Italy, part three: Rome

12/14/07 to Blog by Alex

I'm so impressed with myself - I'm actually finishing this. I kinda suspected I'd run out of steam halfway through Florence. But I didn't! I am awesome. Here's the conclusion of my awesome Italy recap! YOU ARE EXCITED. And slightly aroused. As always, there are more pictures available on Flickr.

Days 7 - 9: ROME
Rome is one of the great cities, like New York or Paris. Huge and fast and dirty. Sometimes it was a little overwhelming. But you kinda have to check it out because it's got old crap in it and old crap is awesome.

• The Colosseum is cool. It sat 50,000 people! You know how much that is? It's 13,000 more than Fenway Park seats, is how much. That's pretty well done.

• Which reminds me, here's what I've learned about old stuff: it wasn't really so different from today. They had a 50,000-seat stadium with vendors running around selling food and ticket booths and a retractable canopy for when it was bright out. They had three-story buildings and plumbing. They got all pissed off about politics and pollution. This was like 1700 years ago. We haven't actually gotten all that much accomplished.

• The two-thirds mark for any trip is tough for us. We always get depressed and homesick on that day. We've learned not to fight it: 2/3 through any trip we just hang out in our hotel room and watch pay-per-view movies in good old English. For that one night, fuck culture. That recharges us, so for the final third of the trip we're back at full force.

• The Sistine Chapel: a little underwhelming. We thought it would be...well, round. It's not! It's just a big room. And you know that iconic image of God touching Adam? I thought that would be wicked big, but it turns out the Sistine Chapel is mostly a series of smaller pictures, sortof like a comic book showing a bunch of stuff from the Bible, and the touching Adam bit is just one of the pictures. The back wall is the Last Judgment, though, and that's one big picture and it's pretty impressive. Michelangelo totally kicked ass.

• St. Peter's, the biggest church in the world, does not have the Sistine Chapel in it. The Sistine Chapel is next to it, in the Vatican Museum. I didn't know that either - I thought they were the same thing.

• And St. Peter's is awesome. Just as impressive as I'd heard. You lose all sense of scale in it. Here's how big it is: we're wandering around it in it, checking out Michelangelo's totally badass Pieta, in one of the holiest places in the world (for Catholics anyway), and this dude on a forklift full of chairs drives by us beeping. St. Peter's is so big you need a forklift to rearrange the chairs. It's Home Depot big.

• You know who's creepy? That pope guy, Benedict. He's really scary looking. He's got these sunken eyes and this predatory smile. He's not an attractive man. We were discussing this as we poked around in Vatican City gift shops, because they've got his creepy mug plastered all over everything. Also, he was in the Hitler Youth. I realize it was compulsory for German kids his age, but that doesn't mean they had to make him a Pope.

• You know what else is great about Italy? The graffiti. They're still doing real, legit graffiti art over there - the kind that got shut down by Mayor Bloomberg in NYC because he was too fucking stupid to realize that it's art. There's amazing graffiti art on nearly all of the metro cars in the Rome Metro. We love graffiti, and Italy's full of terrific work.

• And finally, we flipped some money in the Trevi Fountain to ensure our return to Rome. The Trevi Fountain, by the way...I've seen nice fountains before and they're always like "Yeah, okay, nice" and then whatever. But in Italy when they do fountains, they do fuckin' fountains.. And that thing is enormous. Loved it.

For our next trip, we hope to go to the Amazon and hang out with giant otters and stuff. How bad ass would that be? Oh man, I want to go hang out with otters. I bet there'll be way fewer decaying heads in the Amazon, too. That'll be nice.

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