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Yesterday, we saw the Trajan's Forum area, went back to the Jewish neighborhood for lunch (I'm pretty sure I haven't blogged yet about how cool the tour of the old ghetto neighborhood was -- our guide was a young (cute!) woman whose family lived in the ghetto for hundreds of years (until her mother sold the apartment in the eighties, just BEFORE the neighborhood was gentrified and their old apartment is now worth hundreds of thousands of €, not that she's bitter at her mother or anything), who knows EVERYBODY in the ghetto neighborhood, and loves Rome, and wants you to love Rome, and, specifically, the Jewish neighborhood of Rome, as much as you do.
It's a good tour, if, y'know, you are okay with having the tour interrupted every once in a while by people coming up to your tour guide and talking to her and introducing themselves to your tour group and talking at you and telling you stuff. Which I am quite okay with.
Anyway, so, yesterday, we went back to that neighborhood to show at the synogogue gift shop (it's a synogogue that was built in the early 20th century when the ghetto was turned from an absolute sty of a slum into a pretty nice neighborhood, and it was designed to compete with all the cathedrals around, which it does), and then we got lunch there.
And then we went to Ostia Antica in the afternoon.
Oh, yeah -- and I also buttonholed one of the caribineri to ask what the difference between caribineri and polizia is. Because most of the law enforcement you see around are caribineri, but you see a few polizia. As well as some vigiles, which appears to be the name for both the fire department, and for private security guards.
The caribineri are military police. The polizia are civilian. I didn't ask why the military appears to do EVERYTHING, though. . . seems like a bit of a presumptuous question for a tourist.
Anyway, Ostia Antica is a suburb of Rome, but it's right on the train line (which, I realized, goes right out to the ocean, so, if we'd planned better, we coulda gone to the beach after and taken a dip in the Mediterranian, but, oh well). The train in question is covered by the three-day Roma Pass we got (public transit, two free entries to a number of attractions a tourist might want to see, and discounted entry to the rest of them), making it very easy.
What is Ostia Antica? Well, Ostia is a suburb, right near what USED to be the mouth of the Tiber, before the river shifted somewhat over the centuries. It's currently a pretty nice, quiet suburb. But, a couple thousand years ago, it was the main shipping port for Rome -- a busy, rough-and-tumble port town, with thousands of merchants, rich shipping moguls, sailors, longshoremen, and the rest of the people that you'd expect.
The river shifted, the city was abandoned, and became a ghost town. The river silted up, and buried the city. The city was buried and forgotten about during the post-apocalyptic medieval period, so nobody harvested the old buildings to make new buildings. And then it was discovered and excavated.
Pompei was a wealthy suburb destroyed in an instant. Ostia Antica is a working town, abandoned and desolate.
Pompei is a tourist attraction. Ostia Antica is a ghost town, in which we saw a few dozen people, spread out throughout the entire city. And it is a city. We got lost in it, and had to keep consulting our map. Fortunately, the archaeologists have named the streets -- or, rediscovered the actual names of the streets -- and labeled them.
I know a bunch of you really like cemeteries. And ruins. There's just something about them that is neat. And, as you enter the town, before you get to the gates proper, or, at least, the spot where the gates once were, you walk through the necropolis -- burial inside Roman city walls was not allowed, so people built all their family monuments along the road to the city. So you start by walking through a ruined graveyard.
And you can recognize neighborhoods. You can turn down a street, and realize that you're looking at a row of small shops, exactly like the row of small shops near our hotel. You KNOW what kinds of things were sold there, because you know that it was selling the same sorts of things that are sold in the shops by you. We walked past a building and said, "Oh, that's the garage for THAT building." We can't know that for sure, but, somehow, we ARE sure.
Because the city isn't really any different from a modern city. It just has no roof over any building, and a meadow stretches through every shop and bar and warehouse and tenement building and temple and villa of the wealthy and monument and office.
We walked through a lunch counter. I'd heard about the ancient Roman lunch counters, but what I hadn't realized was that they haven't changed. I pretty much knew how they worked, because I study bars throughout history (my LJ name is "Bartender Geek" for a reason), but it hadn't struck me until I walked through the ruined lunch counter/bar that we'd been grabbing lunch in places exactly like that one all through our vacation. United States lunch counters are slightly different than ancient Roman ones; modern Roman lunch counters aren't. Okay, I suspect that the ancient Romans couldn't ship enough ice to have ubiquitous gelato, but you just KNOW that they were selling the same wines, pizza, fresh fruit, panini, import and domestic beer as the modern Romans.
On our way back, we were exhausted, and, even though I wanted to take the train farther out to go to the beach, we were too tired, and got on the train back to Rome. The train was packed by people coming back from the beach -- women wearing swimsuits under their wraps, with hair that had clearly just been in salt water -- you know what people coming back from the beach look like. Standing right next to me was a pretty young woman coming back from the beach who was just about old enough for me to feel comfortable looking at her every once in a while, so I saw the whole thing, and I got to see how the Italians deal with emergencies.
I saw her rub the back of her neck, and adjust the strap of her swimsuit top which was tied around the back of her neck. And a few minutes later, I saw her eyes roll up into her head, and she fell straght back and collapsed on the floor of the train.
