CAS Rome - Jessica Sheffield

I’m back — not all the way back to State College, though, as I have a conference in Philadelphia for the next couple of days.  Still, I miraculously made it through customs in time to catch my flight from NYC to Philly — unlike poor Hillary, Mark, and Mia, all of whom spent the night in the Big Apple.

I’ll be going back and adding blog posts for some of the things I missed posting about, so there’ll be some new content going up over the next few weeks, but I’m obviously in no rush now.

It’s good to be back.  I ate a bacon cheeseburger the size of my head for dinner last night.

The keyhole through which you can look into the Knights of Malta’s courtyard also perfectly frames St. Peter’s Basilica. Here’s what I managed to get with my camera:

You can get there by walking up the Aventine to Piazza Cavalieri di Malta on Via di S. Sabina.  The piazza was designed by Piranesi in 1765.

The roses at the Forum Boarium temples have died.  Such is the Roman summer.

With a week and a half remaining in Rome, the list of things to see seems to be getting longer! Here are some of the sights I have yet to visit — I’m posting them here as a reminder to myself and as a challenge — can I see them all in ten days?

• Colosseum/Forum/Palatine Hill (all one ticket) — we tried for this today, but alas, it rained — trying again on Thursday?
• Vatican Museums — Wednesday afternoon
• Verano Cemetery — Jenny told me about this just today (I seem to be assembling a collection of cemeteries) — next week?
• Nettuno/Anzio — beaches and more cemeteries — Saturday?
• Aventine Hill — Thursday morning
• Rome’s Municipal Rose Garden — on the east side of the Aventine — Thursday
• Santa Maria Maggiore — next week?

Here’s our entire program with three of the boys from Boys’ Town Italy.  I will be posting some more information about this awesome place, but for now, enjoy all the smiles!

(click the photo for a larger size)

The Theatre at Ostia Antica:

A few photos from our trip to Ostia Antica this morning:

I thought I’d do a roundup of some of the other blogs out there talking about the Mercato di Testaccio.  As it turns out, there are lots of folks writing about this fantastic market and posting some wonderful photos.  Here’s a sampling…

“Pig Me Up,” a blog about cooking, talks about shopping for lunch at the mercato:

The market is not huge, but has some good quality stalls under a covered square. You can find fruit and veg, all really fresh and mostly local. In February, the romanesco broccoli is enormous and gorgeous. Expect to find pristine radicchio of several types as well as piles of all sorts of greens. Real roman specialties are puntarelle, curly, handcut salad greens often served with olive oil and anchovies.

Aielli & Benevento Tours blog about the mercato and love:

No other market in the city has such a strong sense of community: Yuppies and jovial retirees shuffle from stall to stall, passionately debating the latest political scandal—or soccer (football) league standings—while they expertly pick out the freshest culinary delights. Perhaps more so than any other Roman neighborhood, Testaccio has a salt-of-the-earth flavor drawn from its working-class slaughterhouse past.

Maureen Fant says in an interview on eternallycool.net:

I feel as though I spend half my life in the Testaccio market, and I love it. I’ve been going there since about 1981, when I rented a very unattractive apartment on the Piccolo Aventino. That was long before I met Franco, and long before Testaccio was on the foodie maps. No, it was before there were foodie maps. Real food lovers were well aware of it…. there was the lady in my early days at Testaccio who was the first vendor to seem to recognize me from week to week and who was actually nice to me. I figured she was charging me double because I was foreign and unable to follow her calculations (nor can I today, but at least I can speak Italian), but it was worth it to be treated like a regular, which, of course, is your goal….Important lesson about Roman retailers: they think if a customer didn’t come yesterday, he’s not going to come tomorrow; the only customers considered worth treating right are your regulars.

