Entering the Eternal City
We are transiting through Munich at the moment, on our way to Rome, Fumicino Airport that sits between Rome and Ostia Antica. I have very specific memories of the Rome airport for a number of reasons. Back in high school we would fly in and out of Rome on TWA mostly, heading back to New York. It was around 1970 that Boeing introduced its new monster of the sky, the 747. We were in awe of the plane, so much so that our Senior Class Officers photo for the yearbook (I was the Class Treasurer) was taken astride a stairway (terminal-connected gangways were just coming into vogue) half in and half out of the cockpit door of the plane. We were able to do that because one of the guy’s father worked for TWA. Can you imagine the red tape involved in such a thing nowadays? I also remember Fiumicino from on of our trips here for a summer villa rental in Todi back in 2006 when I had to replace a bum rental van at Hertz. What should have been a Sunday morning Italian nightmare went as smooth as silk, go figure.
Today we will be flying in at 3:40pm on a Saturday, trying to get into the Hotel Capo d’Afrika near the Coliseum. All we really have to do is get there, check in and make it through dinner with Gary & Oswaldo, who just texted from Charles DeGaulle that they are sleepless and worn out. Tomorrow will be our Roman Holiday with no specific agenda, but I am hoping a visit to La Boca Della Verita to get a picture to put up in our Hobbit House next to my homemade boulder carving of the famous face.
Rome will always be the Eternal City for me. It is firmly entrenched in my personal history. The history of Rome is well known. If you go up the Capitoline Hill (which I presume we will do on our way to the Boca, you will see the replica of the famous Romulus and Remus suckling on the she-wolf. It is that image which still inhabits the symbols of Rome, along with the SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). The story goes that the R&R twins grew up in a rather lupine way, as one might imagine, and when deciding on where to found a new city, as some brothers do I suppose, they disagreed. Romulus solved the dispute by voting with his a sword and thus put Remus in the history books as the Roman version of Abel. Romulus wasn’t satisfied with just winning, he decided he needed to name the city after himself and thus Rome was born.
That was in 753 B.C., and it took over 700 years for the City to grow to the point where Augustus Caesar thought it was worth declaring the center of a nascent empire that would last in several forms for almost a millennium and a half. During those years, Rome was a formidable power that laid waste to Carthaginians, Etruscans, Turks, the lands of the Levant, all through the Mediterranean, up through the Gauls and Germanic Barbarians, all the way up into the British Isles where Hadrians Wall was built to keep some combination of the Celts and Vikings at bay. It was understandable with all this victory that Romans and others saw Rome as invincible and eternal. Virgil wrote in the Aeneid that Rome was “imperium sine fine”, an empire without end, in deference to the span of their control that went well into Asia Minor, all across North Africa and up into mainland Europe as for as one could go without crossing swords with lots of Vikings. Virgil even hints that Aeneas was a descendant of Romulus, who was clearly more respected for his strength than despised for his fraternal treachery.
During the age of Augustus Caesar, a poet named Tibullus actually coined the phrase Urbs Aeterna, which in Latin translates directly to Eternal City. He wrote of the glory of Rome as the be-all and end-all of civilization, which in that day, as egocentric as it sounds, wasn’t far from the truth. Then, between Virgil, Ovid and Livy, the literary heavyweights in Ancient Rome, they locked in the term of the Eternal City so much that it became fact rather than hyperbole. In the same way that the legend of the she-wolf found its way into the official record of the City of Rome, so did all the Eternal City jazz. And that was, I guess, like seeing it on TV or reading it on the internet…it must be true by then. It didn’t matter how many Barbarians eventually stormed the gates of Rome, it was the Eternal City in eternity and as the eastern Roman Empire moved to Constantinople, leaving Rome to wallow in its less than flawless sewage system, Rome still remained the Eternal City.
In the years 1968 – 1971, when I lived there, the government of Rome changed hands seventeen times in rather turbulent political times. But guess what? The 64 bus still ran from Termini to the Vatican City every day. Rome always manages to muddle through. In that sense, the name The Eternal City seems rather appropriate.
It wil take me a day or so to get back in the swing of being in Rome. As it turns out, will be renting a car at the Termini train station near our hotel and I will drive the group south along the coast to Amalfi, trying my best to cut through Naples without incident (the drivers in Naples are notoriously aggressive). I will not do lots of driving around the Amalfi Coast because we have a guide to show us Positano, Sorrento and Ravello. I will drive up to Pompeii to see the newest discoveries which National Geographic has already highlighted to me. And then we will drive back up to Rome on Thursday via Tivoli, which is technically not a part of the Eternal City, but is equally and eternally part of the Rome I know. We will go to see the fountains of Villa D’Este, we will enjoy some spaghetti alla Limone in the piazza and then, if there’s time, we will go to Hadrian’s Villa to see one of the better preserved ruins of a Roman Patrician’s country estate. That will leave Friday and Saturday for us down in the belly of Rome. We will be staying at the base of the Spanish Steps, which means we will be as central as you can be. We will be near the Piazza Navonna, Piazza Barberini, Via Veneto, the Villa Borghese, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon and all the other great Roman attractions. It’s been five years since I’ve been in Rome, but for me, nothing other than the one-way streets change in Rome. Rome will always be an Eternal City to me…eternally.