Napoli!

One of the things you don’t plan for on a mid-summer vacation is getting a bad cold. James returned from summer camp the day before we left with a cold, and although for him it was just some trivial sniffles, Juliet has not been so spared. The last day in Rome she was showing signs of wearing down, and we hoped it would pass quickly, too. Alas. The bug has taken her down.

We left Rome bright and early on the Frecciarossa, Italy’s version of the bullet train, and arrived in Naples in one hour’s time. Even hopped-up on ibuprofen and Coco-Cola, Juliet was tired and sullen. The plan was to drop bags, then explore the city, including its world-class antiquities museum which houses the treasures of Pompeii. As in Rome, our hotel is a rehabbed former manse of some 18th-century lordling, complete with ornate ceiling and frescoed walls (it sounds very posh, though these places are surprisingly inexpensive, especially considering how centrally-located they are). The accommodating staff allowed us to check in at 9:30 AM and Juliet pretty much went right to sleep. The early start also KO’ed James, who took an uncharacteristic nap next to his sister (then Erica fell asleep, but that’s hardly newsworthy). I left to do laundry in the hottest, tiniest laundromat in town. With this heat, we’re just churning through underwear. Around noon, I woke James up and he and I headed out to the museum, while Erica stayed in with Juju.

It's pronounced Frek-ari-OH-sa

The NAMM (Museo Archaeologico Nationale di Napoli) is housed in a palatial former university building that’s as ramshackle as the city. We were directed to download the museum map, but that didn’t work, so we spent a good two hours lost in a maze of formerly elegant, now well gone to seed, hallways, passageways, and rooms with forty-foot ceilings, pondering the treasures of the Roman patrimony. Here the priceless collection of gargantuan statues of the Farnese Marbles, there exposed wiring, dry rot, peeling paint, leaking ceiling tiles, weedy courtyards, and vast expanses of dirty blank walls. At one point we stumbled on the amazing House of the Fawn mosaics (many of which are extremely lewd, making for an awkward few minutes for James), and did the best we could to understand them with less-than-adequate signage. We didn’t get to see the crown jewel of the entire collection, the massive Alexander Mosaic, as that was off display being restored (though no one was working on it at 1 PM on a Thursday…). Ditto the impressive Farnese Bull, the largest sculpture ever discovered from ancient times, except it wasn’t even being restored, it was just sitting behind an old tarp and we had to crane our necks to get a glimpse of a piece of it. Meanwhile, the Aphrodite Kallipygos was nowhere to be found. It was only when James spotted it through a window that we went looking for a way into its room, but the door was walled up but some unpainted plywood.

Famous Pompeiian Mosaics!

Hulking Torsos!

Butts!

After the museum, we trekked back through the Old City to our place to check on the gals. Naples is gritty, it’s often said, a city of faded grandeur, and that’s pretty much what we’ve seen. The capital of an independent kingdom for much of its existence, Naples amassed vast wealth in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and was a hot spot for Renaissance and Enlightenment art, culture, and philosophy. Before 1860, it was the richest city in Italy, and the largest city in Europe after Paris. But Italian unification saw power centralize on the new capital, Rome, and the riches of Naples’ treasury were emptied to pay for the new capital’s expansion and the industrialization of the North. With the money went the intellectuals and artists, and soon poor (and becoming poorer) Napoli and the agricultural south languished, its former glory stagnating while local animosity toward northern bureaucratic governance grew. This lead to the rise of the Commora, the Italian mafia which filled the power vacuum. Corruption damned economic and cultural progress, and some 4.5 million Neapolitans and southern Italians emigrated to the United States. Today, our stereotypical Italianisms—checkered table clothes, Mama Mia!, spaghetti, O Sole Mio, the mob, etc.—derive from the culture of that late-19th Century Naples the immigrants left behind.

The one is Milan does...not look like this

The gritty Spaccanapoli

Cool staircase

Since then, Naples’ progress has been slow, far slower than cities like Milan and Turin in the north. Corruption still lingers, money is tight, and things just kind of fall apart. Scaffolding is everywhere, covered in layers of dirt and graffiti indicating it’s been there decades. Densely packed neighborhoods (this is the densest city in Europe) feature few squares or open spaces, giving the city a congested feel. The streets mainly predate cars and have not been enlarged, and everywhere drying laundry hangs on strings tied between buildings, sometimes for a hundred feet or more over the street. Diego Maradona, the scandal-plagued Argentine who played for the local Napoli team in the 1980s is worshipped here, with shrines and murals with his visage on every corner, and memorabilia sold in every shop in town, suggesting the power of distraction for a people inured by hopelessness. 

When you walk around here, you feel the old. It is fascinating, and I kinda love it, partly because the city still feels so alive. Living in small, grotty apartments (which mainly lack AC) means people spend most of their time outdoors in the streets. Music blares, vendors hawk their goods, and people eat their meals and drink their beer and spritzes standing around gossiping and talking about soccer. 

