All Roads Lead To Rome

The restaurant was dim and candlelit, the murmur of dinner chatter and strolling couples drifting in gently from the back street outside.  The food was good, the occasional scrape of cutlery underscoring the unspoken poignancy of the night, and-- did I imagine it?-- I thought I caught a glimpse of a tear in the corner of his eye.  Personally, I thought August was a little early for the restaurant to be playing Michael Bublé's Christmas standards, but nevertheless, it made Jordan and I's last dinner together very romantic.

Yes, our parting was sad. We remembered the highs-- climbing Mount Tegelberg in Neuschwanstein (literally high)--and the lows-- such as climbing Mount Tegelberg. Luckily, I caught Jordan's cold, so that a part of him would always remain with me.

Rome was something of a practicum for my efforts to really "see" things. Here, all the churches and artwork we had seen in Europe thus far culminated in the spectacular beat-you-soundly-about-the-face-with-its-staggering-grandeur St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican museum. Appropriately, on the day I went there with my hostelmates Dominic, Linda, and Nicole, I forgot to bring my camera.

While previously this might have been a crisis, it now seemed like a perfect opportunity to apply what I had been trying to learn since Paris, and to make the effort to fully take it all in, instead of assuming that taking a photo meant I had created a memory.

My neck is still aching from craning to see the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for an hour.

And if you're asking thinking, "Then where the hell are all these photos from?" bravo on a keen eye. I got them from Dominic, and if you're thinking that's a cop-out, maybe you're right. But hey, I needed something to keep you reading this entry, right?

In a shocking development, one of my greatest personal developments on this trip has been improving my infamous navigational skills.  Apparently, I am great with a map.  By the end of our stay in Rome, I had  actually been elected chief navigator-- I knew where we were, and where we needed to go, where the metro station was, which line to take, and most importantly, how to find my way back to the gelaterie with 150 flavors.  This idea would be unfathomable to my friends back home.

The metaphor of traveling as a journey of encountering yourself also took a rather literal turn when I came face-to-face with my 15 year-old doppelgänger from 400 years ago:

I mean, he's even playing a guitar.

After Jordan's departure, I was glad to hang out with Dominic, Linda, and Nicole, who were all very nice. Nicole was from the Netherlands, while Dominic and Linda were from Germany, and had been traveling for a year together picking berries in Australia while living out of a van. It got me thinking about the nature of the relationships we strike up while traveling.  Most are fleeting-- transience is the constant companion of the road; travel is an endless series of farewells.  Simply enjoying these relationships for what they are-- brief moments we can never return to-- can seem counterintuitive.

But once you get over that conceptual hump, you realize that enjoying the fleeting company of many can be rich in its own way.  People and shared experiences become inextricably enmeshed in the memory of a place; a part of it.  The irretrievability of the moment now adds to its dearness, rather than its poignancy.

For the most part, we're afraid to lose people; afraid of losing track and losing touch, and the weight of that begins to hold us down; our inertia builds up.  As George Clooney says in Up In The Air, "Make no mistake, your relationships are the heaviest components in your life."

We come to feel bound to places, and this is one of the greatest challenges we face when setting out to travel: simply, allowing ourselves to see and believe it can be done.  To really allow ourselves to be free.

Stray Observations:

• Stairs are an incredible invention.  Walking up stairs is so much easier than walking up an equivalent incline.  I'll bet that before sliced bread was invented, people used to say, "This is the best thing since stairs."
• Engrish is universal:

Jordan tried to explain to Nicole why this was funny to Anglophones, but to no avail.

• I remember a discussion from one of my writing classes in university about whether or not there could be such a thing as a "born cliché," and I think that sitting on a plane listening to Enya while marvelling at how cool the clouds look must surely be one.  

I REGRET NOTHING

• Italian airline food:

Yes, we're at the point of food pics now

• The Italian parties are getting really serious about "the issues" this election:

Ciao.

