Roman Holiday part three: Final Roundup.

Right, I'm going to finish this if it kills me. I'm going to quickly round up the rest of my holiday in Rome, because I've taken far too long to actually get round to doing it properly, and I'm sure you lot are fed up of reading about it by now. It's like when someone offers you their holiday snaps to look at, and you take them, interested, only to find that interest totally evaporated by the time you get to the fifth photograph. (I'm reminded of that quote from Black Books: 'All holiday photos are of people who didn't realise they were that fat, squinting!')

So anyway, I'll go through what we looked at, as quickly and as (hopefully) humorously as possible:


Trevi Fountain



You can tell this was built in a time before the tourist was invented. The fountain, which is huge, is in a really small square. Because of this, you end up shoulder-to-shoulder with other tourists, beggars, pickpockets and tat peddlers, and there's loads of them.

The beggars are odd. In most other places, they invade your personal space and ask you for money. Sometimes they tell you their story. Sometimes they stumble over, pissed up, and swear at you until you give them a couple of quid to go away. Maybe that's just Birmingham beggars. Not so much in Rome, as most of the beggars I saw tend to lie prostate on the floor, as if praying, with a tin can in front of them in which you're supposed to put any spare euros you might have.

We didn't even get to chuck any coins in the fountain either, as is the tradition, because it was so bloody crowded there, but I did get shat on by a pigeon, so it's swings and roundabouts.

It is a bloody impressive thing, though. An awesome piece of sculpture. We didn't see Anita Ekberg dancing in it though, but that's probably a good thing these days as she's nearly eighty, bless her.


Pantheon

This place was originally a temple for all the Roman gods, built by Agrippa, but it burned down and was rebuilt by Hadrian. In the sixth century, it was given to Pope Boniface IV who converted it into a Christian church, and it's also the site of Raphael's coffin. It was the biggest dome ever built before the invention of reinforced concrete, and at the top of the dome is a big circular hole, called the Oculus.

This place is amazing. You walk in, and you notice how much cooler it is in there, you're no longer baking hot. As I mentioned, Raphael is interred there, and you can see his coffin through a glass window. I don't know where the rest of the ninja turtles are buried, though. It is an amazing piece of architecture, especially when you consider it was built in the early second century.

Generally, though, all this religion stuff leaves me cold. I can appreciate the beauty of the buildings, but they won't convert me to God-bothering. What pissed me off about this place was when I heard it used to be covered in marble, but them pesky Catholics took it to build St. Peter's with. By this point on the holiday, I'd heard this a few times at different ancient Roman buildings (the Forum and the Colosseum, amongst others) mainly because I'd have liked to see it in all its original splendour. But then again, how many ancient buildings can you see in their original form, anyway?
Apparently, the best time to see this place is when it's raining, as seeing the rain come in through the oculus is supposed to be amazing, but there was no chance of that at the time we went.

Castel Sant'Angelo

The day we went here was my birthday. We tried at first to get into St. Peter's Basilica, but there was some hold-up and we were stuck in a queue that was going nowhere for the best part of an hour, baking in the ferocious sun, until we thought 'fuck this' and left to get a beer and something to eat, but not far from the Vatican is this castle, and I loved this place. My glamorous other half wasn't so keen, though.

It was originally Hadrian's mausoleum, but it was later fortified and turned into a castle. It's a big, round building, with lots of spiral staircases. The main courtyard has a sculpture of St. Michael by Raphael in it (left) , and a lot of the other courtyards have cannons and other military ephemera in there. Also in there was a mini art gallery, which, whilst we were there, had a collection of the creepiest paintings I've ever seen. You know, kinda like Heironymous Bosch, but shit. Also in there was a museum of old military uniforms and swords and pistols and stuff (luckily, no Mussolini-era fascist togs; that would've given out the wrong message), I love looking at stuff like that, as I'm fascinated by wars. Wouldn't like to be in one, however. As you go up the castle, you get great views of Rome, and the view from the very top of the place is supposed to be amazing, but I didn't get to see it as my girlfriend got an attack of vertigo, so we had to get lower down fairly sharpish. I did get to see the top of the castle when we went to see Angels And Demons with Heather's parents, as the castle featured fairly prominently in the movie. Luckily, there weren't any antimatter bombs there when we were there, or any of the other far-fetched shite from that ridiculous movie. I mean, a bloody parachuting priest jumping out of an antimatter-induced exploding helicopter. What a load of old bollocks. Still more believable than Ewan McGregor's Oirish accent, though.