It’s also partly because I’m fascinated (voyeuristicaly -speaking, I know) by the whole backwards-facing quality of life here. I don’t mean “backwards,” like Neapolitans are rubes. I mean it in the sense that they live now among things that constantly recall previous glory days. This old palace or church was once the bleeding edge of cultural progress, now it’s a grubby shell held up by steel reinforcements (themselves already old as dirt) and some guy has fashioned a makeshift stall in its portico to sell cheap trinkets. There’s pride in this idea—“hey, we may not be great, but we used to be, and here’s proof, right behind this palate of plastic water bottles I’m selling,” but also sadness. 

Augustine referred to this phenomenon as the “saeculum scenescens”—the “aging world”—to indicate the sense in which the world is declining as an old person does. By and large, Rome isn’t like this anymore, it’s too rich now. But it used to be like this, spending much of the last two millennia facing backwards. The Forum, for example, was a cow pasture until the late 19th Century; the Coliseum hosted the events for which it is known for about 300 years in total, but for the majority of its existence has been the refuge of squatters, residing in shacks built up against its walls. Imagine living in Rome in the year 1150, a poor peasant surrounded by decaying architectural glories the likes of which cannot be replicated, the products of a lost know-how it took centuries of political organization to develop, but which is now hopelessly gone. For these folks, everything in the past was better, the future will only get worse. 

Where we live, by contrast, we’re accustomed to thinking of the future. The new technology, the new store coming to town, the new school being built. It’s only in the last few years that, faced with environmental collapse, the uncertainty of AI, and the devolution of democracy around the world, we’ve begun to entertain backwards-facing thoughts (it’s no coincidence that dystopian fiction is now all the rage.) Maybe Naples has something to teach us about getting by in the new world?

Also, this blog entry is long because I’m stuck in the apartment with a sick kid (spoiler alert), so I’m killing time.

Later in the afternoon, James and I beat the heat in the splendiferous Sansevero Chapel, built by one of those dilettante philosopher-alchemist aristocrat type-guys during the Enlightenment glory days of Naples. It has some rad sculptures, including this little number. We then visited the Duomo, the city’s cathedral. It’s a delightfully unbesmerched-by-the-Baroques gothic church which houses the bones of the city’s patron, St. Januarius (St. Genaro, in Italian). They also have the mysterious relic of a vile of the saint’s blood, which liquified at certain times of the year. It’s a big deal to see this happen, though evidence suggests it’s just a medieval forgery containing a type of ferrous solution that had been developed by local chemists around the same time, funnily enough, that the vile is fist mentioned in cathedral records. Huh! Relic authenticity score: 1.5 - Sure, Jan.

The bones of St. Genaro

On the way back, we scored some excellent street pizza (served folded into quadrants and handed to you on the spot wrapped in wax paper). Erica was napping and Juju was watching Big City Greens on the iPad.  After enjoying the AC for a bit, Erica and James headed out to explore a bit more and return with some pizzas for dinner. The plan was to eat and then play some cards as a family, but we were all pretty tuckered out by then, so we just hit the hay, fingers crossed the girl would feel better by morning.

The real McCoy

WILL JULIET BE UP FOR A BOAT TRIP TO CAPRI TOMORROW? WILL MORE PIZZA BE EATEN? Find out in the next edition of Gholson Family Vacations Dot Blogspot Dot Com!

Rome, Day 3

Today continues the theme of being very, extremely hot. We topped out at 100 degrees again, this time right about when we trudged the 500+ stairs to the top of St. Peter’s, but more on that later.

The first half of the day was a comedy of errors; I got us up too early, sacrificing an hour of sleep in order to arrive an hour before our Vatican Museums entrance time. Juliet has caught James’ cold, and has it worse than he did, so she struggled through the day sniffling and just generally feeling kind of “punky,” as my mom would say. Well, this really came to a head within about 15 minutes of entering the Museums. A guard told us to return a very specific way to the ground floor to get a pass out so Erica could run to a pharmacy for some children’s ibuprofen. But when we got down there, another guard informed us no such opportunity existed, and more than that, because we had descended the exit stairs, we had to leave. He was resolute in the face of my complaints, then Erica’s, but eventually relented and let us take the (very cool, old, fancy) elevator back to the museum floor. Anywhozzle, at this point we all decided just to gut it out, and Juju put on her best face and we marched on.

James and the giant Lacoon

Now, the Vatican Museum is one of the largest and best museums in the world. The bulk of its collection is the personal property of a hundred popes, and represents the absolute best of Antiquity (with a healthy dollop of Renaissance goodness thrown in; Rafael’s Transfiguration, anyone? Da Vince’s St. Jerome, that doing anything for you? There’s even a some Matisses and a Picasso, if modernity’s your bag). James and Juliet are art lovers, at least the classical sculpture part of art. James’ love derives ultimately from his interest in Greek mythology via Percy Jackson; Juliet thinks the naked butts are funny. Look, what gets you in the room, as the saying goes, is not necessarily what keeps you in the room, and whatever it takes for at least one of our kids to become a classicist or medievalist or archaeologist or a student of paleo-linguistics, is fine by me. Erica did a fair bit of piggybacking Juliet through the looooong hike to the Sistine Chapel, which sits at the end of the museum, so kudos to mom. At one point, Juju left her fannypack in a bathroom stall, and retrieving it meant a long conversation with security, who take abandoned bags very seriously. 

