard, giving me whiplash and very strange bruises.): “I’ll have the steak, too. Oh, this is tiny. Can you give me another one of these little meals?”

And then, Squeaky: “Oh, Betty, you made it! I’m so glad you’re going to be with us on the boat.” She stands, climbs over her companion, using Kate’s head as a brace, trips over my seat and grabs a woman standing in the aisle, hugging her so tight I hear thin bones snap. “Are you excited or what? Did you know that…”

I realize then the plane has already crashed and we are bound for purgatory in a crowded tin can. In despair, I take the Tylenol PM Kate offers me, down them, beg for more, and promptly pass out.

Five hours later, or maybe six, I am stumbling like a drunkard through the Leonardo da Vinci airport, half-filled backpack hanging off my shoulders like any other fashionably low-key tourist. I produce my passport and wait in line behind a gaggle of soon-to-be boat people. One is very slowly, very loudly speaking English to the Italian immigration officer who pretends not to understand a word he is saying. Another inspector looks at me and then waves me through.

No passport inspection.

No questions about how long I plan stay in their beautiful country.

No interrogation about whether or not I’m a member of the Dutch Liberation Movement here to protest something or other.

So we go through the turnstiles and find ourselves in fresh air, in Italy, just south of Rome. It is Nov. 18, 2000, and I am outside the ruined gates of the eternal city. We grab a taxi and settle in for a long ride in bumper-to-bumper traffic. My head bobs against the leather seatback in a drugged dance as the driver tells about the beauty of Rome, the places we must go and the sites we must explore.

He zigzags through the tiny medieval streets before slamming on his brakes. “Your hotel is through there. The road is too narrow for my car. And,” he says as a final warning, “beware the gypsy children.”

Tomorrow: The truth about the Dying Gaul

Me and the Chihuahua

I have an unusual first name, and it's been a bane and blessing all my life.

As a child, I hated my name--even went through a phase where I would tell people I was named Katherine and to call me Kate.

As I grew older I began to appreciate the uniqueness of my name a little more. It drew (and still draws) attention and sometimes provides a nice conversation starter. Also, most people don't have preconceived notion of what kind of person a "Keena" should be. They don't hear my name and think of the high school frienemy who stole their boyfriend.

On the downside, a lot of people don't get my name right either.

For years, my great-aunt proudly presented me with a cake that said, "Happy Birthday, Kenna." A junior high teacher called me "Kenya," and in college,  a drunken student thought I was "Kiwi." The name stuck with me for four years.

I've met only four other Keena's in my life, and each time I've found myself confused and slightly annoyed. I mean how dare anyone else have my name. I know. Most people learn to deal with that aspect of life while in pre-school. I've never had to.

But last week I experienced a first. A Kincaid from Arizona stumbled across a blog post and wondered if we were related (we're not), then casually let me know his Chihuahua is named Keana (pronounced the same as mine, key-na).

I gaped for a moment, then surprised myself by laughing. He'd named the dog for his grandchildren (using the first letter of each of their names). I only hope no one ever purposely names their dog after me. :-)