Basilica di San Pietro


Or St. Peter's, to you and me. Like I've said, I'm not religious at all, but this place is impressive. The Piazza outside, with all the columns and the statues of the saints and the obelisk is an amazing spectacle.

We went inside and it was heaving. A big chunk of the basilica was cordoned off. Marching through it was lots of Germans in lederhosen and other traditional dress blowing trombones and tubas and playing various musical instruments and waving the German tricolour flag about with lots of other banners all with very long words and lots of umlauts. I thought it might be a world record attempt for the biggest oompah-oompah band, because it went on for ages, but then I thought that was a stupid idea, as St. Peter's isn't really the place for that kind of thing. But then, it also seems odd that Germany, probably the most Protestant country in the world, had a delegation marching through the Vatican. Maybe I wonder about these things too much. Anyway, because of this event, a lot of the basilica was off-limits, but a lot of what I did see was beautiful. Like Michaelangelo's Pieta, for example. It's behind glass, so you can't look at it properly, but it is a beautiful sculpture, and apparently, it's the only work of his that he signed, and that was only because people refused to believe that an artist that young could achieve such a masterpiece. I still had a cob on with the Catholic church for nicking all that marble, though.

All around St. Pete's are loads of monuments to different saints and prominent churchmen and martyrs and suchlike. I got into a little bit of trouble when I asked my girlfriend 'where's the monument for all the buggered schoolboys?' she told me this wasn't the time or place for such crude humour. I argued that all those poor boys who martyred their bumholes for the Catholic church should get some kind of recognition, especially since the current Pope has done his best to sweep all reports of abuse under the carpet. But I got that look that means 'shut up' and I stayed quiet until I saw an american lad walking around with a T-shirt on that said 'I AM AN ATHEIST' on it in big letters. I want one of those. I thought I was being a bit cool wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt (seeing as the band is named after the things they stuck Jesus to the cross with) but that shirt was ace. Anyway, after having a good mooch, we decided not to go further into the Vatican, as it would've cost us something like ninety quid to go and have a look around, and as it was near the end of our holiday, we didn't have much money to spend. It's a shame, I would have liked to have seen the Sistine chapel and the crypt and all the other stuff, but it wasn't to be. Maybe next time.

What was weird was all the stalls just outside. There tends to be more stuff for sale with the last Pope, John Paul II, on than there is with the new one. I wanted to get my kids the lollipops they were selling. You should've seen them, they were brilliant. They had lollipops with photos of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI on them. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to lick a dead Pope's face, then this is how you find out. I was talked out of buying my kids the lollies by my girlfriend, who said they were in bad taste, and at seven euros each, they were expensive. After I got back and I told my daughters about it, they told me they would've loved the lollies, as they've inherited my sick sense of humour. Maybe next time.

Villa Borghese/Bioparco

Bioparco is a zoo. It's inside the Villa Borghese park, which is a lovely park, a little oasis of calm in the chaos that is the city of Rome. It has little paths in it all named after the world's famous authors, and these paths have statues of the titular authors by the side of them. It's so big you can hire pushbikes or segways, or them mad tandem things with roofs on that they had in The Prisoner to get around it in. (At one point, when we'd stopped for a breather, we saw a dwarf hunchback get off one of these tandems to have a look at Victor Hugo's statue. I thought it was strange, anyway.) We went to the Villa Borghese to have a look at the Museo e Galleria Borghese, which is an art gallery housed in a 17th-century villa, but when we got there, we found out that you had to book tickets in advance, and we hadn't, so that was the end of that. Just down the road from the museum was the Bioparco, so we decided to go in. I wish we hadn't. It was extremely busy, with seemingly thousands of children screaming in it, and because it was so hot, all the animals were either hiding or just lying there, asleep. Heather was particularly disappointed by the so-called 'Valley Of The Bears', which should have been renamed 'A Ditch With One Comatose Bear In It'. The best bit, however was the seals. Not because of the animals, as they were mostly just clinging to the bottom of their pools because it was so hot and coming up for a breath or two every five minutes or so. It was because the Italian for seal is 'foca' and that sounds rude in English. It is funny, though, seeing an Italian dad pointing out the seals to his kids and shouting 'fucker'. It livened up a horrible afternoon, anyway.

Trastevere

This place was supposed to be all bohemian and a cool place to hang out. It wasn't. It was a shithole.

