We pulled into Civitiavecchia early in the morning of the 21st, but the crew bus to Rome ($20 for us--Do not discuss this rate with passengers!) did not leave until 10 am. After the Giza experience I didn’t know what to expect. A nice bus (or coach as the British insist on calling it) certainly. No tour guide this time, though. When the flyers advertising the crew bus was put up it made no bones about this being a bus ride to the Vatican’s bus parking lot, from which we could spread out independently on the town.
That’s exactly what we did. As for me, I was the first on the crew bus at 9:30. We left on schedule. As we left the port I caught sight of the Star Princess, parked on the other side of the harbor. That ship was my home in the Baltic in the summer of 2006, and again last December for two weeks when I did a short subbing gig in the Caribbean. We climbed out of the harbor and the city to the hills toward Rome. The hills, dotted with greenhouses for flower growing and truck farmers, reminded me of Encinitas and Pacific Beach before the developers remade the land. Even the gullies between the hills, seen from the bridges as we sped along the Autostrada resembled the trenches along 101 in the old days. How long these flower gardens and truck farms will last is anyone’s guess. I’m betting that the EU with its support of local farming will preserve this stretch of coastline for at least a little while.
We transited a couple monumental tunnels, which the Italians have excelled at since the Romans built roads, and then suddenly we were in the suburbs of Rome, surrounded by garden centers and supermarkets and car lots selling Fiats and Citroens. The transition was sudden and unexpected. And the traffic was appalling. What space a car could not occupy a scooter would. Yes, they park on the sidewalks.
Seeing this all from the comfort of our coach was mildly amusing until you realize that you would soon be walking and trying to cross these streets.
We were dropped off in a multi-story bus parking lot next to the Vatican, as promised, an hour and a half after leaving the port. The driver pointed to the exit that would take us to St. Peter’s Square and told us to be back at 3:30, so we wouldn’t have to compete to get on the gangway with the several buses filled with QE2 passengers who were on various Roman tours. Everyone on the crew lives with a dread fear that they will miss some deadline for some bus somewhere and end up standing on the dock watching their ship sail into the distant horizon, so we don’t have to be told twice about these matters.
I entered the tunnel, navigating the escalators and stairs until I saw daylight. And there was St. Peter’s, and in the middle of it all, maybe a kilometer away, was the Pope. He was greeting several youth delegations, and his televised image was broadcast throughout the square by 4 Jumbotrons and one of the best PA systems I’ve ever heard. I took stills and movies of him from the great distance, on the other side of the square entirely, and while he might be a red speck to those looking at the images, I can assure you he is the Pope.
(I recall a similar event described by Sam’l. Clemens in The Innocents Abroad. In fact, there is enough similarity between this cruise and that book that I’m wondering if there might be a copy up in the library.)
Satisfied that I’d done all the Pope viewing I was likely to do and scared of the stories of the lines inside the Vatican’s walls, I chose to seek the sights of Rome, and immediately got turned around and headed for Civitiavecchia. Soon enough I corrected the error by means of a map generously provided by the bus driver, a map that made Rome look like the crazy quilt of streets that it is.
I was aiming for the Coliseum, because it was on the other side of the map and everyone told me that it was the most interesting thing to see. I knew that there was another monumental Roman construction that stood between the Vatican and the Coliseum that was of more interest to me as a typesetter, though. First I would see Trajan’s Column, the place where modern display typography was more or less born where workers took their chisels and set the elegant Roman capitals which set the stage for my old business a few hundred years later.
But first I thought I’d break for lunch, it being noon. Given the choice of gastronomic delights available to the saxophonist walking the streets of Rome, you might raise an eyebrow when I tell you that I found McDonalds impossible to resist, but there you are. Back home I hadn’t been in a McDonalds in a couple years. Now I duck in to Madiera and Rome, although in Madiera it was just for coffee. (And it was, I feel sure, Nescafe, which is drunk with impunity on the ship and off.) I had a hamburger and a Coke and felt quite American--an American with 5.50 Euros less in his wallet. But I ended up sitting with an energetic group of 10-year-old Italian students who were on a school excursion. Same deal as the kids in Egypt--the kids were enjoying a connectedness with American culture through their Happy Meals (though the text on the boxes was in Italian). The McDonalds staff was only too happy to bring along these youngsters, of course. They might only buy from the bargain menu, where a bare-bones hamburger is one Euro per, but they’ll buy. And while the other crew delighted in the foccacio and pizza for street food and those who ducked into a trattoria enjoyed spaghetti and other Italian delights, I had a quick burger with the young locals.
I have to admit that I didn’t exercise my coffee Jones in Rome, which I regret more than the hamburger thing. It may be because I didn’t see any of the green signs of Strabucks on my walk. I might be more American than I think. Maybe if I had more time I’d have felt more adventurous.