We braved the extreme heat (the museum has little to no climate control, which seems insane given the pricelessness of its collection) and battled the crush of crowds to the Sistine Chapel, where we got a rare chance to sit and chat all about Michaelangelo's handiwork. BUT, whereas every other time I've been in the Sistine Chapel I've been able to pass through the loosely-guarded "tour groups only" passageway directly into St. Peter's Basilica, this time the martinet manning the door was giving every guided group a thoroughgoing review to weed out hangers-on like us. So we had to trudge back through the museum to the entrance (over a quarter of a mile away), then another half mile around to the front of the basilica in the blazing sun in order to enter it. Maybe you feel like that's just desserts, but let me just say that rewarding the tour groups with easy passage is incentivizing the very people who make visiting the Vatican Museums so hectic.

Here I choose to indulge my worse angel and interpret the situation in the least flattering light possible. With respect to the tour guides, we are not talking about learned lovers of art here, keen to share their passion with like-minded religious devotees and antiquarians. They are more akin to New York City cabbies (who, I dunno, maybe at one point enjoyed exploring the city in their cabs?), but who are now battle-scarred cynics, speaking on autopilot into mic'ed headsets while they sadistically drive their great hordes of dead-eyed, cowlike customers on an itinerary that includes only to the most famous pieces, with all the charm and charisma of drywall. God help you if you deign to pause to read a placard, you will be unceremoniously barged out of the way and then separated from your friends or family by their whole waddling retinue, who anxiously follow directly in the wake of their misanthropic leader lest they be abandoned in a sea of other helpless souls similarly engaged and miss their bus back to the cruise port. Buying a guide book and taking your time with a small group of friends and family, on the other hand, is a much better way to experience the museum, and at half the cost. If anything, the Vatican should prioritize these serious good and righteous folks and let THEM (us) go into the Basilica from the Sistine Chapel. Yes, yes, money talks and they’re paying a kickback to the Vatican for the privilege of swift passage, but the Popes have been one of the very few global moral voices of our age opposing the Mammonization of everything, so someone (not me, I’m on vacation) should write a strongly-worded letter to Pope Leo on the matter.

Rafael's School of Athens

On our walk to St. Peter’s, we paused for lunch and kids ibuprofen, and given the heat, some medically-necessary gelato. The kids were rightly delighted by the basilica, the world’s largest church, while Erica and I fought to balance our own delight in the sheer artistic and engineering marvel of the church and the twin pangs of the juxtapositioning of this place with the life and times of the poor carpenter, and the callous and cruel means by which funding for the basilica were secured (wars, indulgences, and the like). After touring the upper floor, which includes the lightly-waxed body of Pope John XXIII on display (patron of our home parish), we descended into the crypt to see lotsa pope tombs, including those of recent office-holders Paul VI, JP I, JP II, and Benedict XVI. James remained interested while Juliet was starting to fade. So we headed up again to start our pre-booked climb to the top of the dome.

St. Peter's above

The saint's relics, below

Now, we booked this before we knew it’d be 100 degrees, but we were all still were game, so we went ahead with it. It’s 551 steps to the top; roughly, the first half takes you up to the roof, then up a bit more and you emerge out onto an internal balcony that encircles the bottom of the dome. From here you can see several hundred feet down to the church floor, where the people look small as ants. The kids were pretty well spooked by this (you can’t fall though, there’s an 8-foot plexiglass barrier along the walkway to prevent falls), and Juliet did a bit better with it than James did. After that, you take a series of tight, stepped passageways that wind up between the interior and exterior of the dome at a sideways angle, then a few more hilariously teensy spiral staircases to the cupola at the tip top. This is the highest point in the city, so you get an uninterrupted 360 degree view. If you lived in Rome, you could see your house from there. 

Dome interior view

We did it!

After descending, we completed a lap through the surprisingly modest (though hopelessly overrun) gift shop, where Juliet was talked down from a 20 euro calendar to a 3 euro vial of holy water (“No, you cannot drink that! Put the lid back on!) Afterward, we headed out into the square and over to the bus stop. We’ve pretty much only taken busses in Rome, which are fast, cheap, and efficient once you get used to how the system works (the Metro is limited, given the difficulty of digging under and around so many ruins, so you can’t use for easy access many of the major sites in the city). The bus back was actually air conditioned (sort of), and we took a long siesta in the afternoon. 

Our evening passiagiata began at the nearby Campo d’Fiori, a scruffy square doubling by day as a flower and vegetable market and by night as a lively hang-out spot with restaurants and cafes. Though it was still 93 degrees, the evening scene was popping off, with locals sweating over their piping hot espressos and resolutely refusing to wear shorts. The kids played a bit in the fountain before we wandered over to the massive, oval-shaped Piazza Navona (it retains the shape of the Roman circus that was once here), basically a bigger, livelier version of the Campo d’Fiori. Did we take the time to appreciate Bernini’s grandiose Fountain of the Four Rivers? No! The kids were whining for dinner, so we schlept on (I say “schleped” because one of the writers of this blog was suffering from an acute case of chafing) to our dinner reservation near the Pantheon.

