The complex bouquet of an ancient city

When you're traveling, it's easy to believe you become someone else temporarily, and you might make the mistake that I made on our second full day in Rome. At home, I know never to drink coffee after 2 or 3 pm. Repeated experience confirmed that my ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime ceased in my early twenties. Excited to be in what is arguably an espresso lover's paradise, however, and penitent for straying from the righteous path of coffee purity into the low grade inferno of Segafredo Intermezzo, I drank dopio after dopio and Americano after Americano of the good stuff as the day wore on. I think my last double or triple espresso slid into my bloodstream at around 9:30 pm. The next morning, in short, I woke up surprised to find that I had slept. Come 4 am, alert as an owl, I had given up hope, and only then, I guess, did Morpheus deign to grant me the release I longed for.

Needless to say, morning was rough. But as these things tend to go, I was cured by the very poison that needed purging. A dopio from the stovetop coffee maker (moca), an hour of eye-rubbing and foot-dragging, a shower, and it was off to the races. Specifically, the Circus Maximus. Evidently, all that remains of this painfully ancient race track is an oval of dirt and pebbles circling a grassy median, which modern Romans use as, well, a track.

"Wait, this can't be the place. It's just a big dirt track!" Circo Massimo, Rome.

Luckily, Rome has no shortage of awe-inspiring ruins. Just on and over the hill (the Palatine) to my left, lay the Forum and the Colosseum, respectively. Sean and I walked down a small side street that skirts the lower ruins of the Forum and looped around and up a curvy paved road overlooking the old meeting place, a vast grid of lopped columns and chipped pedestals and broken bits of teetering marble and, in the distance, the Colosseum itself. Once we made it to the other side of the Palatine and walked the opposite length of the Forum, now level with us, we became part of a strange exodus, or really, and inodus, carried by the momentum of camera-toting, sunblock-smeared tourists heading inexorably toward the enormous navel of the ancient world.

Il Colosseo, Rome, where cats reign and tourists do their bidding.

I'll spare you the details of the line that snaked among the arches, that held us in its coils for what felt like a suffocating eternity. Suffice it to say, I found myself questioning, as I questioned at St. Peter's Basilica, and as I will likely question again here in Florence at the Uffizi, whether the payoff is worth the ante. This reminds me of the hipster paradox: a hipster is someone who denies being a hipster, reviles hipsters even. By the same token, I am a tourist. Oh how I hate them. Us. Me. The only difference, really, is that I forgot to smear sunscreen on myself for the first two days of sunny tramping.

But I have to be honest, and I am not speaking for Sean here: it is hard for me to see past the photo-snapping, mouth-breathing mob into the utter awesomeness that is this centuries-old gift of man to his posterity. The building is truly magnificent. And I found that if I look very closely at it, into the crannies of the pocky brick walls, full of apertures and variations in texture, or along the veins in the fallen hunks of marble, I can see what I could not see looking out over the landscape of history's bones jutting up from the arena's floor.

Tourist-free zones, Il Colosseo, Rome.

Also, as I learned at the Louvre a few years ago, hamming it with the ancients can be great fun.

My Colosseum glamour shot...

... and Lenny's Italian cousin, Leonardo di Catprio, Il Colosseo, Rome.

Despite all the internal hand-wringing and external crowd-dodging, I was duly impressed and, if not floored, then humbled by the grandeur and deep history of a place as choked with ghosts as the Colosseum must be.

I don't care what anybody says. I am happier in a foreign city's markets, metros, and churches than anywhere else. I love its graffiti, its ambulance music, its un-navigable backstreets, its smells (always the first thing to hit you when you step outside a train station, and always a stench of some unique, signatory blend of rancid waste water and exhaust that makes you want to wretch even as it brings a wide grin to your face, because there can be no surer sign that you are alive and living your life right than a new city's bouquet). I don't care what anybody says. I feel duty-bound to see the Colosseum, or the Uffizi, or the Louvre, even after seeing it and knowing I am better for it. And that's exactly it: such places warrant the pain they put you through, and you win a moral reward for the trouble. But I am drawn to the markets and subways, and I long for the vaulted caccoon of the (Catholic) churches. It's the wandering and the inevitable losing of one's bearings and the heat that only a basilica can cool and the crankiness and bliss that vie for spiritual supremacy from moment to moment that collectively make a trip worth taking. In this spirit, Sean and I crossed the street outside the Colosseum and entered the Colosseo metro station, out first taste of what one friend referred to as a little slice of hell. She couldn't be more wrong. Where she saw tightly-packed cars of groping Italians, I saw a city in the raw, a palate cleansing snap of ginger after the rich, cloying, heavy cream of tourism.

Colosseo metro station, Rome.

Sean and I learned quickly that if you wait at the end of the platform and get in the last car, you are more likely to avoid the crush. We also learned that it is sometimes better to wait for the next car, because it might be roomier, cleaner, and more modern. And you won't get your nads caught in the door.

Some messages suffice without words. Colosseo to Terminale, Metro, Rome.

Two stops down the line, we transferred to Linea A and headed for the Spanish steps and the Trevi fountain. Without going into detail, let me say that the first was a lovely if underwhelming staircase on Rome's answer to Rodeo Dr. The second, however, was a glorious, crowded square dominated by an enormous, god-hewn fountain that, in the heat of the day, served as much to torment us with its glassy blue undulations as to call us to reverence. As instructed by just about everyone, Sean and I each threw a coin over the shoulder into the water to ensure our return to Rome one day. I hate to say that I don't know if my coin, launched from several rows of mostly Asian tourists back, made it into the water. But I believe it did. Sean was more patient and wended his way to the marble edge of the bath and, with a dramatic flare of the fingers, tossed his euro in.

Eh! Neptune! Bafangulo! I got your triton right heah! Trevi fountain, Rome.

Climbing out of the morass of gelato eaters, we ducked quickly into a small medieval church on the piazza, the basilica of Saints Vincent and Anastasio. There, we caught our spiritual breath, dropped a euro in the donation box, and thanked god that people once believed in him sufficiently to build such blessed refuges from the heat and crowds in his name. We thought it appropriate, too, to pay our respects to the reverend genii of the Trevi.

About now, hunger conjoins with heat and exhaustion to bring out the beast within. Another fruitless search for vegan fare ends in our sharing a cliffbar that Sean brilliantly brought along, buying us enough time and sanity to see the astonishing Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which is built into the ruins of Diocletian's baths, down the road from Rome's central train station, Terminale. The organ alone quashes whatever edginess I might have brought in with me from the heat-radiating streets without and the pinch of hunger within. Just unbelievable, this magnificent beast.

Imagine what Brother Jack McDuff could do with that. The mind boggles. Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, Rome.

You're sick of my talk about churches. Tough. There will be more, you can bet on it.

After 30 of my finest minutes in Italy thus far, we made our way back on the metro to Circo Massimo station and walked the 2 miles or so back to Trastevere district, which Sean very rightly refers to as the Silverlake of Rome. It's like an entirely different city, yet it's just across the river. Winding cobblestone streets, shops, attractive people, classic Fiats and Vespas, and, if you can believe it, a vegan restaurant called Ti Diro, where we ate dinner. (We gorged on falafel when we got back to our neighborhood in the late afternoon, but we were ready for more after a quick nap and some down time.) It was nearly midnight by the time we were done, and I had a paper to give this morning, but I said fuck it, let's hit the jazz club. It's probably a good thing that my miserable sense of direction in the Old World prevented us from actually following through on this idea. A bit of wandering up and down Corso Vitorio Emanuele II and we were back in Trastevere, asleep by 2 am.