this week in the odyssey
5.3.99 -- 5.10.99
rome, italy

What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?

Ah, the Roman paradox! How does a culture so full of joie de vivre (literally, "jaw of a beaver"), so dedicated to whiling away every night in the bars drinking bucketloads of wine still find the time to invent things like aqueducts, public education, and the judicial system? What is it about "la dolce vita" (literally, "bucketloads of wine") that stimulates the Romans to ever greater feats of cultural excellence? How can a strong liver lead to a stronger nation state?

Out of a staunch sense of journalistic duty and firmly in the cerebral spirit of scientific inquiry the world over, Kristanne and I decided to find out. So, we spent the last week slogging back bucketloads of wine on our deck. Did it work? Did we scale impressive new heights of social progress? Did we diminish the growing gap between the upper and lower classes? Did we draft legislation to improve the plight of the working poor?

Well, no. But we did learn how to say "aspirin" in Italian, which is progress of a sort, I reckon. Heck, if you gave us another few thousand years, we might even come up with some of that other stuff. Rome, after all, was not built in a day.

NOTE TO THE READER: At this point, Sid has completely exhausted his allotment of three hackneyed Roman cliches per trip. In addition to that chestnut in the last paragraph, he's already bored us with his "Roman Holiday" in Week One and rambled on about "all roads leading to Rome" in Week Two. If at any time in the next four weeks he so much as tiptoes towards dropping a "When in Rome...", you are legally required to beat him senseless with a bust of Julius Caesar while chanting, "Et tu, Sid? Et tu, Sid?" Serious times demand serious measures, I'm sure you'll agree.

Scientific inquiry can really wear you out. It also demands that you share your results with your colleagues in the scientific community. So, in the interest of full disclosure, we invited Kristanne's fellow art historians over to our new pad for a pre Festa della Mamma seminar of sorts. Instead of getting right to the science, though, we started the evening with a singalong. There you see me leading the group in a rousing extended dance mix of perennial party favorite, "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore." I've been working on my guitar playing and it really paid off as I was able to segue deftly into "Kumbaya" and then after that into my justly renowned rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In." I even changed the lyrics to be slightly more topical, offering some wry insight into the current turmoil in the Balkans. I consider it a personal challenge to point my songwriting flashlight in such a way that it can illuminate the darker corners of the political landscape for those still dwelling in the gloaming of ignorance. For your own enlightenment, I include those lyrics here:

"Al-ba-nia...Al-ba-nia...you border on the A-dri-atic.
Your land is mostly moutainouuuuus....
And your chief export is chroooome."

Unfortunately, not everyone really appreciates or even understands my songwriting flashlight. Some people even consider it an outright insult. That's why as I entered the second chorus of "When the Saints Go Marching In" ("Mi-lo-se-vic...Mi-lo-se-vic... your troops are trampling Ko-so-vo..."), the fellow seated next to me in that picture at right snatched my guitar from my hands and smashed it to shards. This being a family feature, I'm not even going to mention what he did with my songwriting flashlight. Suffice it to say that replacing its batteries is going to require some outpatient surgery of a decidedly uncomfortable sort.

Our singalong abruptly halted, we decided to repair to our deck for libations. Have we told you about our deck yet? I mean, about its dark and nefarious powers? Its curious gravitational forces? The mysteries of its chairs? Its curious ability to remain permanently suspended out of time?

As you can see there at the left, things usually start innocently enough on the deck -- you sit down, pour yourself a glass of wine, and engage in a meaningful conversation about the relationship of spiritual consciousness to rationalist interpretation in Baroque ecclesiastical sculpture. Well, anyway, some people do. I pretty much just ask people if they miss TV. I mean, I sure do. Does anyone out there know how Sipowicz is doing on NYPD Blue? Is he getting along ok with that cute Ricky Schroder? Sure, he's gruff on the outside, but he's huggably soft on the inside, I tell ya.

That picture at the right shows what the Deck can do, though. The Deck doesn't forcibly abduct you. It doesn't bludgeon you into submission. It just sort of sidles up next to you in a smoking jacket, slips a drink into your hand and an arm around your waist, and whispers sweet sultry nothings into your ear until you melt into its cozy clutches. The Deck is sort of like Mr. Scucherini that way.