After carbo loading again, we got some gelato and headed to the famous Trevi Fountain. It was typically crowded, so could barely see it at first, but with patience managed to wait out a few tedious instagrammers and their idiotic, self-unaware posturing (one girl had her boyfriend taking hundreds of pics of her with both her phone and a separate pocket camera for that “old school 90s look”) and eventually got up to the railing for an admiring view and a photo of our own. Afterwards, James and Juliet paid a euro each to buy this gross little squishy toy from a street vendor; it does nothing but kind of splat when you throw it on a hard surface, then reform into a ball. Unsurprisingly, they did not long survive.

A single, tasteful photo is all you need

Last, it was off to the Spanish Steps. Man, that’s a cool hang out spot, and right at the foot there’s a neat little potable fountain in the shape of a sunken boat by Bernini’s father, the lesser known Pietro Bernini. The kids ran up and down the steps while Erica and I sweated. The square was crowded with tourists, vendors, young lovers making out, and drunken teenagers (it’s open carry here, people). One could just stay there all night with a bottle of vino and a couple of glasses if one was not with a seven year old whose cold was starting to worsen. So, off we trotted back to the hotel for some well-deserved rest.

Steps and boat

Tomorrow, it’s off to Napoli! Ciao! 

Rome, Day 2

Day 2 in hot, hot, hot Rome was a blast. We walked 20 min or so down to the Coliseum and got in right as it opened.  The Coliseum/Forum/Palatine Hill Complex, in the heart of Rome, is the most visited tourist site in the world (particularly the Coliseum bit of it). There’s not much to be said about it that you probably don’t already know or could easily know with a quick internet search, so I’ll skip to talking about how the kids liked it.  

They loved it. James dived right into talking about how impressive the engineering was, and asked a million questions about gladiatorial games. Juliet held her own with questions, mostly about the differences between what cultures consider right and wrong. In fact, she was in the middle of a little dissertation on the matter when a giant seagull got angry with a pigeon and started chasing it all around us. The poor terrified pigeon flew right into a low glass barrier and fell to the pavement stunned, after which the SEAGULL GRABBED IT IN ITS BEAK AND REPEATEDLY THRASHED IT ON THE GROUND UNTIL IT WAS DEAD AND THEN PROCEEDED TO EAT IT. Did you even know seagulls would do this? Well, they would, and be proud to do so in front of a horrified crowd of onlookers. Juliet lost it for awhile (fair, tbh), but at least it distracted her from the little moral lecture she’d been giving, the relativist. 

Anyway, the crowds at this place are immense, but they kept us moving through the site with rapidity. Really, the worst are the giant, lumbering tour groups (I’ll be giving them the what for in tomorrow’s installment on the Vatican Museums), and the heat doesn’t make coexisting with them any easier. But with our trusty Rick Steves guide, we learned all about it in the cadence of an upper Midwest Lutheran.  

After the Coliseum came the Forum and the Palatine Hill (the site of the ruined imperial residence, from which we derive the word “palace.”) It was flippin’ hot, but the kids sallied on. Juliet read to us from her Kids’ Guide to Rome cartoon book, and I supplements with Mr. Steves. We saw where Julius Caesar was cremated, the spot (called the “Umbilicum”) from which all distances in the Empire were measured, and the Temple of the Vestal Virgins (required some ‘splainin’). The Powers That Be could do A LOT better with crowd flow. It was scorching hot and packed and there were lots of people everywhere, but they seem determined to drive the crowds through as few outlets as possible. At least when you’re up on the Palatine Hill the crowds abate. 

See, no crowds

We found a little lunchtime spot in the nearby Monti neighborhood and carbed it out. Then walked back toward the forum and climbed the Capitoline hill (from which comes the word “Capitol”) to the Capitoline museums. This crazy place houses much of the Roman art formerly owned by the Popes, and in particular the stuff dug up in the excavations around the Forum. It’s the world’s oldest public museum, no biggie. The kids really love this type of museum. Juliet can best be entertained in such places by the naked butts, and Erica and James like to keep up the tradition started last year in Greece in pointing out which parts of statues have been knocked off. Plus, it sorta, kinda had air conditioning? We got a good two hours out of this place, then went back for a considerable siesta in the AC of our hotel, before stepping out into that good night for an evening in Trastevere.

Iffin you don’t know, Trastevere (meaning “across the Tiber”) is a colorful, gritty neighborhood full of little vine-strewn alleyways and ramshackle terracotta-colored apartment buildings and venerable old enotecas and elderly persons smoking and sitting around in the heat in pants and hats and sweaters nursing amaros and the like. It’s managed to retain a lot of its character despite being a very hip place to go for the evening, but it’s also inevitably attracted money and monied eateries and bars keen to look like they aren’t monied in order to blend in with (i.e., exploit) the local character. We ate at a local favorite Tonarello, whose Cacio e Pepe is divine. After, we strolled the banks of the Tiber with drinks in hand (sangria for the adults, granitas for the kids), popping into shitty little tzotchke bodegas and the like under well after dark. On the way home, we discovered some First Century Roman ruins just chilling next to a little parking lot like it was no big deal. It’s so great here!