Piazza di Spagna

We didn't really see the Spanish steps. They were there, and so were we, but every available step was occupied by a sitting tourist. I couldn't really see what the fuss was about. We did however, buy some tacky gifts from there, for a laugh. I bought my brothers some penis-shaped pasta and we bought Heather's Mom and Dad some tastefully rude kitchen aprons. Oh, and I was coerced into buying a rose for my girlfriend by a street peddler.

That's pretty much it. I could tell you about some of the restaurants we went to and all that shit, but I can't be arsed. I'm fed up of typing about Italy now. I'd love to go there again one day, but I've had enough of writing about it! I'll soon get back to writing about bodily functions, comics, football and all the usual shite soon.

Roman Holiday part two: Colosseum.

This was the only way Aston Villa were going to get to the venue of the Champions League final. Actually, I'm cheating a little bit; this pic was taken on a different day to the one I'm writing about.

For our first full day in the Eternal City, we decided to go to the Colosseum. So after Heather had opened her cards and prezzies (it was her birthday, after all) and we'd eaten our breakfast of weird bread with ham and and even weirder cheese, we left the hotel and went to Ciampino train station via the hotel's shuttle service, which is basically a pissed-off elderly Italian driving a people carrier.

We got on the train, which was a double-decker ( why don't we have those here in Blighty? I'm sick of paying through the nose for train tickets only to stand up all the way there. I better stop before I go off on one about public transport again!) and off we went into Rome.

As you go into Rome on the train, you notice three things. One, there's history all over the place. You'll see an apartment block, then a bit of ancient aquaduct, a football pitch, then a bit of ruined castle. The town planners have just built around what's left of Ancient Rome, whereas here, if we discover some Ancient Briton burial site, we'll let some archaeologists dig for a couple of weeks and then tell them to piss off and put a multi-storey car-park on top of it.

Two, there's loads of graffiti. All the bits that aren't ancient have got some toerag's tag on it. I'm used to seeing graffiti here in Brum, but it's everywhere in Rome. Then again, 'graffiti' is an Italian word, isn't it? I suppose it's not surprising then, if you think about it. There was an interesting piece of graffiti at the Colosseum, but I'll tell you about that in due course.

Three, it's fucking sweltering. Apparently, we'd arrived during a heatwave, and even the local Romans were moaning about the heat. There was a digital display on the train that tells you what the temperature was, and it was just shy of thirty-five degrees Celsius. I'm not good when it's too hot. I'm not a big fan of sweating. I'm also not a big fan of other people's sweat, especially when the train was as humid and as smelly as the inside of a Chelmsley Wood postman's sock on giro day.

After about twenty minutes in the sweatbox, we got off at Rome's Termini station and because the receptionist at the hotel told us isn't wasn't far, we decided to walk to the Colosseum. To be fair to the receptionist, she had given us a map, and it's not that far really. But to us, who don't know our way around and are very hot indeed, it seemed a fair old distance. Another thing about the inhabitants of Rome, is that they like to dawdle along. Put them on the road, in a vehicle, they go mental, but if you take them out of their car or off their Vespas and put them on a pavement and make them walk, they just saunter along. That's if there is a pavement, of course.

Anyway, after about half an hour of frequent stops to look at the map, and trying to navigate around five dawdling Italians walking side-by-side, we found the Colosseum. It's pretty hard to miss, actually. It is a very impressive building. I'm always amazed when I see something I've only ever seen in films or on telly with my own eyes. When you're there by the Colosseum, you're also surrounded by ancient arches and the remains of the Forum, and you do really get a sense of what ancient Rome must've been like.

Outside of the Colosseum, there's shitloads of tour groups, usually led by someone holding up a stick with a flag on it, there's also loads of blokes dressed up as gladiators or Roman centurions that charge you if you want your picture taken with them. Spoiling the effect, however, is the fact that most of these 'gladiators' are about sixty and smoking a roll-up. There's also quite a few market stalls, selling the usual shite you get at any tourist trap. I'm normally against giving any of these arseholes my money, but Heather talked me into going round the Colosseum with a tour guide, and I'm glad we did because our tour guide was a headcase.

So we sign up for a guided tour and we get given a little blue sticker to show that we've paid, and we join the rest of the punters who have also signed up for the tour. Along comes our guide, who looked a little bit like a younger Fabio Capello, holding what appeared to be a children's picture book about the Colosseum. Because our group wasn't as big as he'd like, he starts waffling on about any old shite to kill time while the group gets bigger.

He was an Italian, and a proud Roman. He began by asking us where we all came from. It was like a word association game for him. One of our group was from New Zealand (which didn't surprise me as looked exactly like Bret McKenzie from Flight Of The Conchords. We asked him about it later on and he said 'we all look alike in New Zealand, probably because we're all related.') When finding where he was from, the tour guide said 'Russell Crowe! Gladiator!'