From One Moment To The Next

Traveling, on its surface, is about getting away from one place to see another. At its heart, though, I think traveling is about getting away from yourself for a while- the people and places we know intimately make it easy to fall back on a "role" that is mutually comfortable.

I'm not being particularly original or profound here, but I think this truism has value in the questions it raises: how do we actually step outside of ourselves for a while? What does that look like? Removing ourselves from familiar surroundings is one way we can begin to deconstruct the "person" to get to the human beneath, but how else can we excavate? And, once there, how can we truly realize who we really are, and who we want to be?

As Jordan and I sat on the cobbled walkway at night and looked across the river at the murmuring lights of Venice, I reflected that this didn't really feel like the other side of the world. Jordan pointed out that it was only a few hours away from the eastern seaboard of North America.

In Florence, we saw the spectacular Uffizi museum, which housed the rich collection of the avaricious Medici clan.  After weeks of looking at an endless parade of religion-themed masterpieces, as I stood in front of Boticelli's excellent "Madonna Della Melagrana," the thing that finally struck me was how bored everyone looks in these paintings: everyone seems rather nonplussed that God is descending from a fiery cleft in the sky atop a chariot of divine light; no one seems especially impressed at the sight of the divine infant (though who can blame them?  He looks like a rather boring child, never smiling, always with that grave expression on his face); St. Sebastien doesn't look particularly discomfited by the arrows sticking out of him; no one looks especially devastated as Christ is deposed from the cross, or when St. John is beheaded, etc.

Purple patriot

Mary looks so bored, it’s as if she actually had to pose for all seven trillion portraits painted of her.  “Oh God, another Titian portrait?  Just get it over with already, my ass is killing me from sitting in this benedict pose all day...”

"Ugh.  FML"

As we took the train from Venice to Florence, then again from Florence to Rome, I began to reflect on what it means to experience a place. Maybe the pace of life of a tourist isn't really conducive to really getting to know a place- you have a few meals, and stand in the sweaty throngs of people frantically snapping pictures of buildings whose names they've already forgotten, and seeing the spot where Hemingway drank, or Picasso smoked, or Joyce fell down dead drunk, but in the end, how much can you say you really have learned about a place or its culture?  How do we find the opportunity to step outside of ourselves?

I also got to thinking about memory. We put so much emphasis on "creating memories," but what are the things we hold onto that come to define a place? Are they things like David's imposing stature (less imposing in certain unfortunate particulars, of course), or the amazing marble reliefs on the pulpit of Basilica Santa Croce?  Can I possibly be expected to remember the minute details of the Arc de Triomphe, or every work at the Uffizi?

Maybe the idea of "memories" is disingenuous.  Maybe what you remember most is the feeling-- the feeling as you catch the warm, aromatic air of Florence at night, or when you pass the sudden vacuuminous hush of a shaded side street leading away from a bustling thoroughfare, or the feeling you get when you see the beautiful Stone Pine trees of Rome  for the first time.  Perhaps, I thought, as Jordan and I sat at the Piazza della Repubblica, eating gelato and watching the street vendors as they continually bundled up their counterfeit leather handbags each time the Carabinieri drove by, all we can really hope to do is to enjoy it from one moment to the next.

Stray observations:

• If, many years from now, lying on my death bed, I can reflect that I never had to use one of those squatting in-the-floor toilets, I will consider this a life well-lived.
• In the European traffic hierarchy, bikes reign supreme. Walking on the sidewalk? It's a bike lane. Have a "walk" signal at a pedestrian cross walk? Fuck you. While the prevailing motorist philosophy seems to be "Get where I am going while applying the brakes as little as humanly possible," drivers are generally adroit at avoiding pedestrians; cyclists here will run you over as a matter of principle.
• GELATO GELATO GELATO

P.S.

While the title of this post wasn't intended as a reference to the Animal Collective song "For Reverend Green," it made me think that you should definitely listen to it right now...