RECESSION-PROOF TRAVEL BREAKS FOR THE BORED AND BELEAGUERED

(for Mam, who loved a bargain holiday, and Dad, who loved Yugoslavia)

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Rome



Ah the cobbles, the cobbles! I don’t know how much a course of reflexol
-ogy costs, but the cobbles of Rome will do the job for you for free. I went to Rome from Girona and back for two Euros (thank you Michael) and the night before I was to go my biggest concern was the tedium of dragging my lazy ass to the airport. It is far too easy to pass up on a two Euro experience. The plane was in fact coming down with tiny teenage Spaniards with tiny rucksacks (and just as full on the way back with tiny Italians) all expanding their horizons thanks to RyanAir.

My ignorance of Rome would fill a library, and while that’s nothing to be proud of, it can be liberating. And there was nothing going on in February. But the city was crawling with tourists. Terravision bring you into the main railway station from Ciampino airport for around 8 Euro and I was installed in my little pension a few blocks away hardly more than an hour after landing. Since this blog is for the aimless, witless and half broke who don’t want to wait any longer for someone to come along, I can’t emphasise enough that EVERYTHING IS EASY NOW, EVERYWHERE IS SAFE, EVERYWHERE IS INTERESTING. YOU WON’T BE LONELY IF YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. It is nearly impossible to go wrong. There is nothing you cannot find, price, compare, refine, book and print out from the internet before you go anywhere. If like me you have to work on the road, bring a laptop – even one of those tiny weightless things with keyboards designed for wading birds - and always book wifi accommodation. It is much, much easier than you think.


Accommodation
I stayed in the 4th floor Nazional Rooms  just round the corner from Termini railway station for six nights and though I can’t remember what I paid (something like 240-250 Euro including breakfast round the corner), it was very reasonable, clean, toasty warm, had a selection of videos, city maps and a helpful manager, good strong wifi and a comfortable desk and chair in the room. It was a block from the department of defence (safe as your grandma’s kitchen), two doors from a café bar, one block from a mini-market, hardly a mile from the furthest of Rome’s fabled sites and sights – the Via Veneto, the Trevi Fountain, the Vatican, Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the massive baroque place and the ruin and the big wall. There were 70% off recession-trauma sales right outside the door of the pension on the Via Nazionale.

Transport
You really don’t need to bother with public transport in Rome, which is much more compact than I thought anyway. It was flogging rain all the time, but you could buy an umbrella from an Indian in a doorway for a Euro. And speaking of a Euro, I found a whizzy busy pizza parlour that had freshly baked pizza for a Euro just off the Piazza Navona and I tried it out just to see if it was possible to eat near the grand attractions if you were broke - and it was fine and filling. There was another place near the Vatican that sold the juiciest pizza I have ever eaten. I had found a tenner on the steps of the Vatican and gave a few Euros of it to a sackcloth monk with a tonsure begging on the street outside the walls. I followed him in to the pizzeria when he dropped in for a coffee at the counter and I spent the rest of the tenner on the pizza and coffee, and then went back there and spent it again the next day and the next, and then again on the trousers I had to buy to replace the ones I came in and again on the taxi I had to get from one side of Termini station to the other when I got lost on the last day.


Sights and sounds for the uninformed
The thing that struck me most about Rome was the colossal size of the ornamentation. Even if a building wasn’t enormously high, the statuary adorning it was gigantic. In-your-face muscles and curls and testicles everywhere. Even despite all that I had ever heard of the Vatican’s art and wealth, the Vatican Museum floored me. The miles of painted barrel ceilings are simply awesome. The Sistine Chapel, when finally it emerged at the end of one of these corridors, seemed a tad gloomy by comparison (see ignoramus reference above). I have hundreds of photos of plaster busts of senators and warriors and grinning lads and maidens. Most of the rest of my Rome photo collection are of cobbles, some of them as large as a small province.

There would be no point in the likes of me waxing on about specific monuments, given the little I knew about any of them and given that I fell over most of them as I wandered around. I’ll just mention the Pantheon, because I came upon it on a Saturday and saw there would be mass there on Sunday. When I got there, tourists were hanging about in the rain for mass to be over so that they could visit. I asked to go in to mass and was ushered inside to join the spare congregation for what turned out to be a resounding and truly moving musical experience, provided by a choir of just four men backed by an organ in full throttle. The acoustics were phenomenal. I may be stating the obvious here, but I did the same thing with an irreligious but spiritually minded friend at the great mosque/ cathedral in Cordoba, where the guards at the door seemed happy to welcome anyone prepared to sit through the mass. Surely it can’t be inappropriate to take in the majesty of these great houses of worship in the ambient embrace of a spiritual ritual, without cameras and sitting quietly?

Six days was for me just the right amount of time to spend in Rome, allowing for mistakes (three attempts to get to the Vatican Museum – too late one day, closed Sunday), work, the weather. I worked nights at the little desk in the Nazional, saw several movies I had missed, including Gangs of New York, and selected one event to track down from the brochures at the tourist office, a classical concert in a church. I was googling the location of the Church of St Paul’s Within the Walls at the desk in my room and looked over the screen of my laptop. And guess what was looking at me from right across the street? I swear to you. That’s how easy Rome is. On the last day I thought I should see the Spanish Steps if they weren’t too hard to find. They weren’t, but I was hungry, so I clipped up one side, across the top and down the other side, then up the road without looking back and was home in ten minutes.

Cost
I think that holiday cost around €400, including pizzas, museum tickets, umbrellas, the €2 I paid RyanAir.

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