When he found out where we were from, he replied 'Fish and chips!' and on he went, shouting out the national dish or footballers or film stars relating to the answer of the punter he'd just asked, until he came to one guy who was Dutch, and he was stymied, and decided to start the history lesson.

He started off telling us what it was like in Ancient Rome. About food, and orgies and slaves and the Vestal Virgins and about how badly women were treated. In fact, every time he mentioned any misogynistic acts the Romans did, he high-fived a man in the group in celebration. He then went on to tell us how clean the Romans were and are. He looked at us and said 'We Romans are so clean, when we invade your Breetan, we name a 'ole city 'Bath'! Not like French. French are Steenky, like skoonks!'

Then he told us that the films Ben-Hur and Gladiator are full of mistakes, most notably, both of those films show chariots being used in the Colosseum, which was never the case, as it was too small for any chariots. If you wanted chariots, you had to go the Circus Maximus, a much bigger venue down the road. (we had a look at the Circus Maximus later in the week, and it's just a vast green field these days, but you do realise how massive it must've been.)

For all his casual xenophobia and sexism, though, he knew his stuff and told us lost of interesting facts. For example, two million people were killed at the Colosseum. And of those two million, guess how many were Christians? Just one, Saint Ignatius. Apparently, persecution was big business, so all the Christians were murdered at the Circus Maximus instead, where there was a bigger audience to see it, as it had a capacity for 120,000 spectators. In fact, they set fire to Christians and used them as human torches so the spectators could see where they were going.

Also, the word Colosseum is an English name, coined by the Venerable Bede in the 9th Century. It's proper name is the Flavian Amphitheatre.

Another interesting fact is that the number four being represented by 'IV' in Roman numerals, came along after the empire became Christian, to save space and chiseller's carpal tunnels because it was 'IIII' when the Colosseum was built, as you can see when you look at the numbers above the gates into it.

Every time he gave us an interesting fact, he would back it up by showing us a picture from the children's book he was holding. At one point, he roped in one of the blokes dressed as a gladiator to help him. He looked authentic until his mobile phone went off. He fished it out of a little drawstring bag and proceeded to have a little chat. When he finished, he pointed to his phone and said 'Cleopatra'.

Anyway, after about half an hour of this, he'd got enough people for his group, and after a free photo-op with the gladiator, which I declined ,as he was far too tanned and good looking, and I'm always nervous around people holding swords, but lots of the other members of the group had their pictures taken with him, we were off into the Colosseum.

The first thing he pointed out to us after we got through the gates was a bit of ancient graffiti. An ancient Roman had carved a big phallus into one of the walls. 'See the penis?' he shouted. 'Look at the penis! Take picture of penis!' I hope he was referring to the graffiti, anyway. I'd hate to think he had a fetish for getting tourists to take a snap of his pudendum.

There was a middle-aged American couple in front of Heather and I, and the husband asked the tour guide 'Why's it so small?' The tour guide smiled and gave him a high-five.

You get an eerie feeling when you walk around the place, which isn't surprising, considering the amount of people killed there. This feeling was abated a little bit by the tour guide pointing out ancient bidets and saying ' Look! Arse-washers!'

So, we walk around for another forty minutes or so, looking around the place in the stifling heat, until we get down to where the fights actually took place. There's not much left of the floor now, but you can see where they had the lifts that elevated lions and other ferocious beasts into the arena. The tour guide pointed to a picture of a lion in his book, in case we'd all forgotten what the king of the jungle looked like. 'Lions are bastards,' he said. 'Capisce? BASTARDS!' and then he went on to explain how they had archers on standby should the lions decide to attack and eat the spectators. It was alright to eat the gladiator, but not the punters.

He then told us about the big crucifix that's there now, put there by some pope or other who came and blessed the place and prayed for the two million or so who died there. Like that's going to help them, seeing as all but one of them were pagans.

Afterwards, he took us to meet the other tour guide, who was taking us around the Palatine hills, but I won't dwell on her as she was informative, but a bit dull, but the area is lovely, and we came away, having looked, amongst other things, at the remains of the forum, well educated about ancient Rome, but also very sunburnt. And we'd been walking for miles. As soon as we got out, we headed for a pizza and a beer in a restaurant overlooking the Colosseum, and despite there being a whole boiled egg in the pizza, it had been a good day.

Roman Holiday, part one; Getting There.

