Friday, December 12, 2008
So when we woke up in the morning of our last full day in Rome, it was still looking pretty gray outside. So I sent Nick out on another breakfast-getting mission at the grocery store, and once again we ate in the room and had a leisurely start.
We headed for the nearby metro station, and the electronic sign above the entrance told us, in English, "Strike Cancelled." Well, I guess that was good, because Nick and I had no idea that there was a planned strike. So we headed back towards the Colosseum metro stop so that we could head towards the general area of the Forum.
We were planning to do a "walking tour of arches" recommended by our guidebook around the Colosseum area that took us to a number of cool arches in the area. Some of them were in the Forum, so our plan was to start outside the Forum, go to the arches you didn't need a ticket to get to, and then loop back around to go through the Forum and see everything in it, including the arches. This would also take us towards the Tiber river, which we hadn't seen yet.
So we started at the Arch of Constantine again, and continued on. One thing that we noticed when we walked past the Palatine, though, was signs saying it was closed. We weren't sure why, but that made us a little bit nervous about whether we'd be able to visit the Forum. The next thing we saw was a bunch of people in red, but we weren't sure whether they were celebrating something or whether they were related to the "cancelled" strike we saw referenced at the metro station. But we kept going on our walking tour. We walked past the Circus Maximus, but it was still raining so we didn't really take any pictures. One of the coolest arches we saw, though, was the Arch of Janus, a four-sided arch.
From there, we departed from our walking tour for a bit so that we could see the Tiber River. The guidebook mentioned that there was a half-collapsed bridge that randomly stood in the middle of the river but that didn't connect to either bank, so we took a look at the Ponte Rotto. It's right next to a separate, complete, modern bridge, but it itself is just an arch.
At that point, Nick noticed that there was a lot less of the arch visible than what we could see in the guidebook photo of it. It appeared that all that rain had risen water levels significantly. Now that we were paying attention, we could see a lot of stuff floating down the river, and also what appeared to be the tops of rooted trees that were probably planted on banks that we couldn't see anymore. We also saw "Flood" lights (ha ha!) that typically illuminated the river at night from above, but were now close to submerged. Finally, we started hearing a lot of sirens and helicopters, but it was unclear whether these were related to the rising waters or the apparent rogue strikers we had seen near the Arch of Constantine.
Undeterred, though, we continued on to Tiber Island, a tiny island in the middle of the river (unsurprisingly). Of course, the rising waters and visions of collapsed bridges made me a little nervous walking over to it (even though we were walking on a giant bridges that cars and everything went across), but somehow I made it, and we took a look at the outside and inside of the small basilica on the island.
From Tiber Island, we decided to continue on our arches tour as best we could. At this point, we were at the stage where it was time for us to loop back around to the Forum and see if we could get in. On the way, we saw the Theatre of Marcellus (which, according to Wikipedia, was an inspiration for the Sheldonian in Oxford) and the three remaining columns of the Temple of Apollo Sosianus.
We also walked past the Vittorio Emanuele Monument again, where we could hear more commotion. There also were cops all along the front of it in riot gear. So we figured that the "cancelled" strike probably wasn't so cancelled, and that the people in red were striking.
From there we saw Trajan's Market, which is across from the Forum. It is essentially the ruins of what amounted to a semi-circular ancient shopping mall.
After that, we walked across the street to the Forum itself. Although we didn't see an entrance immediately, things didn't look too promising. We could see that there was nobody inside, so we figured that, like the Palatine, it was closed because of the "cancelled" strike. So we didn't get to use our tickets from the day before to go in and see the Forum from ground level (like everything else from ancient Rome, it's a bit sunken). So, instead, we wandered around the streets outside of it to see what we could see.
We looped around the eastern edge of the Forum, back towards the Colosseum, to get some more views of it.
I enjoyed seeing what I could, and looking up what things were in the guidebook. But again, at that point Nick and I were cold, wet, hungry ... and curious. We wanted to know what the story was with the strikes and the high river. So we headed back to our room to eat our sandwich lunch again, and look stuff up.