The thing about walking Rome is that all of the buildings are no more than six stories high, which makes spotting even distant structures easy. By the time I was walking out of McDonalds I was seeing the Capitol and the Capitoline Museum peeking past a couple rows of houses. The Forum was just beyond that, and the Colosseum after that, at the other end of the Foro Romano.
Onward to the mothership of all typography, Trajan’s column, which is in the Forum district, where there’s a ton of archeological activity going on. The whole area being excavated by the look of things, down to the catacombs, basements, and baths.
Conveniently there are helpful signs which are in Italian (and why not--they are footing the bill I suppose) but you get the general idea what’s going on all around you. The column is portrayed in a series of what look to be travel book illustrations from the 1700s onward, a somewhat disquieting look at the place where you’re standing, only populated by gentlemen in top hats and ladies with wide bustles instead of the modern Rome all around you. The column endures anyway. It portrays, barber pole style, the story of Rome from the beginning to its glory days at the top. It’s at the top that the names of the rulers of Rome are displayed, and it’s here that display type begins. So great is the artistry of the carvers of the letterforms at the top of the column that they started a new and unexpected industry once type met paper, hundreds of years later. There’s even a typeface called Trajan that is built on these capitals, along with a lower case that the designer added.
I spent a half hour at the column, as close as I could get anyway. The excavations meant that there were fences everywhere. By now it’s getting to be two in the afternoon, and with the Colosseum within spitting distance I know I’ve got to make haste to get back to the Vatican parking lot before the bus leaves.
It’s here that I stumble into an old pattern which Jan calls hey-manning. That’s when musicians who have played together or who play with one person in common improbably get together in some street corner thousands of miles from home. This is something that doesn’t happen to accountants, apparently, but it happens to me all the time. So here I’m walking up the Foro Romano, past the Forum with the Colosseum in sight and I see someone who I used to play with on the Grand Princess. I noticed that the Star Princess, where I also worked, was across the harbor from QE2, but I had no idea that Kerry was working there. So I caught up with him and we did our hail-fellow-well-met and our hey-manning. I met his girlfriend and took their pictures in front of the Colosseum and it was good, but by then all I could do was circle the fabled building and make haste for the Vatican parking lot. I’ll save the inside visit for another time.
When I got back to the bus park it was full of tourists, including most of the crew of the USS Harry S. Truman, which was apparently in port as well, in their uniforms. They had security guys following them with coiled wires stuck in their ears and, I assume, packing heat in case there was any trouble. There wasn’t, but there you are.
We made it back to the ship without incident before there was any huge influx of passengers competing for gangway space and got back on board with enough time to eat dinner and get ready for the gig.
Random Thoughts
This trip was 16 days. I felt like I was watching the passengers age, it was so long.
We had an incident with a disgruntled dancer, a retired, slide-rule toting pocket protector white short sleeve t-shirt kind of guy from the look of him, who was just not keeping up with the rest of the dancers and looked around for someone to blame for his klutzy dancing and settled on us. We ended a set with a Quickstep, which is like it sounds: pretty snappy tempo where the more advanced dancers glide around the dance floor in cut time (2 to the band’s 4) and the less advanced dancers flail about comically in the middle, trying to get their feet to do something, anything, to the music. Now, again, I mean this not to ridicule the couple in question, for I know I couldn’t do any better.
When the tune came to a close Jim announced a break, and this goofus comes up to the stage and announces for the whole room to hear, “Why can’t you play a quickstep that’s slow enough to dance to?”
Of course, the definition of quickstep is fast, at least 180 on the metronome, so my guess is he wanted a swing tempo of around 140, which he could make his feet move to. But that’s no quickstep, and there are plenty of people who can do 180 and higher on the same dance floor. The problem lies not with the band but with the practicing. So Jim suggested that there are other ways to convey the information he had just made a fool of himself blurting out.
Another gig in the life of a dance band musician.
We were so long with these passengers that, because of the crew channel showing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I started to imagine that the more Charles Laughton like among them could very well be Vogons, reading their awful poetry and being obsessed with filling out forms to do everything. Thank you Douglas Adams. You nailed that metaphor and made them speak perfect, though slow, English.
We had three sea days after Rome, which is a portent of the world cruise to come, where we have just 31 ports in 90 days. There’s a lot of sea we’ll be seeing out in the Pacific.
The Gentlemen Hosts are starting to interest me as character studies. What makes a retired man pay his own way to England to ride on a cruise ship so he can ride on a ship and dance with women who come on board alone? Do they get lucky? And what would constitute lucky? I’m hoping that my budding friendship with one of the Hosts, Cornelius from New Orleans, will enlighten me.
Meanwhile we are a day out of Southampton (Starbucks, internet, drug store) heading for the Canaries once more, after which we are going to Oslo, Hamburg, Rotterdam and Zeebruge, then back to Southampton and once back again to Zeebruge for an overnight cruise. Then it’s a long haul to the Caribbean and back. 21 days. Hope there are not any Vogons on that one, and nobody trips on the quickstep.
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