"Heya, sweet stuff, why dontchya have another drink? Slide on over here and light my cigarette while I squeeze you into this chair. Now, now, now...there's no need to be getting up. Four in the morning...that's just numbers, baby. Who needs numbers when we've got each other? That's right...now you're feeling it. Towel off my brow, will ya honey?"

Actually, the Deck is even more seductive than Mr. Scucherini. It's more like the Barry White of the balcony world, all butter-smooth lines and bewitching guile. The Deck, however, does not have a jheri-curl, so there are definitely practical limits to this metaphor.

Eventually, though, the Deck will have had its fill of you and you can weakly totter off to bed, slightly the worse for wear the next morning. "Slightly the worse for wear" in this case translates into hangovers so crippling in power that they reduce you to whimpering jelly. If my head was a city, then a marching band was definitely coming down Broadway. Some well-meaning hippies had started a cooperative on my upper west side and seemed to be taking the subway down to see their parents in my fashionable East Seventies.

I was considering shutting the whole grid down and going back to bed when a blurred motion from the other side of the room caught my eye. Oh no. Not that. Anything but that. It was Miss Money Money. She was standing in front of the mirror praticing her credit card quick draw, punctuating each motion with little percussive sound effects ("Phyooo. Shweooh. Krrack.") and reflexively cracking her knuckles. With each cracked knuckle, I could hear our credit rating dropping a little lower and our baggage for the plane ride home getting a little bit bigger. I tried to feign sleep but it was useless. Miss Money Money dragged me to the shower, hosed me down, and then poured a pot of espresso down my gullet. Time to go.

When Miss Money Money wants to shop, there's really not a whole lot you can do to stop her. Even the Deck is powerless when confronted with Miss Money Money on a shopping binge. So, arm in arm, we sauntered off to the intersection of Via del Corso and Via del Tritone, the holiest shopping intersection in all of Rome. There's a big statue of Hercules there with his arms outstretched to the heavens, an oversized gold Visa card in his steely grip. Pilgrims come by the thousands to make offerings to this statue as well as to the merchants of Rome. Who was I to fight that kind of tradition? We hit the La Rinascente department store, me trudging wearily three steps behind Miss Money Money so as not to be injured in the maelstrom of consumerist ecstasy.

Versace. Prada. Max Mara. Ermenegildo Zegna. Gianfranco Ferre. Miss Money Money whipped from designer to designer as I attempted to remain upright. I was fairly sure that I slipped into some sort of bizarre hallucinatory state when I saw that youngster there at left going from mannequin to mannequin like a princess at a ball, dancing momentarily with each before moving on to the next. But, hey, watch those hands, eh, sister?

Much like scientific inquiry, though, shopping can really wear a body down. After doing our best to wipe out whatever national debt Italy might be experiencing, we headed off for a little lunch. There you see me at right, ever the suavester (not really a word, by the way, but it ought to be), ordering some lasagna for lunch in my rapidly-improving Italian.

Unfortunately, as you can see in the picture at left, my rapidly-improving Italian apparently thinks that the word for "lasagna" is "pizza." No matter. I was so hungry at this point that I ate the napkin too.

Though I only know a few Italian words for food, I'm still doing better than Kristanne, whose vocabulary for food items appears to have stagnated at "doughnut" ("ciambella"). Though I've protested her diet somewhat, she persists in eating doughnuts three meals a day, reassuring me that they are in fact "nature's perfect food -- deep fat fried and sugary!"

Come back, Kristanne. Come back to the light where we can be together.

And so concludes our week, a week not exactly bursting at the seams with culture. All that changes next week, though, as we head to the gorgeous old city of Ravenna, home to the most prized treasures of Byzantine art in all of Italy. Or so I'm told, anyway. It was either that or "no lasagna for you, pizza-face."

See you next week on the Odyssey!

And Happy Birthday to my brother, Russ!

Last Week's Front Page Picture

For those of you wondering, that's Castel Sant Angelo over there at the left, the safe house for the Pope whenever the Empire is under assault. You can't see it in this picture, but a raised walkway connects the castle with St. Peter's itself, over a mile away. This walkway provides a passage to safety for the Pope free from the slings and arrows of outrageous Goths, Gauls, or Gawking Tourists with Videocameras. It also provides a place from which the Pope can taunt passersby and hurl water balloons with impunity. Power does have its privileges. By the way, that's pretty much the extent of the culture this week on the Odyssey, so you might want to read this paragraph twice.