The Ironic Mullet (what an odd blog name!) has a great description of the mercato:

In contrast to the grand covered market in Florence, Testaccio’s market looks a bit like a shantytown - albeit a shantytown filled with boistrous shopkeepers and produce that New Yorkers dream about, yet never can seem to find…. The produce stands are magnificent. Several varieties of artichokes are piled high on the tables at this time of year. They look like bruise-colored flowers at the end of their long stalks…. Citrus of all varieties is stacked over at the fruit booths, in vivid yellow and orange. The stems are attached, still, and look freshly plucked. The famous Sorrento lemons don’t have to travel far to get to my table…. All this produce business is crowded in the center of the room. Along the walls, however, space is rented out to purveyors of all things meaty and delicious…and cheesy and delicious. I spy piles of tripe among the steaks and chops. A booth selling only horse figures promiently in my tour. Perhaps most memorable, though, is the Mastroianni Brothers’ fish stall, which houses a dizzying assortment of fish, crustaceans, mollusks along with various un-identfieds. They’ve got a photo of the famous other brother or cousin or uncle Marcello Mastroianni taped to their sign in case any of us missed that connection. In front of the booth, they’ve stuck a pair of plastic lawn chairs. The brothers have marked each chair with one of their names. I am not sure if that is to keep them from being stolen or if it is intended to stake the territory, and make sure no one else rests their bum in the wrong place.

Hungry yet?

The Rome War Cemetery, according to the signs inside, was established as a permanent resting place for the Britons who died protecting and regaining the city in World War II. English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealander soldiers and airmen are all interred here — and one woman, Margaret someone, an auxiliary whose first name is the only one carved on the white marble headstones. Some are buried together; I puzzled over why some stones were placed closer together and had multiple names, until I realized that they’d buried — or at least memorialized — entire flight crews together. Each headstone has a name except for the four Unknowns, soldiers and pilots; each stone is also carved with a battalion insignia, a religious symbol, and (for most) an inscription from loved ones back in the old country. Many of these inscriptions rhyme — lyric poetry in two lines. One in particular caught my eye — I’m not sure of the precise wording, but it read something like, “He went to defend a foreign land, a corner of which is now forever England.”

The shape of the cemetery is at once Roman and English, and lends itself to contemplation of each. From the vantage point of the entry rotunda (one of three larger structures in the cemetery), one looks down a long, narrow lawn, striped by careful mowing, with a cross on a plinth in the middle. The shape of the lawn seems familiar somehow—and then it hits; it is a circus in miniature, the Circus Minimus perhaps. Next to the long oval, the headstones run in five neat rows down the left side of the cemetery, interrupted halfway back by a walkway leading up to the third of the three large structures: a monument, rather like an altar, proclaiming rather garishly “Their Name Liveth Forevermore.” Tall, twisted umbrella pines line both sides of the cemetery, although there are about twice as many on the left side: shade on the graves, sun on the lawn. Thus it is that one can stand in the circus in the Roman sun and peer into a slice of England, or vice versa.

The grass between the rows is precisely, almost painfully neatly manicured. The garden plots surrounding the headstones are edged with sharp perpendicularity to the ground. Flowers grow in these plots, in front of and around the headstones themselves. These are English flowers: forget-me-nots, roses, the tiny bright flowers my grandmother called “pinks” when she grew them in her garden, creeping ground cover. They’re mirrored on the massive metal gates: heather, shamrocks, roses, and forget-me-not in cold metallic bas-relief.

Walking on one of the gravel-lined walkways ringing the circus toward the back of the cemetery, a closer look at the cross reveals that the decoration which I took to be a second, smaller cross affixed to the marble face is actually a sword. This is, after all, no ordinary cemetery, but a monument to the struggles faced by both the Italian and the English people in the Second World War. The cemetery is flanked on the south side by the city walls — it’s no accident that it’s on the interior side of them, forever a part of the “old city.” The inscriptions — in Italian and English — on one of the larger monumental pieces speak of Rome’s gratitude to these soldiers, who gave their lives so that Rome might once again be free.

On my second visit to the cemetery, I found an information packet at the front which contained, among other information, details about the headstone inscriptions, which I’ve included here: “On many headstones some inscription from one of our own poets has been engraved. Those who recall the elegy written in Italy in 1821 by one of the English residents for another, of peculiar valour of disposition, who died young, may have in mind, as suitable to the whole company of the fallen, these lines:

They borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And they are gathered to the Kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time’s decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
Shelley. ‘Adonais’ (Stanza XLVIII)”

A photodump of some Prague sights until I can get some content written up…