Trastevere

Greetings from Rome!

Hi, we’re in Rome! After about 9 months of waiting, the big family vacay finally kicked off with a long direct flight from Chicago on ITA. The flight was uneventful except for the bad food and badly undersold seat inventory. There were so few people, we each had a row of four seats to ourselves! Since the flight left at 3 PM and landed in Rome at 11:30 PM body time, it wasn’t exactly an overnight flight. So we did the “work really hard to stay up as long as you can routine” and managed to get in a pretty good day!

Happy Travelers 

Upon arriving at Termini, we dropped our bags at a dumpy little bodega/luggage depot and got right to the sites. First up, the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four “major” basilicas in the world (they’re all here in Rome). This is an ancient edifice, the main structure dates to the fifth century, but like so many classical, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance-era churches, SMM is the victim of gross Baroque redesign overreach. The best way to understand the Baroque mind is to imagine yourself as a little kid faced down by a soda fountain and unable to choose which flavor—so you just choose them all! Or perhaps as an adult person you visited a Flattop Grill and you faced a similar dilemma with respect to choosing which sauce to put on your protein-vegetable mis (and you didn’t choose, so you just put all the flavors in there). Baroque is everything all at once, like a Queen song. Thankfully, they had enough sense to leave alone the 5th Century mosaics around the transcript and apse, which are stunning. This church was a personal fave of the late, great Pope Francis, and he chose to be buried here. In typical Francis style, his tombs is an unadorned grotto with a white marble slab reading, simply, “FRANCISCUS.”  A bit of badly needed taste in these parts.

Pope Francis, ain’t puttin on airs

After, we headed two minutes down the street to a mosaic-lovers dream, the oft-overlooked St. Praxedes. This little gem-box is the work of 9th-century artisans who escaped Constantinople during the iconoclast controversy and came west to ply their trade in the old imperial capital. Of particular note is the tiny chapel of St. Xeno, where you can get very close to the mosaics and appreciate the insane handicraftsmenship required to compose these works. 

Nothing’s strange about St. Xeno except the world class craftsmanship

The chapel also holds the supposed pillar to which Jesus was chained and subsequently scourged. It’s a marble pillar and quite short, and having this particular pillar sounds like the kind of thing someone would say if they wanted to get a bunch of credulous medieval peasants to come visit the church they’ve just constructed. On a scale of relic credibility, I give this a 2. Remember, Jesus was a peasant and, though he was an efficient agitator against Roman oppression, nevertheless belonged to a disposable people in an imperial backwater; it is extraordinarily unlikely that relics pertaining to his life survived to today, simply because Rome didn’t care about him. Consider the thousands of supposed pieces of the true cross (if all of them were real, Jesus would have been crucified on a cross 50 feet high). Jesus was probably not the first person to be crucified on his cross, and unlikely to have been the last. His death—however important to the cosmos—was unlikely to have meant much to the local Roman garrison who crucified him. Just another criminal. Just another Tuesday. That it was “discovered” 300 years later by Helen, mother of the emperor Constantine, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem (a city which had been completely and totally destroyed by Rome some 37 years after Jesus’ death) beggars belief.  And why does it matter anyway?!

Since we’re going to be seeing a lot of relics, let’s make a whole relic credibility scale out of 10 right now, shall we?

10 - This relic is verifiable with 100% certainty. Pretty much any Carlo Acutis relics, who died in 2006.

9 - 8 - This relic cannot be historically verified for certain, but evidence suggests it is likely real. E.g., Catherine of Sienna’s head or the bones of St. Ambrose.

7-6 - Plausibly real, given historical circumstances. I’m too tired to find an example, but you get it.

5-4 - Unlikely, but not impossible, like the Holy Stairs.

3-2 - Sure, Jan. (You can’t prove a negative, of course, but highly, highly improbable.) The aforementioned column, or the vial of St. Januarius’ blood in Naples.

1 - Outright forgery, like all the “heads of John the Baptist” floating around Europe. 

I didn’t mention Santa Maria Maggiore’s relic, which Jesus’ crib. Sure, Jan. When we visited, it was being mobbed by the adoring faithful, but I dunno, man. St. Jerome is buried here! That’s way cooler, and like an 8 on the credibility scale. Why on earth are people here to see Jesus’ supposed crib? Anyway, back to St. Praxedes…the kids thought the whole place was gorgeous and I was super pleased they were enjoying themselves in these ancient churches! I love all this stuff, but I recognize that others (wrongly) don’t always love all of it. So you can imagine how proud I was of the kids.

Santa Maria Maggiore

Afterwards, we processed down the leafy Via Merulana to the mother church of all Roman Catholicism, St, John  Lateran. Wait, isn’t St. Peter’s the mother church, you ask? No! As the seat of the bishop of the diocese of Rome, St. John’s is the money melon. In fact, the Popes all lived here until St. Peter’s was rebuilt during the Renaissance. It’s a super big and lovely and cool church, featuring massive Bernini sculptures of all the apostles, including Bartholomew, of ritzy island fame, who’s depicted holding his own skin (he was martyred by being flayed alive). Leo XIII, father of modern Catholic Social Teaching, is buried here in an elaborate tomb. Pour one out. We wandered the church for a bit, then headed back the way we came to grab some pizza and our bags before heading to our lodgings near the ancient Largo Argentina archaeological site, where Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC (seriously, it’s right outside our doorway).