Immediately, I handed the bottle of water in my bag to the woman who was travelling with her, who poured it on her face, as she was elevating the fainting woman's legs. Another woman standing next to her took HER bottle of water, and starting wetting the fainting woman's neck and face, and massaging her hands
It's a good tour, if, y'know, you are okay with having the tour interrupted every once in a while by people coming up to your tour guide and talking to her and introducing themselves to your tour group and talking at you and telling you stuff. Which I am quite okay with.
Anyway, so, yesterday, we went back to that neighborhood to show at the synogogue gift shop (it's a synogogue that was built in the early 20th century when the ghetto was turned from an absolute sty of a slum into a pretty nice neighborhood, and it was designed to compete with all the cathedrals around, which it does), and then we got lunch there.
And then we went to Ostia Antica in the afternoon.
Oh, yeah -- and I also buttonholed one of the caribineri to ask what the difference between caribineri and polizia is. Because most of the law enforcement you see around are caribineri, but you see a few polizia. As well as some vigiles, which appears to be the name for both the fire department, and for private security guards.
The caribineri are military police. The polizia are civilian. I didn't ask why the military appears to do EVERYTHING, though. . . seems like a bit of a presumptuous question for a tourist.
Anyway, Ostia Antica is a suburb of Rome, but it's right on the train line (which, I realized, goes right out to the ocean, so, if we'd planned better, we coulda gone to the beach after and taken a dip in the Mediterranian, but, oh well). The train in question is covered by the three-day Roma Pass we got (public transit, two free entries to a number of attractions a tourist might want to see, and discounted entry to the rest of them), making it very easy.
What is Ostia Antica? Well, Ostia is a suburb, right near what USED to be the mouth of the Tiber, before the river shifted somewhat over the centuries. It's currently a pretty nice, quiet suburb. But, a couple thousand years ago, it was the main shipping port for Rome -- a busy, rough-and-tumble port town, with thousands of merchants, rich shipping moguls, sailors, longshoremen, and the rest of the people that you'd expect.
The river shifted, the city was abandoned, and became a ghost town. The river silted up, and buried the city. The city was buried and forgotten about during the post-apocalyptic medieval period, so nobody harvested the old buildings to make new buildings. And then it was discovered and excavated.
Pompei was a wealthy suburb destroyed in an instant. Ostia Antica is a working town, abandoned and desolate.
Pompei is a tourist attraction. Ostia Antica is a ghost town, in which we saw a few dozen people, spread out throughout the entire city. And it is a city. We got lost in it, and had to keep consulting our map. Fortunately, the archaeologists have named the streets -- or, rediscovered the actual names of the streets -- and labeled them.
I know a bunch of you really like cemeteries. And ruins. There's just something about them that is neat. And, as you enter the town, before you get to the gates proper, or, at least, the spot where the gates once were, you walk through the necropolis -- burial inside Roman city walls was not allowed, so people built all their family monuments along the road to the city. So you start by walking through a ruined graveyard.
And you can recognize neighborhoods. You can turn down a street, and realize that you're looking at a row of small shops, exactly like the row of small shops near our hotel. You KNOW what kinds of things were sold there, because you know that it was selling the same sorts of things that are sold in the shops by you. We walked past a building and said, "Oh, that's the garage for THAT building." We can't know that for sure, but, somehow, we ARE sure.
Because the city isn't really any different from a modern city. It just has no roof over any building, and a meadow stretches through every shop and bar and warehouse and tenement building and temple and villa of the wealthy and monument and office.
We walked through a lunch counter. I'd heard about the ancient Roman lunch counters, but what I hadn't realized was that they haven't changed. I pretty much knew how they worked, because I study bars throughout history (my LJ name is "Bartender Geek" for a reason), but it hadn't struck me until I walked through the ruined lunch counter/bar that we'd been grabbing lunch in places exactly like that one all through our vacation. United States lunch counters are slightly different than ancient Roman ones; modern Roman lunch counters aren't. Okay, I suspect that the ancient Romans couldn't ship enough ice to have ubiquitous gelato, but you just KNOW that they were selling the same wines, pizza, fresh fruit, panini, import and domestic beer as the modern Romans.
On our way back, we were exhausted, and, even though I wanted to take the train farther out to go to the beach, we were too tired, and got on the train back to Rome. The train was packed by people coming back from the beach -- women wearing swimsuits under their wraps, with hair that had clearly just been in salt water -- you know what people coming back from the beach look like. Standing right next to me was a pretty young woman coming back from the beach who was just about old enough for me to feel comfortable looking at her every once in a while, so I saw the whole thing, and I got to see how the Italians deal with emergencies.
I saw her rub the back of her neck, and adjust the strap of her swimsuit top which was tied around the back of her neck. And a few minutes later, I saw her eyes roll up into her head, and she fell straght back and collapsed on the floor of the train.
Immediately, I handed the bottle of water in my bag to the woman who was travelling with her, who poured it on her face, as she was elevating the fainting woman's legs. Another woman standing next to her took HER bottle of water, and starting wetting the fainting woman's neck and face, and massaging her hands
Rest of entry lost
We're now on the train (I'm commenting via cellphone) so Ian will finish his story later.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2007-06-30 03:53 pm (UTC)(link)Duzzy
no subject
*me looking at little hand on a stick* Hey, what's this hand thing?
Friend: That's the Yad.
Me: The what?
Friend: The Yad.
Me: The what?
Friend: The Yad.