When in Rome....be vigilant of your belongings

Touching down in Rome is a bit of an adventure (it always is with RyanAir. They never seem to manage to land both wheels simultaneously.) I get through customs, buy a blue powerade and a bus ticket and go outside to wait. My bus is arriving in forty minutes and I’m lounging beneath a tree in front of the Rome airport. It’s a gorgeous day. The kind of day English people wish they could divorce their wives and run off with. Resting on my overstuffed backpack I drift happily to sleep. When I wake up to catch my bus I realize that my laptop, which I keep in a padded travel case, is gone. And not just that, but since I considered it the safest place, far more safe than my pockets, I’d put a small reserve of cash and my passport in it. Not good. Semi-hysterical, I run back into the airport and start checking and rechecking all the places I’d been hoping it would turn up. I knew it wouldn’t though. On a hail-mary attempt I try to go back through the doors to customs, since I knew I had to have had my laptop and passport there since I did in fact get through customs. I’m greeted by an Italian police officer wielding what looks like a World War II style submachine gun. After I explained the situation he was actually really nice. In fact, everyone was. I’d heard so many awful things about Italians mistreating Americans (and everyone else) and about the abysmal failings of the Italian police that despite being in a state of desperate panic I was pleasantly surprised at how helpful and sympathetic all the Italians were. The guy who sold me my bus ticket stopped working to search everywhere and translate for me. The people outside rooted around under bushes. And when I realized that where I was sitting had been directly beneath a security camera they told me they would look at the film in 24 hours (evidently you can’t look at it for 24 hours?) and send the results to the American Embassy, where they’d helped me set up an appointment to get a new passport. But this was not how I envisioned starting off my trip. If you’d asked me the two things in the world I would least want to lose, especially while on an extended trip through Europe, my passport and laptop would probably be numbers 1 and 2, followed closely by my wallet. I’d have rather lost a kidney.
Anyways, shelving my troubles for a minute, I head into Rome to meet up with the fam. My cousin Katie is studying in Rome and her family was there visiting at the same time. So, obviously, I unashamedly took advantage of their hospitality. Spent the next few days in total luxury at the Hotel Rocco Forte, or something like that, sharing a room with my cousin, Michael, in the same suite as my Uncle Steve and Aunt Petunia (random aside: her real name is Sylvia, but we called her Aunt Petunia before J.K. Rowling made it cool). The first dinner involves a lot of pizza, pasta and wine. I thought my aunt and uncle were getting a lot of wine more out of sympathy to me, what with having been sliced open and had the most valuable objects I own stolen in the past twelve or so hours, but that would turn out to be a nightly affair. So would the pizza and pasta. This may seem kind of obvious, but nobody does Italian food like the Italians.
Rome is a fantastic city. I mean, I thought London had this palpable sense of history. And it does, just its history is more Napolean era. Rome makes London’s dusty statues look like newborns. I’m talking about shit that was around when the “known world” was missing out on more than half the continents. And not just that, but it’s all still so imposing. If the hulking shell of the coliseum is this incredible, imagine what the real must have looked like? And the aqueducts. Don’t get me started on the aqueducts. Constructing hundreds of kilometers of aqueducts that provided safe, clean water to cities, was used for sewers and agriculture, all that. And they knew enough to build the aqueducts either high up or underground so the water couldn’t get contaminated. Two millennia later and people still had outbreaks of disease in because they didn’t realize that the drinking water should probably not serve as the de facto cemetery/toilet. The idea that there is any, any, no matter how minute, aspect of our culture that will be more advanced than something human society two thousand years from now will provide is, I think, ridiculous. And yet, the Romans did it consistently.
Modern Rome does a good job, in that way that European cities tend to, of balancing progress with all their historical-ness. Women in huge high heels (not like they need it, Italian women are like six foot on average) walking around on ancient cobblestone without so much as breaking stride. Although really when I say they balance modernity with their history I mean they manage to develop a gorgeous, modern-day city without detracting from the totally absurd amount of awesome historical stuff. The city has approximately a gagillion fountains (give or take, like, 5) and most of them would probably be a legitimate tourist attraction in any other city, but since its Rome they don’t even come close to making the cut. This city is the all-star team of fountains; you could be fantastic, but you’re still not making the roster. And then there’s the Trevi fountain (the Lebron James of the fountain-world), which makes even fantastic fountains look meek. Everyone should go to Rome. Except maybe lactose-intolerant people. Italy is kind of lactose-intolerant-intolerant. Not like I care, cheese is nestled comfortably between the Mets and Steve Jobs on my favorite things ever list, but it should be noted that this is a group of people that slather everything in cheese and butter and then have ice cream for dessert. How are Europeans not as fat as Americans?
Anywho, I expected to do all of Italy in one post, but this is getting kind of long and Cinque Terra deserves its own post. So that’ll be coming soon…