In the evening, we took a short stroll over to the Pantheon for some appetizers and a look see at one of the most intact of all Roman buildings. The West lost the ability to build domes on this scale until Brunelleschi’s study of the Pantheon roof lead to a breakthrough that allowed him to design and construct the Duomo in Florence—1,400 years later. And, hey, Rafael is buried in here, which is a bonus.

Pantheon paring well with an Aperol Spritz or Belinni

We were so tired at this point, we slept-ate a dinner of pasta and pizza, scored some gelato, and beat a hasty retreat back to our hotel. Incidentally, both the floor and ornate, pained ceiling of our room date from the 17 Century, when the building was some big shot’s apartments. Cool!

More on tap. Stay tuned!

 

Quick Update

Some of you have read the Space Coast Food Guide update, which means we had another little visit to the wonderland that is the greater Cape Canaveral area.  Two weeks there, to be exact, and, well, that's enough time to be able to say "I'm ready to go home."  

The first week, we hosted the Carlsons, with whom we visited the Aquatica waterpark in Orlando and the Kennedy Space Center. And of course we drank our fill of various excellent rum concoctions thanks to the mixological wizardry of Uncle Mark. Beach time, pool time, fresh fish at a B&G time. A rocket launch of two. Uncle Mike even came down with his darlin' new pup, Ellie. Juliet naturally freaked and manhandled the poor thing within an inch of its life.

James and I also got some fishing in--two trips on family favorite the Orlando Princess, one at night to catch sharks and then the standard half-day fishing trip. Sadly, we had no luck with the sharks, save a few brief fights that ended with the sharks biting through our lines. We did manage some pretty swell red snappers on the day-cruise though, but they don't let you keep them as they're overfished.

Several days after the Carlsons bolted, the Brown-Thomas clan (Erica's cousin's family) arrived. The B-T's are such wonderfully sweet kids and they make our kids better when they're with them. Those days were mostly the same: beach, pool, sun. Can't complain! 

Well, maybe a little bit. One of the things Erica and I noticed more often this trip, as I alluded to in the food reviews, is the number of confederate flags and other Trumpy/angry/obnoxious signage and bumper stickers everywhere. Some of that is just us looking for it more, some of that is the fact that, well, there's more of it. Increasingly, it seems, the success of the resentment-stoking machine that just is MAGA is materializing in seditious, angry, intimidating, rude, and overtly-sexualized imagery, messaging, and overall cultural ethos. Classless, yes, but also miserable and miserable to be around. When did tailgating someone in a much bigger truck than you need, with blindingly bright headlights, and aggressive, threatening bumper stickers constitute southern hospitality? I know this stuff isn't exactly new, but its pervasiveness is. And after two weeks, it's just time to come home. Say what you will about some of the more risible eccentricities of Evanston, these aren't fertile grounds for the anti-social, pro-violence, "Gun Control Is A Steady Trigger Finger"-type mindset.

On the way home, we stopped over in downtown Nashville for their Let Freedom Sing celebration. The city was packed for what turned out to be a nationally-broadcast, star-studded fireworks and music spectacular sponsored by Disney. We spent a few hours on a very hot (95 degrees!) and crowded Broadway Street taking in the sounds of such luminaries as Boys 2 Men, Nick Jonas, and Sublime. Actually, being there was not quite as cool as it sounds, since we were basically a live audience backdrop for a television broadcast, rather than a crowd at a concert. Most of it was actually dead air, between-the-commercials time, but the kids seemed overwhelmed by the scene in a good way.

The best bit by far was the drone show/fireworks display at the end. Nashville does it up big, with what is one of America's largest fireworks shows. None of us had seen a drone show before, but it was amazing, and the fireworks were a overwhelming pedal-to-the-metal blitzkrieg of light and booms for half an hour, culminating in an absurd "fire all of your guns at once" fusillade that left the crowd speechless.  I'd post a video, but blogger doesn't handle those to well, so you're gonna have to trust me.

Lastly, we lived up to a promise we made to the kids and went to a Waffle House on the way home. It's just as you remembered it!

Only 17 day to our Italy trip and I promise to post more often on location!

Space Coast Restaurant Guide, Part 4

Hey! We've been down here in Florida for a bit, and we've had a chance to eat out a few times, so here's the newest installment of our Space Coast Eaters Guide!

Before we begin, I invite you to go back and read Part I, which features my discussion of "Floridity" as a concept, and the follow it up with Part II and Part III

Ok, back from that? Here's part four. Happy eating!