It's been a while since I last posted, I know, but I've got a good excuse this time, as my girlfriend and I were in Italy for a good part of my hiatus. This was my first proper holiday in God knows how long, my girlfriend and I were going to celebrate our Birthdays in Rome (yep, our birthdays are in the same week. Weird, huh?) and I was looking forward to it immensely, but the main problem about Rome is the fact that it's abroad and you have to get on an aeroplane to get there. And you can't get there directly from Birmingham International Airport, either, you have to go to Heathrow, which is nearly a hundred miles away.

I'm not a big fan of flying. Don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of it; I quite like the bit when you're actually up in the sky. I love looking down at the world from above, seeing coastlines and the tops of mountains and the topside of clouds. It's just a pity I can't sit in a window seat because I'm poor and can only afford to travel economy and therefore end up with my knees around my earholes because I have the audacity to be taller than six feet. Anyway, as I said, I enjoy the actual flying. What I don't enjoy is all the rigmarole you have to go through before you can actually get on the plane. All the checking in and security checks and putting all your bottles in plastic bags and all the general fucking about really gives me a cob-on. (That's a Brummie phrase meaning 'in a bit of a mood')

When you get on a bus or a train, do they ask you to take off your belt first? No. And recent events tell us that buses and trains are just as likely to get blown up by terrorists as planes are. The stuff they won't let people take on, either; Tweezers, for example. If anyone ever mounted a successful hijack armed with just a pair of tweezers, then they deserve the fucking plane, if you ask me. (Not that I had a pair of tweezers, by the way. Anyone who knows me well enough to inspect my eyebrows can testify to the fact that I don't use them!) Don't get me wrong, I know we need security, but there's a difference between security and paranoid hysteria.

So, anyway, we flew from the new Terminal Five, which looks like something out of Flash Gordon, but unfortunately without a bellowing Brian Blessed. Actually, it'd be cool to have him do the Tannoy announcements. You certainly wouldn't ignore them. Typically, as this is England, our flight was delayed for an hour and a bit, but after we got on, it was all fairly plain sailing. Or Plane-flying, if you will.

Two and a half hours later, we land at Fiumicino Airport, and I knew for sure we were in Rome as the woman who checked my passport looked like a Vogue model and I was surrounded by loads of nuns.(Sounds like a dream I once had.) These nuns weren't your normal, boring, black-and-white penguin types, these ones were all in white, except for their wimples, which were navy blue. I suspect these nuns were Tottenham supporters. (if they were indeed Spurs fans, I bet their faith has been sorely tested lately!) Anyway, I get through passport control with a minimum of fuss as I'm from the EU. My girlfriend, however, with her American passport, had to queue for ages with the rest of non-EU undesirables. However, this just meant I had to go and get our luggage, which, as is usual for me, were the penultimate bags to come out onto the belt.

We were picked up by an elderly taxi driver and taken on a half-hour walk to where his car was parked. We were staying in a hotel which was on the other side of Rome, in a town called Ciampino. The taxi driver couldn't find it, and spent a lot of the journey talking and swearing to himself in Italian. Now, I don't know if you've ever been to Rome, but one of the things about the place is that everyone there drives like an absolute nutcase. The speed limit is seen as just a rough guide and stuff like traffic lights and roadsigns are just there to make the roadside look a bit more interesting. It's like Death Race 2000. (RIP David Carradine, by the way. Surely, he should've learned from Kill Bill that the palm technique was dangerous?) The village we were staying in didn't have the big roads Rome does, it just had single-lane roads and dirt tracks and roads that share space with train tracks and no pavements, so sitting in the back of a taxi with a swearing taxi driver who's lost whilst everyone else is doing their level best to collide with you was a bit worrying.
Anyway, after a while, and probably more through luck than judgment, we got to where we were staying, and it was a lovely-looking place. It was an old farmhouse which had been converted into a few apartments. We checked in, dumped our bags and went for a night-time al-fresco dinner. I normally struggle to make any kind of decision, especially when picking from a menu, but the hotel's menu helped me on this score as it only had three dishes to choose from on it. Chicken, beef, or a plate of cheeses. A vegan would be fucked, basically. Anyway, I had the beef, Heather had the chicken and afterwards we drank and looked out over the lights of Rome in the distance. It wasn't the best meal we've ever had, but it was just what we needed.

(Right. I seem to have been typing for ages, and we've only just got there! Serves me right for going off on one about air travel. There's another five days of this shit yet, so I've decided to do it in episodes. Next one soon!)