As we were eating, we discovered that the big news in Rome wasn't really the strike, it was the threat of a flood. We saw a lot of news articles about it. Apparently, some streets in the north of Rome had already flooded, and the river was threatening to rise above the embankments built in the late 19th century to prevent just that (prior to their construction, the river flooded all the time). Eventually we discovered the story with the strike, although it was kind of buried under all the flood articles. It seemed that the Italians were protesting the bad economy with some sort of "general strike." I'm not sure exactly how effective this is, but whatever. They don't seem to happen infrequently; the last strike before this one was in November. So it wasn't making as much news as the flood. Which also accounts for why the strike was partially cancelled; apparently on Thursday night, the planned strike (which Nick and I didn't know about) was partially called off, and essential transportation workers still had to go in on Friday, on account of the flooding. So I guess that was good.
After lunch, Nick and I headed back out to see the Pantheon, and also to see how close the Tiber really was to going over the embankments. The news articles we read made it sound eminent, but when we had physically seen it earlier in the day, there was still plenty of space for it to go up before reaching the top, and the rain itself had been becoming less and less frequent over the past two days.
On our way towards the Pantheon, we walked past the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which was based on Trajan's Column that we had seen earlier at the Forum. We also saw a marble foot remain on, appropriately, the Street of the Marble Foot.
Then we arrived at the Pantheon itself. It was pretty cool. The oculus at the top of the dome was completely open to the sky, so the center of the floor inside was roped off so that people wouldn't slip on the wet, rainy floor. On one of the signs we read, it mentioned that apparently rock climbers had done a lot of the restoration work on the dome in the 1960s. We saw Raphael's tomb in there, and liked the story that at some point some official wanted to make sure that it really was Raphael in there, and had to drag out his body to check.
At that point we headed over to the river to see what was going on. Nothing was overflowing yet, so Nick took some good nighttime pictures of the Vatican.
At this point, Nick and I wandered down the river because we saw what looked like an oopsie. It took us a while to figure it out, but it appeared that a tourist boat had broken loose from its dock in the river and had crashed into a bridge, and the dock itself wasn't doing too well, either.
Nick was enjoying getting photos of the boat, but we couldn't get too close to the bridge it had crashed into because, by that point, cops had blocked it off. Nick made us do a loop around though, to see it at all angles, which meant that we even had to detour around the Castel Sant'Angelo because large sections of the sidewalk along the Tiber were blocked off. We ended up back at the same bridge we started on, which we noticed was actually structured so that, somehow, cars drove on the left on it. Oh Italy. Nick grabbed a few more pictures of St. Peter's from there, too.
At this point I was tired of photos, so we headed towards dinner. We went in the same general direction we had gone the two nights before, and walked through the Piazza Navona again, too. There was a pretty restaurant-y district, so we looked at a few menus in windows before picking a restaurant. We picked the one we did because I was intrigued by a menu option that was translated in English as something like "Little Pig." So I was going to order Little Pig, but the waiter told me that they were all out of Little Pig. Oh well. I ended up with a pizza instead. During dinner, there was a TV that the restaurant owners kept turning up whenever there was news of the flood, but we couldn't really understand more than aqua alta, so just looked at it.
After dinner we headed back to the room to get more flood updates on the river, since it seemed like the flood wasn't really going to happen, because the river didn't really seem to rise much between the morning and the night. Except when we got back, the internet wasn't working, and Gianpaolo wasn't in his little office. So Nick and I figured that we probably just had to reset the router. The router wasn't in his office, which was good, because it was just in the hall where we could get at it, but it was really high up in the hall, and there was nothing to stand on. Eventually Nick lifted me up on his shoulders and I managed to unplug and replug the router -- which worked! We were a really good team.
The news seemed to agree with me that there wasn't really going to be a huge dramatic flood after all. So we went to bed soon after that to get ready for Saturday, our last day in Italy.
Where did we go on a map?
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1 comment:
No flood for Nika - oh well.
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