Pier 62 Oceanfront Restaurant & Bar
Let me just start by saying we don't actually know what the indoor restaurant is like because we never get past the excellent little outdoor annex, a bar built right along the southern side of the pier. The food is surprisingly tasty, particularly the mahi sandwich, and the servers are generally peppy. They're also displaying some photos from the salad days of Cocoa Beach and IIRC even a picture of Barbara Eden in her Jeanie costume (her show was set, if not actually filmed, here). Look, I'll cop to this being just a overpriced barlette with no real redeeming intrinsic qualities, but it does afford the ability to drink beer in the shade while peoplewatching beachgoers, and that's good enough for me.

Floridity Factor: 🐊🐊🐊   It's got boring beer offerings, cocktails full of mix, and at least a Florida Man or two posted up at the bar, plus the beach is right there beneath you! Could use a bit more crazy crap on the walls, yeesh.

Graham's Beach Grill
I've had my eye on Graham's for some time, cuz from A1A it looks to have all the goods of a classic Florida B&G, plus also a mediocre exterior mural of sea animals swimming with busty, beer-swilling mermaids. It's big with the biker crowd and has a reputation as a rough joint come late night. But the food gets decent reviews and it advertises itself as "family friendly," which turns out to be a reeeeeaaal stretch given the amount of female nudity and swearing on the wall signs and posters. And speaking of these, Graham's features one of those cringey, wholly-performative "In this place, we aren't politically correct. We always..." signs that itemize a litany of right-wing culture war talking points, then tell you to get out if you don't like it. I'll just note that I saw no one "salute the flag" or say "In God We Trust," while we were in there. In fact, the only flag we did see was a Confederate one emblazoned with the caption "Heritage, Not Hate." So by all means go to Graham's if you support a heritage that is literally defined by succession from the United States for the sake of enslaving people. The mahi tacos were mid.

Floridity Factor: 🐊🐊🐊 You'd think a 4 or 5, but there was too little of the fun side of Floridity here. More parrots and broken surfboards, please, and maybe less porny sedition.

Dirty Birds
A relative newcomer on the scene, massive Dirty Birds ranges over half a block of primo downtown C-Beach real estate. The owner (who also owns nearby the "Dirty Nudes" noodle bar; he's got bit of a yen for this particular naming convention) splashed a tremendous amount of capital to build this little slice of the Floribbean. You've got an enormous outdoor bar with big screens and live music, a crows nest-type tiki bar that overlooks the main intersection of downtown, and inside is a muy authentico tiki bar/restaurant called The Roost. It's a bit jarring to enter the Roost, tbh, since in the blink of an eye you leave a typical Florida B&G and its live band karaoke Van Halen and enter a dark, subterreanean-seeming Polynesian idyll. The drinks and their vessels were top tiki quality, so you would find any filler mix here. Even as legendary a tiki connoisseur as Mark Carlson pronounced these libations legit. Just don't stay for dinner. I can't speak for the outdoor menu, but the food in the Roost was real bad; the mahi in the tacos was was off and the bizzarro jerk meatballs (whose exterior "skins" peeled off to reveal meat paste underneath) were downright inedible. 

Floridity Factor:🐊🐊🐊. Come here for a lively B&G evening or pre-prandial tiki drinks, just vamoose before mealtime.

Southern Charm Cafe

The Southern Charm Cafe slings hot plates of southern cookin' with a heaping helping of hospitality and a side of authentic cornball bonhomie. My tasty shrimp and grits had andouille AND okra in it, and the waitress bothered to learn everyone's name in our party and consistently used them throughout the entire dining experience. Impressive! The walls are thick with faux-handicrafted signage that ranged from the inane ("Live, Laugh, Love"), to the corny ("This is a private sign, please do not read"), to the off-puttingly mephitic (a picture of a chicken over a caption reading, "I poop breakfast"). Places down here love their little signs, and few of them are what you'd call "classy," per se, but that's Florida, take it or leave it. Given all the ambient southern charm, I was willing to overlook the same culture war checklist sign we saw in Graham's Beach Grill given they'd also (paradoxically) posted a sign bidding customers to "leave your politics at the door." But then we spotted a (sigh) confederate flag behind the cash register, and if that's what you all "charm," you can keep it.

Floridity Factor:🐊🐊🐊. Not a Bar and Grill per se, but pretty Florida from a "lots of signs everywhere" perspective.  

The Cantina

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Everything's great at The Cantina--a hole in the wall serving up huge portions of no frills Tex-Mex so straightforwardly they don't even need a modifier in their name--until you peep the giant confederate flag with a Dale Earnhardt crest emblazoned on it. This place is a Cape Canaveral staple, and I've been eyeing it for years. So imagine our disappointment when we finally go there and everything's real great and the fresh chips were super salty in the way you want them to be and then you see 15 sq. feet of hate on the wall. I can't tell if there's more confederate paraphernalia in recent years around town, or if we've just started noticing what was always there now that we're on the lookout for it. But it did get us thinking: what justification do people who fly the confederate flag use, anyway? Which of these reasons, reader, do you find most compelling?

         A. The confederate flag is just part of the aesthetic down here such that it's become functionally meaningless, like a verbal tic. No one intends anything by it really, it's just kinda there.

