SALVE ROMA!!

This story I’ll tell in begins in December, 2016.  I had finished my Contracts exam (my hardest exam) and had headed home for a home cooked meal and to relax.  When I slumped into our house in Fort Mill around 8:30 P.M., I expected that the family would have eaten dinner and the bustle of our hous eold would be winding down. Instead, my mom sat at the kitchen table, eyes flickering across her I-pad screen, dinner burning in the oven. Before I could fall into her arms, exhausted after having failed my exam, my mom spoke: “do you want to go to Italy?!” For a moment I paused my post-exam issue spotting, as my mind drifted to my study abroad experience in Rome. The best experience of my life. “YES!” I shouted.

 I joined my mom at the kitchen table and listened as she explained that she had happened to find “cheap” plane tickets, and laughed as she convinced my dad how “cheap” they were (we never did learn how she “happened to find” them)

“Should we go to Cinque Terre, too?” my mom asked me.

“Should you be studying for your next exam?” my dad interjected. I answered mom first, of course with an excited, "ABSOLUTELY!" 

And so the evening of planning our trip began: my mom and I beaming about Italy, and my Dad more than occasionally interrupting to quiz me on promissory estoppel (a contracts concept).

Second semester of law school sped by. Well, there were a few 13 hour days in the library that didn’t seem to speed by, but soon the day for our departure to Rome arrived.  

We arrived in Queens, New York around 1A.M and it felt about 1 degree outside. Our shuttle driver kindly blasted the heat and we laughed since we can count on one hand the times we had to use the heat in SC in the Winter. Here, in New York, it was spring, and still we shivered (and yawned!) our shuttle ride to the hotel.

Rebekah and I fell asleep instantly, mom not at all. Themes of this trip include strong cappuccinos and mom never sleeping. As well as mom and Rebekah not unkindly suggesting I put on lipstick, and inevitably, reminding me to reapply it.

Salve Roma!

Do not worry because the description of our first day in Rome will be short as I was drunk on exhaustion and hardly remember it. We went straight to our hotel and waited, and waited, for the hotel desk lady to check us in, Italian style; meaning, slowly and inefficiently. Just when Rebekah and I considered using our suitcases for pillows, the woman motioned for us to follow her to our “luxury suite.” I think there was some poor translation going on with the word “luxury” because our room was anything but luxurious. Fortunately, we hardly found ourselves in the room at all because we busily explored Rome all day and into the night. When we were in the room, we were probably fighting over who could sit on the toilet because the toilet happened to be the only spot where we could get wifi in our “luxury suite.”

After dumping our 500 tons of luggage filled with clothes and shoes we never would wear in the hotel, we sped to the Vatican Museum in order to make our tour time. We crammed ourselves into the Vatican halls with our 5,000 closest friends, from 5,000 different countries bringing with them their smells and I-pads snapping pictures. We shuffled our way to the Sistine chapel. The halls to the Sistine chapel are lavish and awesome (now "awesome" is an overused word I hate, but I use it here because the Vatican museum is a rare occasion where the word “awesome” applies).

You cannot describe the Sistine chapel: it is a place one has to visit for themselves and experience their own spiritual journey, while studying the frescoes, which tell the story of the Bible from Creation to the Last Judgment.  The Last Judgment painting is particularly moving. A quote I loved from the audio guide  on the last judgment is: “The sin of Adam and Eve mortified the body, making it a slave to death, and it took a Christ, who has triumphed over the true limitation of man, which is evil, to redeem us.”

While the Sistine Chapel was, and is, reserved for papal use, the frescoes of Biblical scenes in the churches throughout Italy reached the mostly illiterate population.  I loved that about the art in the churches in Italy: it was intended to share the good news of the gospel with all!

We spent an hour in the chapel, letting our minds and hearts wander away from the crowd and the crowd control police shouting “no photo.” Afterwards, we went in search of food. A constant tension between grumbling stomachs and not wanting to eat at a “tourist restaurant” dominated the trip. Some of the time our growling stomachs led us to an overpriced and mediocre meal.  Most of the time though, mom and Rebekah indulged my constant “we can’t eat here, it looks touristy” so that we enjoyed more authentic Italian cuisine. Such was the case after the Vatican museum.

I led them to the left of St. Peters Basilica, onto a road I remembered fewer tourists ventured. The flashy “pizza here!” and “conditioned air” signs gave way to greyer buildings, occasionally marked by graffiti.  Ultimately the smell of freshly baked bread led us to a small shop of pastries and pizza sold by the gram. We ordered “to go” from women who knew no English and next to customers who gave us peculiar looks, not so subtly questioning what we were doing there.

We tried to get the women to heat up our pizza by repeating in English, “hot! hot!” as if repeating a word they had never heard before would make them understand what it meant. Ultimately, I think my mom spoke in Spanish and asked them to heat our pizza, but not before she gave me an admonishing looks that I knew meant, “how did you spend 5 months in Rome and not know the word for hot?” (another constant theme of this trip: my mom’s disbelief at how little Italian I know) That meal was delicious and uneventful besides for me leaving my purse on a chair, which, for those who know me well, is hardly noteworthy.

After lunch we had a Scavi tour, or a tour of the mausoleums below St. Peters, which includes the tomb of St. Peter. Only 250 people are allowed through each day – compare that to the 30,000 that visit the Vatican Museums! Accordingly, had our minds been awake enough to think, we would have considered ourselves lucky to be on such a tour. Instead, we shifted from leg to leg, in an attempt to stay awake. The guide’s broken English sounded foreign and far away. I cannot tell you one thing she said.

Afterwards, at around 5 p.m we went straight to our hotel with plans to take a quick nap and continue our exploring. We awoke at 8 A.M the next morning.

Day 2 in Rome

To be cont.