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Wednesday, July 18, 2001

We had done all the things we absolutely wanted to do in Rome, with time to spare. In the remaining days, assuming we could get enough rest, we would see whatever we managed to see in the way of small sights and neighbourhoods.

Top of our list was the Domus Aurea, Nero's "Golden House". This was some of the rooms of an extensive palace built by Nero after the fire during which popular mythology has him fiddling destroyed significant parts of Rome, saving him the trouble of evicting inhabitants and razing their homes. The building was torn down after Nero committed suicide, but a hundred or so rooms, ranging from small ones to a large octagonal court, survived because they were filled with rubble to for a foundation for the Baths of Trajan. Others probably exist under the Esquiline Hill as far as Santa Maria Maggiore but can't be excavated due to the houses in use above them.

The Domus Aurea was discovered by chance during the Renaissance, and first thought to be a grotto with paintings. Many of the delicate frescoes decayed when exposed to fresh air. Vagrants lived in the holes for a while. Then the whole place was closed to the public for a few decades. It was opened only a year or two ago, and demand was so enormous that they had to institute a policy of prebooking. Our books suggested reserving far in advance.

The Domus Aurea hadn't been high on my list, and after looking through a book put out by the Rome archaeological authorities, I wasn't sure it was going to be worth the hassle and expense. It also involved phoning to book, and to add to my phobia regarding phones I had the difficulty of using a phone card in a public phone and attempting to conduct the transaction in Italian. When it became clear that we would have enough time to see the Domus Aurea, I agreed to it, screwed up my courage, and went out to make the call -- only to get a mysterious noise I assumed was a busy signal.

I tried several times more without success, though I did manage to complete several other calls: I made reservations for a restaurant on Friday, fixed a departure time with Massimiliano, left a message with Wolfgang and Paola in Naples telling them which train we were arriving on), and called Rome Sweet Home (the agency handling our Naples apartment), getting mobile and office numbers to call in Naples on our arrival. But I couldn't get through to the Domus Aurea. Finally we just decided to walk up to the site on this Wednesday and see if we could book in person. We walked through Trastevere, caught the tram on Viale Trastevere that went down to the Pyramid of Cestius and then up past the Circus Maximus. Getting off at the Colosseum stop, we crossed the street and headed up the hill.

To our surprise, we could enter in twenty minutes, or forty minutes if we opted for a guided tour. Since we'd read that the layout could be confusing, we chose the tour, and passed the time sitting in a little shaded garden and reading.

The tour started at eleven, and was conducted in English. Our guide turned out to be a young archaeologist. He put on his parka as we walked down the wide hallway, part of Trajan's Baths, that led to the Domus Aurea. The temperature varies between 8 to 12 degrees Celsius, with almost 100% humidity. We had come prepared with sweatshirts, which had not been used since we left Waterloo.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the Domus Aurea. The traces of frescoes on the walls, the vaulted halls, and especially the octagonal court were quite impressive. It was also nice to have a guide who hadn't simply memorized a canned speech; he responded quite well to detailed questions, and offered us alternate theories that counteracted some popular suppositions about the place (for instance, discussing evidence that Nero had not started the fire, only benefitted from it).

The tour took about forty minutes, and we saw perhaps thirty of the rooms. At one point, we were shown a section of fresco that had been restored (not by repainting it, but by careful cleaning); all around it were images obscured by calcium deposits, and it gave us hope that we could return in a decade or two and see much more.

We had time for one sight before lunch; we crossed the street again, and walked down to the church of San Clemente. By the time we got there, we had only about half an hour before the church was to close for the afternoon. For a normal church this would suffice, but below the current twelfth-century basilica there are remains of a fourth-century church, and below that a Roman house of the first century AD. To get into the church, we had to walk through a courtyard where a young orchestra and singers were practicing parts of The Magic Flute for a performance later that week.

In the main church we peered through the grating of a locked chapel at frescoes by Masolino and Masaccio, and then walked up the nave to look at the apse mosaics, passing by a selection of various recycled columns. We could get no further than the white marble central choir, rebuilt with slabs with papal insignia from 535. After paying a small fee, we were allowed down the stairs to the basement, which had been formed (in the Roman fashion) by truncating the 4th-century basilica and putting the floor atop it.

The medieval frescoes and mosaics had historical significance but they weren't particularly attractive. One fresco held our interest -- the story was hard to discern, but as our books told us, the captions above one of the panels represent the earliest known written instance of Italian (from the 11th century). Amusingly enough, the panel depicts someone cursing, including the phrase "fili di pute" -- quite surprising for a church decoration.

Below that was the first-century area. There were no signs or texts, and it was hard to figure out what the purpose of the rooms were, except for the Mithraeum, which we could just peer into. An announcement sounded while we were down there; it was time to leave.

I had no great hopes for food in the touristic vicinity of the Forum, but Frommer's came through by directing us to the Hostaria Nerone. This was up a short street terminating at the ruins of the Baths of Titus. We were seated at a table on the sidewalk, practically on the corner. The food was pretty good -- fettucine al nerone for A (cream, peas, ham, egg), pollo al peperoni for N, coda alla vaccinara for me, cannelloni for Z. I noticed an article on the door from the New York Times (1998) that mentioned the restaurant.

After lunch, we walked across the park of Monte Oppio, among the ruins of the Baths of Trajan and Titus, past rows of parked tour buses whose inhabitants were at the Colosseum, and street people camped out under the trees. Descending to Via Mecenate, we were suddenly out of the tourist zone.

Our destination was the Auditorium of Maecenas, a minor archeological landmark. Maecenas was a rich friend of Augustus; it was reportedly from his tower (the plausible site of which now contains the cinema across the street) that Nero is said to have watched the fire. The Auditorium is set in a small park that is essentially a traffic island. We descended down a stone ramp (original) into a modest rectangular room with an apse at one end, up which semicircular stairs rose. Traces of fresco could be seen on the walls (the Oxford guide printed a eighteenth-century engraving of what they looked like when the place was discovered, but they have all deteriorated) and traces of mosaic on the floor. There was a small exhibit on Roman aqueducts, though we couldn't understand most of the texts.

From there we walked up a narrow strip on shade on the west side of the wide Via Merulana to the large basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. The Byzantine interior was pleasant, though it was hard to make out the mosaics along the nave, and we could have done without the Baroque encrustations (particularly in the Sistine and Pauline Chapels).

We were within striking distance of the San Crispino gelateria, though it took a warm hike down, then up on Via Panisperna and across the shadeless Piazza del Quirinale. The gelato was quite good, and we agreed it deserved its reputation as Rome's best (at least among those we tasted).

The 116 bus got us within striking distance of home, for the usual rest and music practice. In the evening, we went down to La Tana di Noantri again, but this time for dinner at the tables across the street, under the umbrellas. This was just around the corner from Santa Maria in Trastevere but not in sight of it, so it was marginally less touristy than the places on the piazza. Still, there were already a few people there when we sat down about ten minutes after eight, and by eight-thirty the place was mostly filled with parties of tourists.

Spaghetti alla vongole for everyone to start, then grilled scampi for the kids (conveniently cut in half so that we didn't have to wrestle with them), mixed grilled fish for N, and abbacchio for me. Mine was quite nice, having been finished on the grill so the skin was crisp like confit.

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