         B. The symbol is meant only to celebrate the heritage of Dixie and should be understood separately from it's actual history. It expresses southern identity per the via negativa--i.e., we are not the Yankees we rebelled against--without expressing sentiments that are anti-America (which just is, inconveniently, the unity of these very southerners with those Yankees, including Blacks, plus Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, immigrants, and all the rest). Ostensibly, this "heritage" is one centered around hospitality, a rebellious spirit, and the food, music, and other traditional cultural forms of the region.

                But if this is true... 

                        1. As for hospitality, it must account for the extraordinarily inhospitable message it sends to every American who doesn't fly it (namely because, you know, it was the battle flag of the Confederacy). It's as if to say, "our ancestors killed and/or enslaved yours under this banner, but don't take this to mean we aren't a welcoming people." Sure, Jan.

                        2. As for the rebellious spirit, how does it coexists alongside the ubiquitous expressions of support for the military and law enforcement we see everyday? Are not cops and soldiers paid with your tax dollars to enforce the laws of The Government? If they aren't The Man, who is? This blatant contradiction makes me think of an ad I saw for congressional campaign a few years back for a MAGA guy running as (I kid you not) "The Law and Order Outlaw." Lol. In the words of Jack White, "you can't be a pimp and a prostitute, too." 

                        3.) As for culture, the flag denies the obvious fact that so much southern culture is derived either indirectly from black labor or directly from black creativity. Yet you don't see too many black folks displaying it. And even if it black people hadn't contributed to the rich cultural stew of the south, isn't there a less baggage-laden symbol you could use for, I dunno, rockabilly and country and bluegrass or jambalaya and fried chicken or Southern Gothic literature than a divisive, century-and-a-half old a battle flag?

        C. It's kind of a Trumpy-type thing, a noxious verbal wink where what's said isn't what's really meant. You display the flag not because you wish the South to rise again, but because it pisses off snowflakes like me who clutch their pearls and run home to blog about how offended they are. But if this is the case, it means you're tacitly acknowledging how offense-worthy the flag actually is, that the confederacy really did incarnate a racist politics sustained by violent exploitation. The flag-flying troll thus swallows all that evil for the sake of the greater good of making outsiders exactly as outraged as they should be. Again, some hospitality you got here!

        D.) You mean everything it stands for.

Now, sadly, for some it's D, and I don't buy A. As resentment is the gasoline in the Dixie political engine, I'm sure there's also a healthy dose of C. But I can't help but think for many it's an unexamined B, or at least I hope it is. We all need roots and a sense that we're part of something bigger than we are. But the confederacy and its symbols can't be healthily reclaimed. Let it die. Anyways, you otherwise have a lot to be proud of [gestures around wildly]! You invented the world's greatest music for God's sake! You are the cradle of modern non-violence! Bourbon and hot chicken and Moon Pies!!!!

Don't go expecting margaritas, the Cantina only serves beer and wine.

Floridity Factor:🐊🐊.  All the Packers memorabilia is disorienting (and galling, for this Bears fan).

The Island Waterfront Bar & Grill

Yes! Now we're talking. The Island sits on the inland shore of the Banana River, directly across from the dour Sunset Cafe Waterfront Bar & Grill we panned in a previous edition of this excellent little blog. Though there's a small indoor eating area, it's the outdoor covered deck that pull the crowds. We were greeted by a super friendly waiter who sat down with us and chatted amicably with the kids as we ordered. The seafood platter was enormous and fresh and a few dollars cheaper at Merritt Island prices than it would have been on the Barrier Island. They even improvised a spicy margarita for Erica by pouring some jalapeno juice into a regular margarita, which turned out to kinda work! We were there on a Monday, so weren't pressed by crowds, but they must do a weekend trade tidy enough to merit their neat little satellite bar and big adjacent hang out area with free bags games. Like most Florida B & G's, it's kid friendly, which just means none of the adults mind kids running around while they smoke, drink, and carry on with their loud, often inappropriate conversations. 

Floridity Factor: 🐊🐊🐊🐊🐊  Boorish, drunken, chainsmoking younger retirees, workmen at the end of their shifts, Florida Mans and Womans, cancelled license plates, piles of excellent seafood, and hungry pelicans staring at the diners. Really the only drawback is the mosquitos, but if that's not Florida, I don't know what is.

The Alibi

Finally, the Alibi is a bit of an outlier for this blog. A modern, tasteful, low-lighted upscale eatery and bar isn't what the typical Cocoa Beach vacationer is looking for. But if our visit was any indication, it's the NASA/Blue Origin/Space X worker where the Alibi's making it's hay (this crowd sticks out around here like college kids among townies). Several groups of engineers were posted up around the outlandish back dining area, keen to pay handsomely to sample the delightful cocktail menu. The food looked pretty good, too, but we'd sadly already eaten our fill at Dirty Birds. A better choice would have been to do it in reverse: the Alibi for dinner, then tiki cocktails at The Roost, then out into the outdoor bar area for some late night Van Halen live band karaoke. Now that's an evening!

Floridity Factor: 🐊 This lovely little place really could be anywhere. Consider dining here when your personal mercury levels begin to top out from all the fresh fish you're eating elsewhere.